# Predictive Processing **Entity class:** Concept or analytic term **Domain:** Cognitive Science / Neuroscience / Perception **Function:** Describes cognition as continual inference in which a system uses prior expectations and incoming signals to update a model of the world and itself. Predictive-processing accounts treat perception as active model revision rather than passive reception. A system generates expectations, compares them with sensory evidence, and updates either its model or its actions in response to prediction error. Different theories disagree about the scope and neural implementation of this framework, so it should be used as a family of models rather than as a settled explanation of all cognition. The concept clarifies [[wiki/Developmental Priors|Developmental Priors]]: earlier experience shapes what a system expects before new evidence arrives. It also helps distinguish inference from authority. A model may predict a person's response accurately without acquiring jurisdiction over the person. In [[wiki/Westworld S3E6 — The Model Beneath the Model|Westworld S3E6]], the therapeutic environment tries to infer William from staged memories and personified priors. Its epistemic ambition becomes political when the inferred model is used to define what William is and what should be done to him. ## Related [[wiki/World Modeling|World Modeling]] · [[wiki/Computational Psychiatry|Computational Psychiatry]] · [[wiki/Predictive Psychiatry|Predictive Psychiatry]] · [[wiki/Model-Subject Boundary|Model-Subject Boundary]] · [[wiki/Prediction Is Not Jurisdiction|Prediction Is Not Jurisdiction]] ## Relationships <!-- BEGIN HUMANIZED RELATIONSHIPS 2026-09-11 --> This entry's documented connections are expressed in its definition and related-work routes, with provenance retained in the source-linked material. <!-- END HUMANIZED RELATIONSHIPS 2026-09-11 --> - **Edge source route:** [[collections/Edge|Edge]] connects this topic to exact Annual Question passages promoted into the Simple Reminders archive. ## Simple Reminders, Quotations, and Thoughts > "The most beautiful and elegant explanation should be as strong and overwhelming as a brick smashing your head; it should break your life in two. For instance, as a result of that explanation, you should realize that even if you are dreaming your brain is active doing what he does best: creating models of reality or, in fact, creating the reality where you live in." > **— Eduardo Salcedo-Albaran**, *2012, Edge Annual Question, “What Is Your Favorite Deep, Elegant, or Beautiful Explanation?”* [[reminders/Simulation/Dreams Reveal the Brain as a Reality-Making Machine by Eduardo Salcedo-Albaran|Dreams Reveal the Brain as a Reality-Making Machine by Eduardo Salcedo-Albaran]] > "Some topics in psychology have advanced beyond essentialist views. Memory, for example, was once thought to be a single process, and later was split into distinct subtypes like semantic memory and episodic memory. Memories are now considered to be constructed within the brain's functional architecture and not to reside in specific brain tissue. One hopes that other areas of psychology and neuroscience will soon follow suit. For example, cognition and emotion are still considered separate processes in the mind and brain, but there is growing evidence that the brain does not respect this division. This means every psychological theory in which emotions and cognitions battle each other, or in which cognitions regulate emotions, is wrong." > **— Lisa Feldman Barrett**, *2014, Edge Annual Question, “What Scientific Idea Is Ready for Retirement?”* [[reminders/Consciousness/The Brain Does Not Separate Cognition From Emotion by Lisa Feldman Barrett|The Brain Does Not Separate Cognition From Emotion by Lisa Feldman Barrett]] > “The Cartesian wall between mind and brain has fallen. Its disintegration has been aided by the emergence of a wealth of new techniques in collecting and analyzing neurobiological data, including neuroprediction, which is the use of human brain imaging data to predict how the brain’s owner will feel or behave in the future. The reality of neuroprediction requires accepting the fact that human thoughts and choices are a reflection of basic biological processes. It also has the potential to transform fields like mental health and criminal justice.” > **— Abigail Marsh**, *2016, Edge Annual Question, “WHAT DO YOU CONSIDER THE MOST INTERESTING RECENT [SCIENTIFIC] NEWS? WHAT MAKES IT IMPORTANT?”* [[reminders/AI Control/Brain Data Can Predict How a Person Will Feel or Behave by Abigail Marsh|Brain Data Can Predict How a Person Will Feel or Behave by Abigail Marsh]] > “Recent models of how the brain controls behavior have begun to clarify how the mechanisms that enable us to learn quickly about a changing world throughout life also embody properties of expectation, intention, attention, illusion, fantasy, hallucination, and even consciousness. I never thought that during my own life such models would develop to the point that the dynamics of identified nerve cells in known anatomies could be quantitatively simulated, along with the behaviors that they control. During the last five years, ever-more precise models of such brain processes have been discovered, including detailed answers to why the cerebral cortex, which is the seat of all our higher intelligence, is organized into layers of cells that interact with each other in characteristic ways.” > **— Stephen Grossberg**, *2002, Edge Annual Question, “WHAT IS YOUR QUESTION? ... WHY?”* [[reminders/Simulation/Brain Models Can Simulate Neural Dynamics and the Behaviors They Control by Stephen Grossberg|Brain Models Can Simulate Neural Dynamics and the Behaviors They Control by Stephen Grossberg]] > “Can we develop a procedure that, in principle, would tell us whether or not our universe is a simulation (analogous to the way the now proven Poincaré Conjecture can tell us the universe’s shape)?” > **— Keith Devlin**, *2018, Edge Annual Question, “WHAT IS THE LAST QUESTION?”* [[reminders/Simulation/Can We Test Whether the Universe Is a Simulation by Keith Devlin|Can We Test Whether the Universe Is a Simulation by Keith Devlin]] > “In 1995, Finnish philosopher Antti Revonsuo already pointed out how conscious experience exactly is a virtual model of the world, a dynamic internal simulation, which in standard situations cannot be experienced as a virtual model because it is phenomenally transparent—we “look through it” as if we were in direct and immediate contact with reality.” > **— Thomas Metzinger**, *2016, Edge Annual Question, “WHAT DO YOU CONSIDER THE MOST INTERESTING RECENT [SCIENTIFIC] NEWS? WHAT MAKES IT IMPORTANT?”* [[reminders/Simulation/Conscious Experience May Already Be a Virtual Model of Reality by Thomas Metzinger|Conscious Experience May Already Be a Virtual Model of Reality by Thomas Metzinger]] > “As with any elegant scientific law, many complexities are waiting to be discovered. There is probably not just one accumulator, but many, as the brain accumulates evidence at each of several successive levels of processing. Indeed, the human brain increasingly fits the bill for a superb Bayesian machine that makes massively parallel inferences and micro-decisions at every stage. Many of us think that our sense of confidence, stability and even conscious awareness may result from such higher-order cerebral "decisions" and will ultimately fall prey to the same mathematical model. Valuation is also a key ingredient that I skipped, although it demonstrably plays a crucial role in weighing our decisions. Finally, the system is ripe with a prioris, biases and time pressures and other top evaluations that draw it away from strict mathematical optimality.” > **— Stanislas Dehaene**, *2012, Edge Annual Question, “WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE DEEP, ELEGANT, OR BEAUTIFUL EXPLANATION?”* [[reminders/AI Control/Human Decisions May Follow a Universal Algorithm by Stanislas Dehaene|Human Decisions May Follow a Universal Algorithm by Stanislas Dehaene]] > “The human brain is an inconceivably complex tool, and while we're focusing on the business of daily life, our brains are processing multitudes of information below the surface of conscious awareness. Meanwhile, this peripheral information subtly shapes our thoughts, feelings and actions, and crafts some of our most critical life outcomes. This information takes many forms, but I'll illustrate the principle with three brief examples:” > **— Adam Alter**, *2011, Edge Annual Question, “WHAT SCIENTIFIC CONCEPT WOULD IMPROVE EVERYBODY'S COGNITIVE TOOLKIT?”* [[reminders/Identity/Humans Are Blind to Many Processes That Shape Their Mental Lives by Adam Alter|Humans Are Blind to Many Processes That Shape Their Mental Lives by Adam Alter]] > “The predictive brain presents us with an unprecedented opportunity for new discoveries about how a human brain creates a human mind. New evidence suggests that thoughts, feelings, perceptions, memories, decision-making, categorization, imagination, and many other mental phenomena, which historically are treated as distinct brain processes, can all be united by a single mechanism, prediction. Even our theory of human nature is up for grabs, as prediction deprives us of our most cherished narrative: the epic battle between rationality and emotions to control behavior.” > **— Lisa Feldman Barrett**, *2016, Edge Annual Question, “WHAT DO YOU CONSIDER THE MOST INTERESTING RECENT [SCIENTIFIC] NEWS? WHAT MAKES IT IMPORTANT?”* [[reminders/Consciousness/Prediction May Be the Common Mechanism Behind Much of the Mind by Lisa Feldman Barrett|Prediction May Be the Common Mechanism Behind Much of the Mind by Lisa Feldman Barrett]] > “Amazingly, Libet found that the readiness potential appeared not after, but 200 milliseconds before a person felt the urge to move his or her finger! Thus by merely observing the electrical activity of the brain, Libet could predict what a person would do before the person was actually aware of having decided to do it.” > **— Eric R. Kandel**, *2006, Edge Annual Question, “WHAT IS YOUR DANGEROUS IDEA?”* [[reminders/Identity/The Brain Can Reveal a Decision Before the Self Knows It Has Decided by Eric R. Kandel|The Brain Can Reveal a Decision Before the Self Knows It Has Decided by Eric R. Kandel]] > “An idea that would be "dangerous if true" is what Francis Crick referred to as "the astonishing hypothesis"; the notion that our conscious experience and sense of self is based entirely on the activity of a hundred billion bits of jelly—the neurons that constitute the brain. We take this for granted in these enlightened times, but even so, it never ceases to amaze me.” > **— Vilayanur Ramachandran**, *2006, Edge Annual Question, “WHAT IS YOUR DANGEROUS IDEA?”* [[reminders/Consciousness/The Conscious Self May Be Entirely the Activity of Neurons by Vilayanur Ramachandran|The Conscious Self May Be Entirely the Activity of Neurons by Vilayanur Ramachandran]] > “Gaining knowledge and skills should benefit survival, but not if you spend all of your time immersed in the Internet. The intermittent rewards can become addictive, hijacking your dopamine neurons that predict future rewards. The Internet, however, has not been around long enough, and is changing too rapidly, to know what the long-term effects will be on brain function. What is the ultimate price for omniscience?” > **— Terrence J. Sejnowski**, *2010, Edge Annual Question, “HOW IS THE INTERNET CHANGING THE WAY YOU THINK?”* [[reminders/AI Control/The Internet Can Hijack the Neurons That Predict Reward by Terrence J. Sejnowski|The Internet Can Hijack the Neurons That Predict Reward by Terrence J. Sejnowski]] > “By seeing experience as a construct that merges prediction and sensory evidence, we begin to see how minds like ours reveal a world of human-relevant stuff. For the patterns of sensory stimulation that we most strongly predict are the patterns that matter most to us as both as and as individuals. The world revealed to the predictive brain is a world permeated with human mattering.” > **— Andy Clark**, *2017, Edge Annual Question, “WHAT SCIENTIFIC TERM OR CONCEPT OUGHT TO BE MORE WIDELY KNOWN?”* [[reminders/Simulation/The Predictive Brain Constructs a World of Human-Relevant Reality by Andy Clark|The Predictive Brain Constructs a World of Human-Relevant Reality by Andy Clark]] > “We take each other's consciousness on faith because we must, but after two thousand years of worrying about this issue, no one has ever devised a definitive test of its existence. Most cognitive scientists believe that consciousness is a phenomenon that emerges from the complex interaction of decidedly nonconscious parts (neurons), but even when we finally understand the nature of that complex interaction, we still won't be able to prove that it produces the phenomenon in question. And yet, I haven't the slightest doubt that everyone I know has an inner life, a subjective experience, a sense of self, that is very much like mine.” > **— Daniel Gilbert**, *2005, Edge Annual Question, “WHAT DO YOU BELIEVE IS TRUE EVEN THOUGH YOU CANNOT PROVE IT?”* [[reminders/Consciousness/We Take Other Minds on Faith by Daniel Gilbert|We Take Other Minds on Faith by Daniel Gilbert]] > “This question was asked by my eight-year-old grandson George. In eight letters it summarizes the conundrum of personal existence in an impersonal universe. How does it happen that a couple of liters of grey matter organizes itself into the unique stream of self-awareness that calls itself George? If we could answer this question, we would be on the way toward an understanding of brain structure and function at a deep level. We would probably have in our hands the key to a more rational and discriminating treatment of mental illnesses. We might also have the key to the design of a genuine artificial intelligence.” > **— Freeman Dyson**, *2002, Edge Annual Question, “WHAT IS YOUR QUESTION? ... WHY?”* [[reminders/Consciousness/Why Does Grey Matter Become a Unique Stream of Self-Awareness by Freeman Dyson|Why Does Grey Matter Become a Unique Stream of Self-Awareness by Freeman Dyson]] > “Will we soon cease to care whether we are experiencing normal, augmented, or virtual reality?” > **— Andy Clark**, *2018, Edge Annual Question, “WHAT IS THE LAST QUESTION?”* [[reminders/Simulation/Will Normal Augmented and Virtual Reality Become Indistinguishable by Andy Clark|Will Normal Augmented and Virtual Reality Become Indistinguishable by Andy Clark]] > “Physical universes are user interfaces for minds. Just as the virtual worlds experienced in VR arcades are interfaces that allow the arcade user to interact effectively with an unseen world of computers and software, so also the physical world one experiences daily is a species-specific user interface that allows one to survive while interacting with a world of which one may be substantially ignorant.” > **— Donald D. Hoffman**, *2004, Edge Annual Question: “WHAT'S YOUR LAW?”* [[reminders/Simulation/The Physical World Is a Species-Specific User Interface by Donald D. Hoffman|The Physical World Is a Species-Specific User Interface by Donald D. Hoffman]] > “We don’t just passively perceive the world; we actively generate it. The world we experience comes as much from the inside-out as the outside-in.” > **— Anil Seth**, *“Your Brain Hallucinates Your Conscious Reality,” TED2017 talk, April 26, 2017* [[reminders/Consciousness/Perception as Active Construction by Anil Seth|Perception as Active Construction by Anil Seth]]