Life as Prediction
We often imagine ourselves as reacting to the world — responding to events as they happen. But the brain works differently. It doesn’t wait for reality to arrive. It is constantly guessing what will happen next and preparing us to meet it.
We are prediction machines.
How Prediction Shapes Experience
Every action you take is guided by forecasts running silently inside your head:
Reaching for a glass: your brain predicts its weight, texture, and position before your hand even closes.
Hearing a sentence: your brain anticipates the next word — slips or omissions jar because they violate the forecast.
Walking downstairs in the dark: your body expects the next step. When it isn’t there, the shock shoots up your spine.
We don’t simply perceive the world. We perceive our predictions about the world, corrected in real time by what actually happens.
Prediction Errors: Signals, Not Failures
When reality doesn’t match the model, we feel surprise: the glass is heavier, the sentence twists, the stair is missing.
This is a prediction error. Far from being a flaw, it’s the engine of learning. The brain updates itself to reduce the gap between what it expects and what it encounters.
Think of a child learning to ride a bike: every wobble is a prediction error. Each one recalibrates the balance model until cycling becomes second nature.
The Free Energy Principle
Karl Friston’s Free Energy Principle (FEP) generalises this: all living systems survive by minimising surprise.
Organisms must stay within safe bounds. If the world is too unpredictable — too hot, too cold, too chaotic — survival is threatened.
They refine internal models. By predicting what should happen and updating when wrong, they reduce surprise over time.
They act to shape their environment. If it’s cold, we put on a coat. If hungry, we seek food. Action reduces mismatch.
In this sense, free energy is just another way of describing surprise or uncertainty. To live is to keep free energy low — to make the world familiar enough that we can continue to thrive.
The Role of the Boundary
Here’s the catch: our internal states never touch the outside world directly. They interact through a boundary known as a Markov blanket.
On one side, the external world.
On the other, our internal states.
In between, the senses (bringing in signals) and actions (sending out effects).
All learning, adaptation, and agency happens at this boundary. We can’t command the world directly. We can only perceive, predict, and act through these channels.
This is where the Free Energy Principle meets lived experience: recognising the limits of influence, and acting skilfully where perception and action meet reality.
Why It Matters
Understanding life as prediction reframes familiar struggles:
Mistakes become data. Errors are how models improve.
Habits become visible. Much of what we call “automatic behaviour” is simply deeply ingrained predictions.
Stress becomes comprehensible. When our world feels out of control, it’s because prediction errors pile up faster than we can resolve them.
Growth becomes practical. To grow is to expand the models we carry — seeing new patterns, testing new actions, widening what feels predictable.
This is not abstract neuroscience. It is the everyday logic of how we navigate life.
The Journey Ahead
To live is to predict, to err, and to learn.
Every surprise is a reminder that our models are provisional, our footing not yet final. That is not weakness, but the ordinary work of being alive.
And because every model can be updated, the future is never closed. Each error is not just correction — it is the chance to imagine and create something new.
