The emerging neurocomputational vision of humans as embodied, ecologically embedded, social agents-who shape and are shaped by their environment-offers a golden opportunity to revisit and revise ideas about the physical and information-theoretic underpinnings of life, mind, and consciousness itself. In particular, the active inference framework (AIF) makes it possible to bridge connections from computational neuroscience and robotics/AI to ecological psychology and phenomenology, revealing common underpinnings and overcoming key limitations. AIF opposes the mechanistic to the reductive, while staying fully grounded in a naturalistic and information-theoretic foundation, using the principle of free energy minimization. The latter provides a theoretical basis for a unified treatment of particles, organisms, and interactive machines, spanning from the inorganic to organic, non-life to life, and natural to artificial agents. We provide a brief introduction to AIF, then explore its implications for evolutionary theory, ecological psychology, embodied phenomenology, and robotics/AI research. We conclude the paper by considering implications for machine consciousness.

Introduction: Recent advances in research on stress and, respectively, on disorders of perception, learning, and behaviour speak to a promising synthesis of current insights from (i) neurobiology, cognitive neuroscience and psychology of stress and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and (ii) computational psychiatry approaches to pathophysiology (e.g. of schizophrenia and autism).Methods: Specifically, we apply this synthesis to PTSD. The framework of active inference offers an embodied and embedded lens through which to understand neuronal mechanisms, structures, and processes of cognitive function and dysfunction. In turn, this offers an explanatory model of how healthy mental functioning can go awry due to psychopathological conditions that impair inference about our environment and our bodies. In this context, auditory phenomena—known to be especially relevant to studies of PTSD and schizophrenia—and traditional models of auditory function can be viewed from an evolutionary perspective based on active inference.Results: We assess and contextualise a range of evidence on audition, stress, psychosis, and PTSD, and bring some existing partial models of PTSD into multilevel alignment.Conclusions: The novel perspective on PTSD we present aims to serve as a basis for new experimental designs and therapeutic interventions that integrate fundamentally biological, cognitive, behavioural, and environmental factors.

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This chapter proposes a way to understand the social, distributed and ecological underpinnings of improvised musical activity. It argues that significant aspects of collaborative performance may arise from perceptual, cognitive and action-orientated factors, in relation to prior experience and the broader historical and cultural context. The chapter illustrates ways in which each improviser in a collaboration may attune to different aspects of the circumstances, with idiosyncratic perceptions of the available affordances guided by attentional processes, physical aspects of the human body and musical instrument, and associations with prior experience. The experience of each musician in a collaborative improvisation thus both overlaps with and diverges from those of other musicians in the ensemble. These divergences are as important as the common ground, and are thus essential to any plausible and comprehensive account of collaborative improvisation.