Abstract
Clark describes a budding trend in neuroscience toward what he calls a “predictive processing” model, the core idea of which is pretty simple. The brain is a prediction machine. It generates top-down predictions about expected sensory input. These collide with actual bottom-up sensory input, canceling out the matches, and leaving only the prediction errors to propagate forward. This model nicely explains a variety of otherwise anomalous experimental results and dovetails cleanly with Bayesian modeling formalisms. As such it is a wonderfully concise model that gets at a critical and under-appreciated component of brain activity – error correction under prediction.
Highlights
Clark has got a hold of the steering wheel here but does not notice he is in a car... and steering wheels abound
This approach is not a small component of a broader theory; error correction under prediction is the general unifying theory, one that is on the verge of unveiling nothing less than an expansive, unifying account of mind, and behavior
As such it is false, and it is false for an important reason – we are not essentially prediction machines – and so, as a general unifying account of mind and action it is radically misguided
Summary
Clark has got a hold of the steering wheel here but does not notice he is in a car... and steering wheels abound. He sees error correction under prediction everywhere he looks (a generalization I applaud), first seeing it in action in addition to sensation, so ubiquitous as to be the unifying architecture of “mind, brain, and action” that can illuminate perception, action, learning, attention This approach is not a small component of a broader theory; error correction under prediction is the general unifying theory, one that is on the verge of unveiling nothing less than an expansive, unifying account of mind, and behavior.
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