For a growing number of researchers, it is now accepted that the brain is a predictive organ that predicts the content of the sensorium and crucially the precision of—or confidence in—its own predictions. In order to predict the precision of its predictions, the brain has to infer the reliability of its own beliefs. This means that our brains have to recognise the precision of their predictions or, at least, their accuracy. In this paper, we argue that fluency is product of this recognition process. In short, to recognise fluency is to infer that we have a precise ‘grip’ on the unfolding processes that generate our sensations. More specifically, we propose that it is changes in fluency — from unfelt to felt — that are both recognised and realised when updating predictions about precision. Unfelt fluency orients attention to unpredicted sensations, while felt fluency supervenes on—and contextualises—unfelt fluency; thereby rendering certain attentional processes, phenomenologically opaque. As such, fluency underwrites the precision we place in our predictions and therefore acts upon our perceptual inferences. Hence, the causes of conscious subjective inference have unconscious perceptual precursors.

对于越来越多的研究人员来说，现在人们普遍认为大脑是一个预测器官，可以预测感觉中枢的内容，并且最重要的是预测其自身预测的准确性或置信度。为了预测其预测的准确性，大脑必须推断其自身信念的可靠性。这意味着我们的大脑必须认识到其预测的准确性，或者至少是其准确性。在本文中，我们认为流畅性是这种识别过程的产物。简而言之，认识到流畅性就意味着我们能够精确地“掌握”产生我们感觉的展开过程。更具体地说，我们提出，在更新关于精度的预测时，流利度的变化——从无感觉到有感觉——是被认识和实现的。无感觉的流畅性将注意力集中在不可预测的感觉上，而有感觉的流畅性则取代了无感觉的流畅性并使其情境化；从而使某些注意力过程在现象学上变得不透明。因此，流畅性保证了我们预测的准确性，从而影响我们的感知推理。因此，有意识的主观推理的原因有无意识的知觉前兆。