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Perception as Generation: A Predictive Coding Interpretation of Wang Yangming's “This Flower” Proposition

Target: Asian Philosophy (Routledge)

Abstract

Wang Yangming's "this flower" proposition — "Before you looked at this flower, this flower and your mind together returned to silence; when you came to look at this flower, the colour of the flower at once became clear" — is neither an ontological claim (the idealist reading) nor a mystical intuition, but an epistemological claim about the mechanism of perception:

perceptual content depends on the active generative operation of xin (mind), and its structure is analogous to that of the generative model in predictive coding theory. The paper draws a systematic correspondence at the mechanistic-descriptive level between Wang's xin-xue and predictive processing, while explicitly delimiting the limits of the analogy: the innate normativity of liangzhi falls outside the explanatory scope of predictive coding.

Keywords: Wang Yangming; xin-xue; predictive coding; perception; mind–world relation; liangzhi; Chinese philosophy