The Awareness-First Theory: A Coherence Principle Underlying Active Inference and Physical Law.

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Science
• Neuroscience
• Theoretical Biology

Background:

• The Free Energy Principle (FEP) and Active Inference offer a unified framework for biological systems, explaining organization under uncertainty.
• However, these models do not address the fundamental question of subjective experience or 'why there is experience at all.'

Purpose of the Study:

• To propose the Awareness-First Theory (AFT) as an alternative framework that begins with the givenness of awareness.
• To formalize the conditions necessary for a coherent world to appear within awareness.

Main Methods:

• Introduced the Coherence Principle (δA=0) as a variational stationarity condition for awareness.
• Reinterpreted existing variational principles (e.g., FEP's δF=0, stationary action's δS=0) as specific projections of this parent constraint.
• Proposed that Active Inference describes coherence maintenance within awareness, not its generation.

Main Results:

• Demonstrated that familiar variational principles are restricted cases of the Coherence Principle.
• Showed that Active Inference's role is to maintain coherence within awareness under uncertainty.
• Dissolved the perceived explanatory gap between physical processes and phenomenal experience by reframing it as a category error.

Conclusions:

• The Awareness-First Theory provides a new perspective on the relationship between physical systems and subjective experience.
• The AFT suggests that Active Inference models how systems maintain awareness coherence, rather than generating awareness itself.
• The theory yields testable predictions regarding dissociations between inference and coherence in various states like dreaming and psychopathology.