Acquiring information itself is passive. Experiencing is active. When you "experience," something happens inside your nervous system and your midbrain. New "en-grams" and "neural" patterns are recorded in the gray matter of your brain.
Animals cannot select their goals. Their goals (self-pres-ervation and procreation) are pre-set, so to speak. And their success mechanism is limited to these built-in goal-images, which we call "instincts."