Lancelot Da Costa
Department of Mathematics, Imperial College London; Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging, University College London
Functionalist What matters is the organisation of the processing, not the material
Lancelot Da Costa is an applied mathematician and theoretical neuroscientist based at Imperial College London and the Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging at University College London. His research establishes the formal mathematical foundations of active inference, treating self-organizing agents through the lens of non-equilibrium physics, stochastic differential equations, and Bayesian mechanics.
In his 2026 collaboration with Anil Seth, Karl Friston, Maxwell Ramstead, and Lars Sandved-Smith, published in Neuroscience of Consciousness under the title “A Rosetta Stone hypothesis for neurophenomenology,” Da Costa developed the formal mathematical machinery that operationalizes Francisco Varela’s generative passages. By demonstrating how posterior belief distributions in an active inference agent can serve as a tripartite bridge connecting neural dynamics, outward motor behavior, and subjective reportable experience, his work supplied the quantitative structure that neurophenomenology lacked for thirty years.
Da Costa’s technical contributions focus on turning philosophical claims about embodied mind into tractable variational equations. His work models cognitive effort, time perception, and similarity judgments as derived mathematical consequences of precision-weighted belief updating, establishing an empirical calculus for testing how subjective phenomenology maps onto physical substrates.
Known for. Mathematical foundations of active inference, Bayesian mechanics, computational neurophenomenology, continuous-time variational inference
Coverage on this site
- Anil Seth and Karl Friston Build a Predictive Processing Bridge to Neurophenomenology September 2026
Related researchers
-
Anil SethSussex Centre for Consciousness Science, University of SussexThe beast machine hypothesis, and controlled hallucination as an account of perception
- Karl FristonUniversity College London. Chief Scientist, VERSES AIThe free energy principle and active inference
- Maxwell J. D. RamsteadVERSES AI Research Lab, Los Angeles; Department of Philosophy, McGill UniversityMultiscale active inference, cultural affordances, computational neurophenomenology, shared intentionality
- Lars Sandved-SmithSussex Centre for Consciousness Science, Department of Informatics, University of SussexComputational phenomenology, active inference models of the self, temporal thickness, predictive processing
- Hedayat AbedijooACE Conscious Studio / IndependentACE.await (2026), the ACE decision framework (Agency, Connection, Exchange)
-
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)
Lancelot Da Costa 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.