This is the core idea of predictive processing.
And if it can explain that anticipatory ability, it’s explaining a lot of what makes you generally intelligent.

Now, we can translate some of that functional language:
What is it doing? It's trying to anticipate the world.

Into the phenomenological language:
How are you experiencing it? The brain is actually trying to reduce surprise.

The brain is trying to reduce you being surprised by the environment.

Surprises are prediction errors.
It means your expectations have not been met.

So phenomenologically what we're talking about is:
You have expectations and they're not met…and that's a prediction error and you're trying to reduce that.

But you want to be surprised sometimes…because you don't want to just exploit where you are, you want to explore where you're not.

We're going to come back to that.

So the brain is trying to detect and complete ahead of the world patterns relevant to it.

And you experience that in a particular way.
You experience that as a kind of not being surprised and that your expectations are continually being met.

So when you get up to walk across the floor, you expect that the floor will be solid, that you'll be able to go there, etc.

And if the floor starts to break, then you are surprised.

All that sounds easy, but predicting the world is really hard.

Think about all the scientists we need with all of their education, banded together using computers and machines…and all this to make their predictions.

Now, the first major insight I'll give you into predictive processing is how it tries to address this issue that predicting the world is so hard. So let's try and unpack it a little bit more.

Why is the world so hard to predict?

Well, it's really large…and I don't just mean spatially big.
The world contains way more in it than you can realize…way, way more.

The world isn't simple. It's complex. And what's annoying about it is, it keeps getting more complex.

Especially if you're in a world where there's a cultural, technological environment like the one we're in.

It's constantly changing and the information we get from it is almost always ambiguous.
There are multiple possible interpretations of it.

Behind that is the deep reason:
The world is not trying to communicate with us.
It is not trying to cooperate with us. It is not trying to be clear to us.

And that means there are a lot of ways we can go wrong.

Now, stick with me….this is a little abstract, and I'll do it a couple of different ways:
Let's say it's just non-controversial that the amount of information I can take in at any time, even my entire lifetime from the world, is finite.

I have a finite amount of data.

There is a technical, mathematical, logically and deductively valid proof (that comes from Reichenbach and other philosophers) that for any finite set of data, there is literally an infinite number of legitimate (meaning logically consistent) interpretations of it.

That's a problem.

Now that was very top-down and abstract…let's do it in a more concrete, bottom-up way:
Imagine that all the world was doing was just generating a single stream of figures for you.

And these patterns are complex. They're ongoing. They're changing on the fly…and you already know they're just going to be very, very, very big.

So you start to look at this:
There's a 1 and a 2 that show up….what's next?

3, maybe?

Or maybe it's doubling.
Maybe it goes 1, 2, 4.

Maybe it alternates between primes and not primes.
Don't know.

This is what Kirchhoff means by underdetermination.

That thing I just did is called the underdetermination problem.
The data don't determine which interpretation you should make. It's underdetermined.

You're too unconstrained in your attempt to interpret it.

So you say, well, I need more information:
But now there's a 1, 2, 4, and then a letter B.
Now, what's next?

And then it goes 1, 2, 4, B, 2, B.
What's next?

And now you move to the next pattern…and the number 1 has disappeared.

Now it's 2, 4, B, 2, B.

What's next now?

And then it goes 2, 4, B, 2, B…is the next thing another B or a 6?
You can’t tell.

That's what it's really like…and you don't realize that because your brain is so good at solving this problem.