Is perceptual inference itself regulation, or does “letting go” collapse into active inference?
Raised directly in discussion of Farb et al. (2015)‘s active/perceptual-inference distinction (see norman-farb). The paper proposes perceptual inference — updating priors to match sensation, mapped onto contemplative acceptance and equanimity — as a regulatory route standing alongside active-inference. But a sharper question sits underneath that framing: is perceptual inference a regulatory strategy at all, in any sense that doesn’t ultimately bottom out in active inference?
The puzzle
If “regulation” means intentionally selecting among options to reduce prediction error, then even the decision to stop regulating in the active sense — to relax control, redirect attention toward sensation, and allow priors to update — looks like it requires an agent to do something: allocate attention, lower the precision it assigns to its own priors, permit an update. That “something” has the shape of an action. On this reading, perceptual inference never happens as a genuinely passive, unchosen event; it is always downstream of a prior active-inference-like act (the choice to let go), which would mean the two modes aren’t peers but are nested — active inference at the meta level, perceptual inference only describing the content of what follows.
Why the paper leaves this open
Farb et al. explicitly flag their own classification of acceptance as “bottom-up perceptual rather than top-down cognitive” as potentially controversial (see the notes field on perceptual-inference) — but the paper does not resolve why it might be controversial. This debate names that gap directly: the controversy plausibly lives exactly at the meta-level question above, not merely in loose terminology.
A relevant absence in Seth & Friston (2016)
Seth & Friston (2016), the formal successor to Seth’s original framework, splits active inference itself into epistemic (information-seeking action) and instrumental (regulatory/control action) modes — but proposes no third, passive/perceptual mode alongside them. That silence cuts both ways: it could mean the authors simply didn’t address regulation-via-updating (an omission, not a rejection), or it could mean the architecture, worked through carefully by its own originators, has no natural place for perceptual inference as a peer category — lending some weight to the collapse-into-active-inference reading above. Recorded here as suggestive, not decisive, since the paper never engages the question directly.
Stakes
This bears on the wiki’s broader feedforward-vs-predictive-interoception debate (is interoceptive processing ever genuinely bottom-up, or is everything, at some level, top-down prediction?) and on does-mindfulness-enhance-interoceptive-accuracy (if “letting go” is itself a trained active-inference skill, that reframes what contemplative training is actually training — not raw sensory accuracy, but the meta-level capacity to initiate and sustain a perceptual-inference episode). It also touches presence-and-agency: if presence (via perceptual inference) requires an antecedent act of agency to initiate, the two constructs may be less independent than Farb et al.’s “two complementary senses” framing suggests.
Status: open, and — per the my-take above — the live center of the author’s own current thinking on this material.