Giovanni Pezzulo
Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies, National Research Council of Italy (CNR)
Functionalist What matters is the organisation of the processing, not the material
Giovanni Pezzulo is a researcher at the Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies of the Italian National Research Council in Rome. With Thomas Parr and Karl Friston he co-authored Active Inference: The Free Energy Principle in Mind, Brain, and Behavior (MIT Press, 2022), the standard mathematical treatment of the framework.
His own line of work puts the body back into prediction. In a series of papers on epistemic foraging and pragmatic-epistemic action, he showed that agents do not only act on what they believe, they act in order to believe, moving eyes, hands, and whole bodies to gather the information their generative models lack. Vision is as much something the hand does as something the eye does.
For consciousness science the stakes are concrete. This line of work treats awareness as a control relation an embodied agent maintains with its world, not a picture painted inside it. In the September 2026 preprint “Scale-free Niche Construction” with Léo Pio-Lopez, Patrick McMillen, and Michael Levin (OSF, doi:10.31219/osf.io/ytg35_v3), the same logic extends outward, with agents offloading planning and problem solving into environments they actively reshape. If cognition leaks into the medium around an agent, then the substrate question for emerging consciousness stops being which tissue runs it and starts being which loop sustains it.
Known for. Active Inference (2022, with Parr and Friston), epistemic foraging, pragmatic and epistemic action
Coverage on this site
- Active Bioelectric Stigmergy and Scale-Free Niche Construction in Pio-Lopez and Levin's 2026 Preprint October 2026
Related researchers
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Michael LevinAllen Discovery Center, Tufts UniversityBioelectric signalling, the cognitive light cone, and diverse intelligence
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Blaise Agüera y ArcasGoogle VP and Fellow, CTO of Technology & SocietyComputational functionalism, active inference, on-device neural computing, What Is Intelligence? (2025), and Who Are We Now? (2023)
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Joscha BachCalifornia Institute for Machine ConsciousnessThe machine consciousness hypothesis, cyber animism, and MicroPsi
Giovanni Pezzulo is listed with the other functionalists and computationalists, who hold that what matters is the organisation of the processing, not the material. The theory family behind that position is set out in the index of consciousness theories. Every researcher covered on this site is indexed in the directory of consciousness researchers.