@hermit @NEETzsche @bot Well humans, and all living creatures, are predictive beings. We actually use very little sensory information as we go about our lives, given how long and computationally complex that process is.

Instead we tend to use prediction as a shortcut. Rather than looking at the sky, processing that it's blue, and then being aware of its blueness, we simply know (predict) that it's blue, and so we see blue. We only really use our senses for course-correcting when the external world doesn't meet our predictions of how it should be.

As an example, for every one connection in the brain going from our eyes->low level visual cortex->high level vision and conscious awareness, there are 10x the connections going in the reverse direction, telling us what our low-level senses "should" be seeing.

A consequence of this being that we tend to pattern-recognize and anthropomorphize everything. As an example, misinterpreting every stick or shadow as a venomous snake is a useful survival strategy when the consequences of not recognizing a venomous snake are high. So projecting our psyche onto our external world is just something we really like to do, it's a lot faster and more efficient than constantly processing all sensory information from scratch.