Emotional intentionality and predictive processing

Abstract

The detection and the prediction of changes of the world incorporate processes enabling an automatic coding of sameness. Predictions can be formed in relation to stimulus timing, location, or content, while it is not yet clear whether they concern a unitary neural process or an array of independent, task‐tailored mechanisms. Predictive activity is indispensable and vital for survival, and interoceptive inference remains influential in understanding the predictive processing, since it brings closer the phenomenology of consciousness with that of emotionality. On the other hand, intentionality seems to have essential relations with both consciousness and evolutionary selected functions. Phenomenologists suggested that affective intentionality is an embodied and enactive process that connect us to a shared world and guide our dealings with it. The present article poses the question whether the concepts of emotions, intentionality, and moreover emotional intentionality, can bridge the gaps in the predictive processing framework. Many relative concepts, theories and findings suggest that these dynamic domains, acting as hidden aspects in this framework, can give a thorough understanding of its functioning.