It takes more than that, I think; I don't think the adaptive digital filters I used to work with long ago were conscious, yet they work by predicting future val

It takes more than that, I think; I don't think the adaptive digital filters I used to work with long ago were conscious, yet they work by predicting future values of a signal and continuously adjusting their parameters to minimize the mean square error (or some other error measure). Most of the prediction that's going on in the brain seems to be at an unconscious level, and our conscious mind only seems to be alerted when something unexpected happens, like when you're walking along and suddenly step into a shallow hole you didn't notice: your brain was unconsciously predicting when your foot would hit the ground and something else happened.