[amatic]

Then that is probably not the way human or animal brains do object or pray or something catching. First, you would need very accurate estimates of current velocity and direction of the object, but human sensory systems are fairly imprecise. Still, if the details are calculated in advance you would expect that, say, a baseball catcher would be able to predict exactly where the ball would fall after the initial visual estimate. This does not happen: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3816735/

> even skilled baseball players can’t identify correct ball trajectories or predict landing points

[jamesrcole]

to take one simple example to illustrate the point:

light comes from a moving object

by the time the light has reached the perceiver the object has already moved (in most cases, very slightly) forwards.

by the time the brain has done some bit of processing to do with that object, the object has moved further. brain processing is not very fast.

say this processing generates nerve signals. by the time those signals have reached muscles, the object has moved even further.

by the time those muscles have contracted the object has moved further still.

what i am arguing against is the assumption that all these details are instantaneous. they are not. this is a fundamental constraint.

that means that whatever that brain processing is doing, and however the nerve signals are "telling" the muscles to do, while it is based upon where the object was at one point in time, fundamentally must concern where it is some moments later on.

if you don't want to call this a form or predicting, then fine, though I would like to know why you think the term 'predicting' does not suit what is going on there, and I'd like to know what alternative term you would use to describe what the brain processes "concern".

[amatic]

At low levels, I think it is probably a very simple computational process, something like taking a derivative of the position (estimating the direction and magnitude of velocity of the object in some perceptual space). If we understand prediction in a loose sense, then taking the derivative would be predicting, just like the D part in a PID loop is considered predicting.

At higher levels of the nervous system where more abstract variables are hypothetically handled, there could be something like model-based prediction. For example, if we are trying to catch a ball we would predict its movement differently then if we are trying to catch a cat or mouse or a drop of water.