Over the last few years I have worked more and more on the idea that the brain is a prediction error minimizer. This has now resulted in a book— The Predictive Mind —just published with Oxford University Press. The Predictive Mind By Jakob Hohwy The first part of the book explains the basic idea of prediction error minimization, which mainly stems from work by Karl Friston and others in computational neuroscience. The second part applies this to the binding problem, to cognitive impenetrability, to delusions and autism, and to a range of philosophical questions about misrepresentation. The third part considers how it applies to attention, consciousness, the mind-world relation, and the nature of self. The prediction error minimization idea says that all the brain ever does is minimize the error of predictions about its sensory input, formed on the basis of an internal model of the world and the body. The better these predictions are, the less error there is. On this view, the...
A blog at the intersection of philosophy, psychology, and mental health