If the body is conceived of an information processing system, it seems that one fruitful interpretation of the placebo effect is that it's some sort of somatic

If the body is conceived of an information processing system, it seems that one fruitful interpretation of the placebo effect is that it's some sort of somatic top-down processing to help deal with noise and crappy sensors. Language and vision research have come to understand that the noisy nature of the world / our senses necessitates top-down processing (i.e, rich hierarchical priors) in order to operate, I don't see why it would be different for the subjective experience of health. Right now we have a rigidly bottom-up, overly mechanistic understanding of the body, but I think as we go forward we'll start to appreciate the complexity of the body as an information processing entity, and move from puzzlement regarding the placebo effect to an understanding that is an artifact of a far more powerful system that we previously thought.