Prediction, agency, and body ownership

The idea that the brain is an organ for prediction error minimization is becoming increasingly influential. Since this idea posits action as playing a central role, it has the potential to reveal new perspectives on troubled notions of action, sense of agency, and body ownership. Elucidating these notions may help ascertain how close this new framework is to contemporary views of embodied, enactive, and extended cognition, which also makes action central to cognition. The prediction error minimization framework suggests novel and somewhat provocative notions of action, sense of agency, and body ownership and, in important respects, it pulls in the opposite direction from the embodied, extended, and enactive approaches.