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Everything in the brain is natively probabilistic. Representations which have low to zero mutual information with the current sensory input are simply not comp

Everything in the brain is natively probabilistic. Representations which have low to zero mutual information with the current sensory input are simply not computed-with. You could say that almost all representations will have nonzero mutual information with almost all real-world sensory input, but the sensory input is precision-weighted, so it will take both a sufficiently high degree of mutual information and sufficiently high precision of the activating sense-data to make a given branch of the hierarchy (the whole model is hierarchical, and very large) relevant enough to load it into working memory and use it for prediction.

myflash13 10y ago
> Representations which have low to zero mutual information with the current sensory input are simply not computed-with. Who decides that a particular representation in the brain has zero mutual information with current sensory input? This requires a comparison of some sort (i.e. computation).
- eli_gottlieb 10y ago
  It's a distributed computation that has been mostly precomputed, ie: brain connectivity. And a very popular theory of the brain says it does calculate second-order (precision/entropy) statistics about what it models.
  - myflash13 10y ago
    The combinatorially explosive amount of information that we deal with at every single moment is too large to be dismissed as "precomputed by brain connectivity". If such a large amount of computation could be "precomputed", it has massive implications on our understanding of complexity-theory. Besides it contradicts our subjective feeling of free will, which is why it is not a satisfactory answer for most people.
    - wyager 10y ago
      >combinatorially explosive amount of information that we deal with at every single moment What are you referring to? The sensory input to the brain takes, as a ridiculously high upper bound, perhaps terabits per second. In reality it's probably a few megabits. It's really not much. Vision is, I suspect, by far the highest bandwidth input to our brain, and computer vision has met or exceeded human vision in many tasks.

myflash13 10y ago

> Representations which have low to zero mutual information with the current sensory input are simply not computed-with. Who decides that a particular representation in the brain has zero mutual information with current sensory input? This requires a comparison of some sort (i.e. computation).

eli_gottlieb 10y ago
It's a distributed computation that has been mostly precomputed, ie: brain connectivity. And a very popular theory of the brain says it does calculate second-order (precision/entropy) statistics about what it models.
- myflash13 10y ago
  The combinatorially explosive amount of information that we deal with at every single moment is too large to be dismissed as "precomputed by brain connectivity". If such a large amount of computation could be "precomputed", it has massive implications on our understanding of complexity-theory. Besides it contradicts our subjective feeling of free will, which is why it is not a satisfactory answer for most people.
  - wyager 10y ago
    >combinatorially explosive amount of information that we deal with at every single moment What are you referring to? The sensory input to the brain takes, as a ridiculously high upper bound, perhaps terabits per second. In reality it's probably a few megabits. It's really not much. Vision is, I suspect, by far the highest bandwidth input to our brain, and computer vision has met or exceeded human vision in many tasks.