This article comprehensively examines how information processing relates to attention and consciousness. We argue that no current theoretical framework investigating consciousness has a satisfactory and holistic account of their informational relationship. Our key theoretical contribution is showing how the dissociation between consciousness and attention must be understood in informational terms in order to make the debate scientifically sound. No current theories clarify the difference between attention and consciousness in terms of information. We conclude with two proposals to advance the debate. (...) First, neurobiological homeostatic processes need to be more explicitly associated with conscious information processing, since information processed through attention is algorithmic, rather than being homeostatic. Second, to understand subjectivity in informational terms, we must define information uniqueness in consciousness (e.g., irreproducible information, biologically encrypted information). These approaches could help cognitive scientists better understand conflicting accounts of the neural correlates of consciousness and work toward a more unified theoretical framework. (shrink)

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Proponents of the predictive processing (PP) framework often claim that one of the framework’s significant virtues is its unificatory power. What is supposedly unified are predictive processes in the mind, and these are explained in virtue of a common prediction error-minimisation (PEM) schema. In this paper, I argue against the claim that PP currently converges towards a unified explanation of cognitive processes. Although the notion of PEM systematically relates a set of posits such as ‘efficiency’ and ‘hierarchical coding’ into a (...) unified conceptual schema, neither the frameworks’ algorithmic specifications nor its hypotheses about their implementations in the brain are clearly unified. I propose a novel way to understand the fruitfulness of the research program in light of a set of research heuristics that are partly shared with those common to Bayesian reverse engineering. An interesting consequence of this proposal is that pluralism is at least as important as unification to promote the positive development of the predictive mind. (shrink)

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