Pablo López-Silva is a professor at the School of Psychology of the University of Valparaíso, an associate researcher at the Institute of Complex Systems of Valparaiso and a young researcher at the Millennium Institute for Research in Depression and Personality (MIDAP). He is a psychologist and holds a degree in psychology from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso and a PhD in philosophy from the University of Manchester. His research focuses on the intersection between philosophy of mind, psychopathology, and cognitive sciences.
Delusions in schizophrenia present a variety of conceptual and explanatory problems. A current model that attempts to explain the etiology of the phenomenon appeals to the resources of the predictive processing framework, according to which conscious experience arises from a Bayesian inference about the potential causes of the sensory inputs received by the cognitive system based on a model of reality constructed in the process of organism development. In this model, the brain tries to reduce prediction errors in order to maintain a functional model of reality. In recent years, it has been proposed to understand delusions with one of the strategies of cognitive organisms to deal with prediction errors. This presentation discusses some of the explanatory challenges arising from the application of PP to the problem of the etiology of delusions.