TY - CHAP A2 - Metzinger, Thomas K. A2 - Wiese, Wanja AB - This paper deals with the question of agency and intentionality in the context of the free-energy principle. The free-energy principle is a system-theoretic framework for understanding living self-organizing systems and how they relate to their environments. I will first sketch the main philosophical positions in the literature: a rationalist Helmholtzian interpretation (Hohwy 2013; Clark 2013), a cybernetic interpretation (Seth 2015) and the enactive affordance-based interpretation (Bruineberg and Rietveld 2014; Bruineberg et al. forthcoming) and will then show how agency and intentionality are construed differently on these different philosophical interpretations. I will then argue that a purely Helmholtzian is limited, in that it can account only account for agency in the context of perceptual inference. The cybernetic account cannot give a full account of action, since purposiveness is accounted for only to the extent that it pertains to the control of homeostatic essential variables. I will then argue that the enactive affordance-based account attempts to provide broader account of purposive action without presupposing goals and intentions coming from outside of the theory. In the second part of the paper, I will discuss how each of these three interpretations conceives of the sense agency and intentionality in different ways. AU - Bruineberg, Jelle CY - Frankfurt am Main DO - 10.15502/9783958573062 KW - Sense of agency, Active inference, Phenomenology, Skilled intentionality, Cybernetics, Affordances, Helmholtz, Free energy principle LA - English PB - MIND Group PY - 2017 SE - 5 SN - 9783958573062 ST - Active Inference and the Primacy of the ‘I Can’ T2 - Philosophy and Predictive Processing TI - Active Inference and the Primacy of the ‘I Can’ UR - https://predictive-mind.net/papers/active-inference-and-the-primacy-of-the-i-can ID - 5