Abstract

Can social interactions, identity, and higher-order abstract concepts such as ideas and morality be mathematically explained? I propose that they can—through Social Predictive Processing (SPP), an extension of the brain’s predictive and adaptive mechanisms. The Self is not intrinsic but a hallucination of consciousness—a mechanistic and dynamic optimization algorithm to reduce collective uncertainty. Predictive Processing explains how the brain predicts reality; SPP explains how the self predicts social reality. The Social Self is not just a construct but a necessary Bayesian heuristic to navigate high-dimensional social environments—an evolving generative model fine-tuned for collective interaction with reality.