Moved from “So, what’s science then”?
Yet, our mainstream metaphysics—physicalism—denies that: according to physicalism, all those qualities exist solely inside our skull, in that they are somehow—nobody has ever coherently and explicitly specified how—conjured up into existence by our brain activity.
This is what Anil Seth refers to as confirmation of the brain’s expectation as compared to prior data stored in memory.
Seth’s own view falls along the lines of predictive coding theories of consciousness.
These theories see the brain as a Bayesian processing system, one that is constantly making predictions, receiving error correction from the world, and adjusting. In this view, perception happens from the inside out rather than outside in. The system is constantly making predictions about what is there, receiving sensory information, and adjusting.
It’s important to understand that these predictions are generally related to what the system is doing or planning to do. So the predictions, the inferences, should be viewed as active inferences rather than passive ones. This view has a lot of resonance with Karl Friston’s free energy principle, which Seth explores a bit in the book.
Another important aspect of this view to understand, is it doesn’t just pertain to predictions about the outside world, but also about the self. In other words, the self is just another perception, a prediction, or a set of predictions, ones involving the state of the body, the perspective of the system, and the perception of volition (free will). We primarily perceive ourselves in order to control ourselves.
This pertains even to emotions, which Seth sees as control oriented perceptions (predictions) which regulate the body’s essential variables.
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