Prediction Machines
Andy Clark · Oxford University Press eBooks · 2015
Abstract This chapter examines the history of the core ideas concerning neural prediction, presenting them in both a general and a more specific form. The general form is a vision of the brain (and especially the cortex) as fundamentally an engine of probabilistic prediction. The more specific form is a proposal (hierarchical predictive coding, or predictive processing) describing the possible shape and nature of that core process of multilevel probabilistic prediction. The chapter includes a historical overview of the development of these ideas. It also displays some of the evidence in favour of such approaches, and addresses some worries.