The illusion of intrinsic meaning in predictive coding through cognitive artifacts to minimize prediction errors points toward a functionalist attempt at understanding conscious experience. It examines how conscious experience serves functional roles in predictive coding and symbolic cognition systems within the brain. By addressing recent developments in diverse fields like cognitive neuroscience, philosophy, and artificial intelligence, we argue that conscious experience emerges from the need to construct coherent narratives for survival and decision-making. Additionally, the paper explores the implications for artificial intelligence, suggesting that artificial systems could develop analogous cognitive artifacts through predictive models without subjective awareness, contributing to a functionalist understanding of consciousness, and further advancing the discussion on the nature of conscious experience in biological and artificial systems.

This article aims to root history education in Portugal, which is interlinked with Isabel Barca’s efforts to enhance the discussion about the relationship between history, history epistemology and situated cognition. By the late 1990s, history education had begun to be taught at the University of Minho under the influence of the Anglo-Saxon paradigm, mainly Lee, Ashby and Shemilt’s ideas. Important milestones were, in the 2000s, the creation/coordination by Isabel Barca of: (1) an academic master’s degree related to history teaching; (2) the HiCon projects (2003–11), focused on deepening knowledge about Portuguese teachers’ and students’ historical thinking and historical consciousness; and (3) the Jornadas Internacionais em Educação Histórica (International Journeys of History Education), conceived to share results with national and international researchers, and that contributed to building bridges with other academies, namely in Brazil. History education has influenced Portuguese history curricula since 2001 (apart from the years 2011–2015, when there was a right-wing shift), and has inspired the competencies in history oriented to develop students’ historical thinking. As the new curricula and paradigms in history teaching were challenging to school teachers, Barca has inspired the Portuguese History Teachers Association to promote several scientific events and continuing professional development since the 2000s. This was how her workshop classroom model based on history education (the ‘aula-oficina’) became known among teachers, and contributed to practice changes in schools. Through the years, Portuguese history educationalists have continued to deepen knowledge in this area, and to share the results in national and international academic communities, and also with school teachers.