In the long run, actions are fundamental to learning—which here means improving the brain’s generative models by revealing more about the causes of sensory signals, and about the causal structure of the world in general. When I look over the fence to help me infer the causes of a specific wet lawn, I’ve also learned more about what causes wet lawns in general. In the best case, active inference can give rise to a virtuous circle in which well-chosen actions uncover useful information about the structure of the world,
