Biased Belief in the Bayesian Brain
Today’s post comes from Ben Tappin , PhD candidate in the Morality and Beliefs Lab at Royal Holloway, University of London, and Stephen Gadsby , PhD Candidate in the Philosophy and Cognition Lab , Monash University, who discuss their paper recently published in Consciousness and Cognition, “ Biased belief in the Bayesian brain: A deeper look at the evidence ”. Last year Dan Williams published a critique of recently popular hierarchical Bayesian models of delusion, which generated much debate on the pages of Imperfect Cognitions . In a recent article , we examined a particular aspect of Williams’ critique. Specifically, his argument that one cannot explain delusional beliefs as departures from approximate Bayesian inference, because belief formation in the neurotypical (healthy) mind is not Bayesian . We are sympathetic to this critique. However, in our article we argue that canonical evidence of the phenomena discussed by Williams—in particular, evidence...