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Pezzulo G., Parr T., & Friston K. . The evolution of brain architectures for predictive coding and active inference. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 377, 20200531. doi.org
ARTICLE HISTORY Received 17 June 2022; Accepted 5 July 2022
In 1963, Niko Tinbergen proposed that the phylogeny of behavior was one of the foremost questions to be addressed by behavioral research: We have to understand the evolution of the species we are researching - in our case, the human being - if we are to understand and explain the behavior. In this context, the latest issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B is of interest to neuropsychoanalysis, as its subject is systems neuroscience through the lens of evolutionary theory. All articles are interesting and more or less relevant to readers of all kinds, but one needs special mention in this journal: the article by Pezzulo, Parr and Friston on the evolution of brain architectures for predictive coding and active inference. Or, to reformulate in the words of Tinbergen: the phylogeny of the brainmind as executor of the free-energy principle, well known to the readers of this journal.
Their article considers the evolution of brain architectures for predictive processing, arguing that brain mechanisms for predictive perception and action are not late evolutionary additions in advanced creatures like us. Rather, they emerged gradually from simpler predictive loops (e.g. autonomic and motor reflexes) that were a legacy from our earlier evolutionary ancestors - and were key to solving their fundamental problems of adaptive regulation. Simpler-to-more-complex brains are characterized formally, in terms of generative models that include predictive loops of increasing hierarchical breadth and depth. These may start from a simple homeostatic motif and be elaborated during evolution in four main ways:
the multimodal expansion of predictive control into an allostatic loop;
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