Reverse Engineering: A Neurophilosophical Interpretation of Embodied AI and Embodied Athletes' Action Prediction

Integrating neurophilosophy, cognitive science and engineering practice, this article deploys reverse engineering as its methodological pathway — taking the algorithmic praxis of embodied AI as a dissectable engineering object from which to reversely infer the internal mechanisms of action prediction in human sports, a domain that otherwise remains a black box — and focuses on brain-body-environment coupling, with the aim of disclosing the essence of embodied sports: active prediction. The study argues that the emergence of embodied AI marks an inflection from pre-programmed humanoid robots toward body-analogical paradigm, foregrounding action prediction as the central problem of uncertainty management: through active inference and free energy minimization, intelligence is instantiated within the dynamic interplay of body and environment as a perception-action loop, thereby surpassing the constraints of classical symbolism and connectionism. By leveraging the algorithmic mechanisms of embodied intelligence, this research reversely explores Bayesian brain theory to explicate the active, precision-weighting, and self-evidencing characteristics of predictive strategies of humans in sports. It further analyzes the Markovian isomorphism between embodied intelligence and humans in sports in predictive processes, reversely inferring the mathematical signatures of the human extended mind while accentuating the ecological advantages of bodily priors, subjective temporal modulation, and morphological computation. Although embodied intelligence presently exhibits insufficient generalization capacity to replicate the embodied prediction of humans in sports, it nonetheless furnishes sports science — conceived as a discipline of body-mind intelligence — with foundational logical scaffolding, and in so doing provides a quantitatively interpretable reverse-engineering pathway for sports science to interrogate the mechanism in sport from the sport itself, pushing a paradigmatic shift in sports science from neurocentric frameworks toward brain-body-environment holism.