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Prediction Machines

Li Two Ways to Sense the Coffee

What happens when, after a brief chat with a colleague, I re-enter my

office and visually perceive the hot, steaming, mug of coffee that I left
waiting on my desk? One possibility is that my brain receives a swathe of
visual signals (imagine, for simplicity, an array of activated pixels) that
rapidly specify a number of elementary features such as lines, edges,
and colour patches. Those elementary features are then fed forward,
progressively accumulated, and (where appropriate) bound together,
yielding higher and higher level types of information culminating in
an encoding of shapes and relations. At some point, these complex
shapes and relations activate bodies of stored knowledge, turning the
forward flow of sensation into world-revealing perception: the seeing
of steaming delicious coffee in (as it happens) a funky retro-green mug.
Such a model, though here simplistically expressed, corresponds quite
accurately to traditional cognitive scientific approaches that depict
perception as a cumulative process of 'bottom-up' feature detection. 1
Here is an alternative scenario. As I re-enter my office my brain
already commands a complex set of coffee-and-office involving
expectations. Glancing at my desk, a few rapidly processed visual

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