This paper (available here) has grown from my attempt to figure out what is “the predictive processing view” on consciousness and realization that not only there are a lot of alternatives, but also they exist parallel to one another, apparently with some of the authors not aware of a lot of the research being done concurrently. So I wrote a term paper charting a map of those approaches and then expanded it into the final form, submitting it to a special issue on theories of consciousness.

In the paper I use the Wanja Wiese’s idea of “minimal unifying models” as a way to frame the similarities which run across alternative accounts of consciousness, stemming from the same theoretical Bayesian core. I argue that what these models have in common is the roles they ascribe to the formal concepts of “precision” and “complexity” of generative models, and I show how each approach (that I was aware of at the time of writing that paper—I have not caught up since) differs in most of the details.