“What Am I — Qualia, Brahman, Neurons, or just Nothing?”
This node explores the predictive processing framework of Karl Friston and Andy Clark, analyzing the brain as a prediction engine that constructs experience through top-down expectations.
Perception is not a passive reading of sensory inputs. Instead, the brain generates top-down expectations (predictions) and only registers the sensory errors (prediction errors). Our daily experience is a controlled simulation, corrected by sensory inputs.
Karl Friston's mathematical formulation: all self-organizing systems act to minimize free energy (which translates to minimizing surprise or prediction error) to maintain structural integrity and survive.
The brain balances its predictions against raw sensory data through precision weighting. Attention is the adjustment of sensory signal volume (precision), deciding whether to prioritize top-down expectations or bottom-up sensory errors.
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