Predictive brains: forethought and the levels of explanation

Abstract

A commentary on Whatever next? Predictive brains, situated agents, and the future of cognitive science by Clark, A. (in press). Behav. Brain Sci. Is any unified theory of brain function possible? Following a line of thought dating back to the early cybernetics (see, e.g., Cordeschi, 2002), Clark (in press) has proposed the action-oriented Hierarchical Predictive Coding (HPC) as the account to be pursued in the effort of gaining the “Grand Unified Theory of the Mind”—or “painting the big picture,” as Edelman (2012) put it. Such line of thought is indeed appealing, but to be effectively pursued it should be confronted with experimental findings and explanatory capabilities (Edelman, 2012). The point we are making in this note is that a brain with predictive capabilities is certainly necessary to endow the agent situated in the environment with forethought or foresight, a crucial issue to outline the unified account advocated by Clark. But the capacity for forethought is deeply entangled with the capacity for emotions and when emotions are brought into the game, cognitive functions become part of a large-scale functional brain network. However, for such complex networks a consistent view of hierarchical organization in large-scale functional networks has yet to emerge (Bressler and Menon, 2010), whilst heterarchical organization is likely to play a strategic role (Berntson et al., 2012). This raises the necessity of a multilevel approach that embraces causal relations across levels of explanation in either direction (bottom–up or top–down), endorsing mutual calibration of constructs across levels (Berntson et al., 2012). Which, in turn, calls for a revised perspective on Marr's levels of analysis framework (Marr, 1982). In the following we highlight some drawbacks of Clark's proposal in addressing the above issues.