Enactive Inference and Processual Perspectivism: Predictive Engagement, Affective Criticality, and the Second-Person Structure of Mind

Predictive processing and active inference have become influential frameworks for understanding perception, action, emotion, and consciousness. Yet their philosophical interpretation remains contested. Should they be understood as internalist theories of neural representation, or can they be reinterpreted as accounts of embodied and socially situated sense-making? This article argues for the latter by developing a processual-perspectivist account of enactive inference. Building on the notion of predictive engagement, the paper interprets active inference not as the secluded operation of a brain-bound predictive system, but as an embodied, affectively regulated, and socially mediated process of world-involvement. It further argues that consciousness is best understood as a dynamic stabilization of perspective formation, grounded in affective regulation, predictive openness, corrective constraint, and neurodynamic viability. The article proposes a triadic framework of processual perspectivism: the first-person perspective of embodied affectivity, the second-person perspective of interpersonal and we-forming co-regulation, and the third-person perspective of neurodynamic description. This framework integrates enactive accounts of sense-making, recent work on affective criticality in active inference, and phenomenological analyses of second-person and we-experience. The result is a neurophilosophical account in which mind is not merely predicted by the brain, but enacted through living, feeling, interacting, and neurodynamically regulated processes of perspective formation.