The Experience Machine

Millions of years of evolution have determined the bedrock configuration of the machinery we command at birth: the early wiring of the brain, the structure of our sense organs, and the shape of our bodies. Courtesy of all that, we start our journey already armed with plenty of hard-won knowledge.

We should not downplay the importance of all that rich sensory information arriving at the eyes, ears, and other senses. But it casts the process of seeing—and of perceiving more generally—in a new and different way. It casts it as a process led by our brain’s own best predictions: predictions that are then checked and corrected using the sensory i

When the brain strongly predicts a certain sight, a sound, or a feeling, that prediction plays a role in shaping what we seem to see, hear, or feel.

Incoming sensory signals help correct errors in prediction, but the predictions are in the driver’s seat now. This means that what we perceive today is deeply rooted in what we experienced yesterday, and all the days before that. Every aspect of our daily experience comes to us filtered by hidden webs of prediction—the brain’s best expectations roo

Instead, all human experience arises at the meeting point of informed predictions and sensory stimulations.

We can no more experience the world “prediction and expectation free” than we could surf without a wave.

we are never simply seeing what’s “really there,” stripped bare of our own anticipations or insulated from our own past experiences. Instead, all human experience is part phantom—the product of deep-set predictions.

is built from our own predictions.

According to the new theory (called “predictive processing”), reality as we experience it