The predictive mind

"A new theory is taking hold in neuroscience. It is the theory that the brain is essentially a hypothesis-testing mechanism, one that attempts to minimise the error of its predictions about the sensory input it receives from the world. It is an attractive theory because powerful theoretical arguments support it, and yet it is at heart stunningly simple. Jakob Hohwy explains and explores this theory from the perspective of cognitive science and philosophy. The key argument throughout The Predictive Mind is that the mechanism explains the rich, deep, and multifaceted character of our conscious perception. It also gives a unified account of how perception is sculpted by attention, and how it depends on action. The mind is revealed as having a fragile and indirect relation to the world. Though we are deeply in tune with the world we are also strangely distanced from it. The first part of the book sets out how the theory enables rich, layered perception. The theory's probabilistic and statistical foundations are explained using examples from empirical research and analogies to different forms of inference. The second part uses the simple mechanism in an explanation of problematic cases of how we manage to represent, and sometimes misrepresent, the world in health as well as in mental illness. The third part looks into the mind, and shows how the theory accounts for attention, conscious unity, introspection, self and the privacy of our mental world."--Page 4 de la couverture.

Part I. The mechanism : Perception as causal inference : Constraints on perceptual inference ; Perception and Bayes' rule ; Perceptual inference and binocular rivalry ; How do neurons know Bayes? ; From inference to phenomenology ; A hierarchy of causal regularities ; Perceptual variance and invariance ; Message passing between hierarchical levels ; Additional constraints on hierarchical inference ; On Bayes' rule ; Summary: Hierarchical neuronal inferential mechanisms -- Prediction error minimization : A statistical illustration ; Reconceiving the relation to the world ; Being supervised by the world ; A deeper perspective ; Recognition and model inversion ; Summary: Perception in prediction -- Prediction error, context, and precision : Context and uncertainty ; Plugging the leaky dam ; Expected precisions ; Precisions and prediction error gain ; The basic mechanism: matters arising ; Summary: Passive perceivers? -- Action and expected experience : Active inference in perception ; Modelling the agent, and acting ; Bounding surprise ; Active inference: matters arising ; Prediction error minimization: challenges ; Summary: Tooling up for understanding the mind -- Part II. The world…