Consciousness is entailed by compositional learning of new causal structures in deep predictive processing systems

Understand

Machine learning algorithms have achieved superhuman performance in specific complex domains.

• However, learning online from few examples and compositional learning for efficient generalization across domains remain elusive.
• In humans, such learning includes specific declarative memory formation and is closely associated with consciousness.
• Predictive processing has been advanced as a principled Bayesian framework for understanding the cortex as implementing deep generative models for both sensory perception and action control.