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Interlude LVI: Belief as Perceptual Gravity - Predictive Processing, Priors, and Cognitive Bias in Perception
Do you see the world as it is or as you expect it to be?
In this interlude of The Observable Unknown, Dr. Juan Carlos Rey examines a central claim in modern cognitive science: belief doesn't follow perception. It organizes it. What appears to be direct experience is shaped in advance by priors, expectations, and learned patterns that determine what becomes visible, meaningful, or ignored.
Drawing on the predictive processing framework advanced by Andy Clark, a philosopher of mind at the University of Sussex, this episode explores how the brain functions as a prediction engine rather than a…
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