Philosophy

Edinburgh's Andy Clark has a neat piece in the Times' Stone series suggesting that just how the brain encodes information about the environment may yield cognitive riches. From the article,

Finally, perception and understanding would also be revealed as close cousins. For to perceive the world in this way is to deploy knowledge not just about how the sensory signal should be right now, but about how it will probably change and evolve over time. For it is only by means of such longer-term and larger-scale knowledge that we can robustly match the incoming signal, moment to moment, with apt expectations (predictions). To know that (to know how the present sensory signal is likely to change and evolve over time) just is to understand a lot about how the world is, and the kinds of entity and event that populate it. Creatures deploying this strategy, when they see the grass twitch in just that certain way, are already expecting to see the tasty prey emerge, and already expecting to feel the sensations of their own muscles tensing to pounce. But an animal, or machine, that has that kind of grip on its world is already deep into the business of understanding that world.

I find the unity here intriguing. Perhaps we humans, and a great many other organisms, too, are deploying a fundamental, thrifty, prediction-based strategy that husbands neural resources and (as a direct result) delivers perceiving, understanding and imagining in a single package?