The Brain as Deducer: A Unified Architecture of Cognition, Perception, and Felt Experience

This paper proposes that the brain is best understood not as a passive receiver of sensory information but as an active deducer; a system that continuously builds, tests, and updates internal models of the world based on incomplete data. Perception, cognition, and felt experience are treated as outputs of the same underlying inferential process, operating across different timescales and levels of abstraction. The argument draws together threads from predictive processing, Bayesian brain accounts, and embodied cognition, but reframes them in plain language and grounds them in lived examples: how we recognise a face in a crowd, why expectations shape what we taste, how a gut feeling can arrive before a conscious thought. The deducer framing treats inference as the brain’s default mode rather than a special case, and treats felt experience (intuition, somatic signal, emotional tone) as data the system uses, not noise to be discarded. The paper is written for an interdisciplinary readership — cognitive science, philosophy of mind, and adjacent fields — and is deliberately accessible to readers outside the institution. It is part of an ongoing independent research programme by the author connecting cognition, time, and relational structure across domains.