13 ms·
Our brain is a prediction machine that is always active
- etiennebausson 4y agoI honestly though this had been understood decades ago. Somehow, I doubt that my limited understanding of the human mind was a decade in advance of state of the art science.
- bsenftner 4y agoMy thoughts as well; seems extremely obvious.
- jphenningsen 4y agoYes, the theory isn't new, but getting experimental evidence is difficult in neuroscience. Here they used GPT-2 for quantitative predictions, which obviously was not available a decade ago. This way they could extend experiments from highly artificial signals to natural language.
- MonkeyMalarky 4y agoI feel like it is one of the things you learn in a intro psych/neuroscience course. Also that the predictions are a way to deal with timing issues between parts and lag from your limbs and sensory perception? Kind of like the net code for a FPS.
- misja111 4y agoObviously your brain was predicting it
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- dekken_ 4y ago> prediction machine that is always active This is a consequence IMO. What we actually are is uncertainty minimizers, or certainty maximizers if you'd rather think of it that way
- pyinstallwoes 4y agoGiven that the universe is eventually inconsistent, your assertion that human observers are certainty maximizers is interesting as a polar force to eventual inconsistency. Throw the idea of entropy into the mix and you have some interesting comparisons for fun. 1. Universe(Uncertainty Maximizer) || Humans(Certainty Maximizer) 2. Universe(Eventually Inconsistent) || Humans(Eventually Consistent) 3. Universe(Entropy) || Humans(Negentropy) Seems like life contributes towards a certain required organization principle of the universe to balance out the chaos.
- nightgarden 4y agoHumans are part of the universe, so isn't that a false dichotomy?
- deltathreetwo 4y ago>Given that the universe is eventually inconsistent, I don't think this has been observed to be true yet. At least not true within a framework of very specific theoretical rules. Otherwise all our science and logic is useless.
- dekken_ 4y agoI think you're right. For all we know the universe is perfectly balanced and there is no heat death coming.
- almostdigital 4y agoLink to non-paywalled paper: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.12.03.410399v4 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.12.03.410399v4
- mad44 4y agoOur brains are like wireless radio receivers in that way: https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2012/12/our-brains-are-radios.html https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2012/12/our-brains-are-rad...
- Geee 4y agoYes, they're very similar. Brain is trying to decipher meaning from a noisy and incomplete world. I've actually wondered if intelligence could be defined through information theory, i.e. intelligence would be the inverse of error rate. Super-intelligence could operate at the Shannon limit.
- karelpeeters 4y agoThat's the idea behind the Hutter prize: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutter_Prize https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutter_Prize
- tasty_freeze 4y agoI'm glad this just a metaphor about discrimination of signal from noise. When the idea of consciousness comes up, too often I've heard the exact claim that consciousness cannot be from the brain. They assert the brain is just the receiver of the information coming from the soul. When asking why damage to a particular part of the brain usually results in a predictable deficit, they confidently reply that is also true of a radio receiver -- the non-physical soul is intact but the brain just garbles the message.
- giantg2 4y agoOr in my case, a prediction machine that is more often wrong than right.
- asddubs 4y agoin cases where there's more than 2 options, that's still not necessarily a bad track record
- kekebo 4y agoWhich could also be a bug in the conclusion algorithm / reward function that evaluates right from wrong after the fact
- blamestross 4y agoThe brain is a survival engine, not a truth detector. If lies improve fitness, the brain lies.
- tartoran 4y agoExactly. As a matter of fact it constantly lies to us projecting a convenient reality and narrative so we eagerly wait for the next day.
- deltathreetwo 4y agoLying to oneself and exposing the complete truth are two alternative strategies towards survival. That is why some people have brains that lie to them less then others, while others have brains that lie more. You will find different degrees of bias and delusion in the people you encounter.
- lotsofpulp 4y agoAt which point you run into problems of defining agency/free will.
- 4y ago
- TaupeRanger 4y agoTLDR: the fMRI brain image lights up a bit more when the person encounters something unexpected. Yet another stunner from "neuroscience" using up thousands of dollars of funding to tell us something we either already knew, or that is entirely irrelevant.
- kristiandupont 4y agoThe reason why it can be valuable to research common sense is that every now and then, we discover that common sense is in fact wrong. Those are the discoveries that lead to paradigm shifts.
- TaupeRanger 4y agoWhen the common sense is just a truism, it can't lead to paradigm shifts, by definition, because it's a truism. "Something different happens in the brain when unexpected things happen" is common sense in this case. Seeing a picture of the difference in an fMRI machine (for the 100th time over several decades) doesn't add anything to our understanding, wastes money that could be better spent elsewhere, and wastes valuable time.
- Ruq 4y agoNot to discount the research or its usefulness, but I feel uncomfortable with sterile language that, to me, implies that humans are nothing more than accidental automatons that can eventually be replicated and replaced by AI. Aren't we more than that?
- Waterluvian 4y agoAre we?
- douglaswlance 4y agoThere is no behavior in our universe that exists outside the laws of physics. So whatever we are, it is a product of our physical form. If that's true, then we can build something else that also exhibits our same behavior but is a purely non-biological organism.
- SnowHill9902 4y agoYour “laws of physics” are just a verbal representation of what has been observable to you. It’s not a fundamental property in the deepest sense and there’s no guarantee that they may not change.
- taylodl 4y agoIt's not a fundamental property in the deepest sense What do you mean by "in the deepest sense"? If the actual laws of physics were to change, then our world would instantly change - perhaps in such a way that we no longer can exist. If our understanding of the laws of physics were to change, that doesn't undo what we already know. For example, apples won't start falling up from trees. Greater understanding of the laws of physics refines our knowledge, for example what, exactly, happens inside a black hole? As far as the physics governing our daily lives and even our biology, it appears to be rather mundane and well-known. It's not apparent that resolving QFT with GR is going to answer the question for how life arises. I think it therefore stands that we could, in principle, build something equivalent to a human being - I just see no reason why we would choose to do so. After all, we're already pretty good at building new human beings!
- hunta2097 4y agoI live by a couple of (vaguely related) principles: a) Consciousness is just your brain trying to anticipate the future. b) Your brain compresses (normalises?) repetition in memories. So even if day to day events happen at normal speed, the years seem to fly by when you reflect on them. If your life seems to be flying-by then maybe you need more novelty.
- posterboy 4y agominesimpler a) Consciousness is. Period. > b) [...] maybe you need more novelty. I have a few heuristics. One is that man is egocentric (I too use indefinite "you" when I do not want to sound egoistic).
- packetlost 4y ago> a) Consciousness is just your brain trying to anticipate the future. My personal theory is consciousness is a coalescence of weighted distributions that learn via a closed loop feedback and an injection of true randomness via quantum tunneling. That is, the brain is a mechanism by which true randomness gets turned into a weighted distributions that equate to decisions and actions with a feedback loop. As experiences get encoded as complex neuron paths or "memories" (this includes things like muscle memory, not just what we normally think of as memories), they build stronger paths and more connections, effectively increasing their "weight". This holds true down to how neurons function on an individual level.
- awesomelvin 4y agoI've personally always liked the deterministic approach more. Is there any reason you believe in an indeterministic randomness approach?
- packetlost 4y agoRandomness is the basis for all life and seems necessary for there to be any sort of curiosity component to intelligence. At a macro level, it seems to represent breaks in cycles that allow for change. Further, if our own decision making amounts to weighted distributions in neuron paths, how would a brain resolve an equally weighted distribution (no matter how small the chance of that happening is). Edit: To further explain, I apply the basic principles that govern life to all facets of life, all the way up to the complexities of human society, language, etc.. That is, DNA is a self-replicating system that through randomness was able to build more and more complex organisms over time. It generically represents a way to encode behaviors through time, a necessary subset of which include behaviors for self-replication and resource acquisition (mostly to satisfy the self-replication requirement). On a more complex level, human society is the organism, human language (including speech, writing, visual arts) is the DNA (a means to pass knowledge, behaviors, etc. through time), and humans are the "cells".
- odyssey7 4y ago> it is difficult to imagine that even a simple dream is possible without something like an ego or an “I” experiencing it, he adds. So if spiders dream, “it might mean that we start talking about spiders having something like a minimal self” Why would having a self not be a binary feature? If the theory is that a human's self is less minimal because the human understands itself more richly, that seems like two features are being conflated.
- FeepingCreature 4y agoIt being difficult to imagine, of course, is hardly any argument against it.
- wpietri 4y agoWhy would it be binary? Few natural things are. E.g., living/non-living is an obvious binary that turns out to not be so clear once you look at the details. E.g., whether viruses are alive. Ditto all of the theories about life's origins: https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-biochemists-view-of-lifes-origin-reframes-cancer-and-aging-20220808/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-biochemists-view-of-lifes-o...
- Kalanos 4y agowhat's interesting is that it is both generative and discriminative. i guess GANs are both by definition
- la64710 4y agoAll animal brains (including us) are first and foremost is a great signal processor that is tuned to surface that particular reality of nature to us that helps life.
- dekken_ 4y agoNot saying you're wrong, but it leaves the question of what the point of life is to the universe.
- elevaet 4y agoWhy would/should/could there be a point? Life just is, doing life.
- Traubenfuchs 4y agoUnless one believes in supernatural creators, observers and judges, there is no point in anything and existence, life and consciousness are all unlucky coincidences. We are an absolutely pointless long term consequence of the natural process of evolution, that can start anytime the environment for life is just right.
- swframe2 4y agoThe large language models are very good at prediction. We are making good progress getting them to reason. We need to figure out how to get them to use an internal "blackboard".
- suoduandao2 4y agoHow do we know they aren't already?
- meroes 4y agoChinese room thought experiment maybe. It says a human does not learn language purely formally (the man inside the room doesn’t learn/understand Chinese like a natural Chinese speaker does by shuffling formal syntax around), which programs are. So there must be something extra non-formal for consciousness, and the meager electronics of modern computers plainly don’t seem it.
- suoduandao2 4y ago>So there must be something extra non-formal for consciousness, and the meager electronics of modern computers plainly don’t seem it. But the neurons of a brain do? Don't get me wrong, I like the theory that microtubules harness quantum weirdness to do something hard-problem of consciousness adjacent. But I would bet that if we were silicon-based lifeforms experimenting with carbon adding machines we'd say they plainly don't have the stuff for consciousness either. There's just no consensus theory[1] explaining how consciousness arises. [1] though for my part I'd bet Tononi's model of information integration combined with quantum bayesianism and long relaxation times is on the right track.
- photochemsyn 4y ago> "The final non-predictive variable was semantic congruency or integration difficulty. This speaks to the debate whether effects of predictability reflect prediction or rather post-hoc effects arising when integrating a word into the semantic context. This can be illustrated by considering a constraining context (‘coffee with milk and … ‘). When we contrast a highly expected word (‘sugar’) and an unexpected word (e.g. ‘dog’), the unexpected word is not just less likely, but also semantically incongruous in the prior context." Seems like reading a string of random words vs. reading a text the listener was very familiar with, or had even memorized previously, would have been the obvious test to see if there was a clear difference. Perhaps taking the familiar text and swapping some words, too. Otherwise, the conclusion is that people anticipate the familiar and get surprised when the familiar behaves abnormally? PNAS... kind of an odd little club, that journal.
- notacoward 4y ago> PNAS... kind of an odd little club, that journal. Ironically, you're kind of illustrating the point made in the text you quote. You expect things to be written in a style and jargon familiar to you. That was written in a style and jargon from a different specialty, thus it's unfamiliar. Often these seemingly-odd phrasings are the result of authors trying to be very precise about what they are or are not claiming - especially they are not making the more general, ambiguous, and seemingly obvious claim. They use terms that have very specific meanings in their own field for that purpose. But instead of considering that, you just cast aspersions on the entire organization or specialty. Congratulations, you've done yeoman's work for the Anti Science Brigade.
- em500 4y agoThat, or maybe they're just publishing junk? Who can tell? I know PNAS mostly from Andrew Gelman's blog often making fun of them for publishing jargon laden pseudo-science https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2017/10/04/breaking-pnas-changes-slogan/ https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2017/10/04/breaking-p...
- aydyn 4y agoWhether their findings are novel or not, it is clearly laden with technobabble. It seems you are the one less familiar with academic writing?
- darrelld 4y agoSidebar: This is the first piece of content out there in the wild where I've noticed a Dall-E generated image for an article.
- 40acres 4y agoCasey Newton has been doing this lately with decent results.
- hcmacro 4y agoSurfing Uncertainty by Andy Clark is all about this.
- shon 4y agoIf you want a deeper dive on this concept read Ray Kurzweil's How to create a mind. Ray pioneered a lot of the concepts speech recognition and his book is a fun read and greatly expands on these concepts as well as Ray's ideas on how to build AGI.
- mym1990 4y agoA Thousand Brains by Jeff Hawkins captures some of these observations, and whether the theory is correct or not, there was definitely some resonance with how I feel like my brain might work. Things like anticipating how much something weighs before picking it up, or thinking you're about to drink water but its actually milk, etc...
- zxcb1 4y ago̶p̶r̶e̶d̶i̶c̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ ̶m̶a̶c̶h̶i̶n̶e̶ adaptation organism
- grantcas 4y ago[dupe]
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- naeemtee 4y ago> Dr. Edelman distinguished between primary consciousness, which came first in evolution, and that humans share with other conscious animals, and higher order consciousness, which came to only humans with the acquisition of language. Interestingly, this is (roughly) the Qur'anic explanation for the genesis of human consciousness.
- aaaaaaaaaaab 4y agoA broken clock is right twice a day.
- chimineycricket 4y agoQuran also states that the big bang is real[0]. Make that 3 times a day [0]: https://quran.com/21/30 https://quran.com/21/30
- 22122 4y agothe quran also has a math error in its inheritence laws: https://www.reddit.com/r/exmuslim/comments/98rpd8/qurans_mathematical_errors_in_inheritance/ https://www.reddit.com/r/exmuslim/comments/98rpd8/qurans_mat...
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y agoIt makes a statement that can be interpreted that way with some help, sure. Sort of like how the ancient greeks came up with atoms, evolution etc. But it was just a vague idea, really, nothing very concrete.
- drittich 4y ago
- kadonoishi 4y ago[0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/05/book-review-surfing-uncertainty/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/05/book-review-surfing-un... [1] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-consciousness-and https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-consc...
- a9h74j 4y ago++ Both great links. I've been aware of and impressed by Hawkins' book(s) for years, but now that I am reading Surfing Uncertainty I am blown away by how developed research supporting a predictive brain model appears. Perhaps I missed something, but in Hawkins' more recent Thousand Brains I do not remember him giving prominent notice to Surfing Uncertainty and related research, which would be a great disservice.
- bambax 4y agoRegarding predictions and randomness, it's amazing that when producing music, just injecting some randmness for velocity and timing in a loop (for each note event) completely changes it from being insufferably boring to actually enjoyable, even for extended periods. The brain apparently can detect when a part is exactly repeated, even if it's long, but is thrown off by micro changes.
- sinalalgedonico 4y agoYEA IT`S CALLED PREDICTIVE PROCESSING DUH
- hbarka 4y agoHow does the sense of the ridiculous or sarcasm fit into the theory of the brain as a conscious prediction machine? Is a sense of humor necessary with AI?
- solarmist 4y agoThey're probably emergent properties. Neither sought nor designed, but come along with the other desired properties. Like music/song is a consequence of verbal communication.
- tmnvix 4y agoI think a lot of humour works by establishing a recognisable pattern and then providing a punchline that is not the expected continuation of that pattern.
- gardenfelder 4y agoIn the 1950's - same era as Watson and Crick, Nicholas Rashevsky [1] invented Relational Biology in which he was looking for the mathematics of life itself. His student Robert Rosen [2] went on to pen a book "Life itself..." in 1989, but not until after he had penned a different book "Anticipatory Systems". While looking for the mathematics of life (living things, not machines), several points came to life, one of which is that while machines have the luxury of plan s and makers,living things don't. How to resolve the difference led to the thesis that living things are anticipatory - they are driven by predictive "models". The low level paramecium is able to swim towards "food" by using chemical sensors and measuring gradients; of course, that creature doesn't have anything like a human brain (the topic of this thread), so its models are more innate internal structures; humans have those too, but over time, the adult brain emerges as the supreme modelling agent. It is anticipatory. What does anticipatory mean? A child lets go of a heavy object and it smashes the child's toe. Next time, the child won't let go of heavy objects because it learned an important correlation (causality isn't yet in play). Correlation is sufficient to teach that child a new anticipatory rule; simplest form: dropping heavy stuff --> pain. That applies to reading and human prediction machines. Just try learning a foreign language by reading children's books - the pictures really help. Over time, you don't need them anymore. @hunta20097 on this page says this with different words, but the game is the same: model building and refinement. There are books 'out there' which try to explain all of this in Bayesian terms, that we are always "updating our priors" as we encounter new experiences. It's way above my pay grade to know if that's right, but it still offers satisfying explanations. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Rashevsky https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Rashevsky [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Rosen_(biologist) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Rosen_(biologist)
- gardenfelder 4y agoRight away here at HN, brains as bayesian pops up https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32400462 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32400462
- barking_biscuit 4y ago>Just try learning a foreign language by reading children's books People often trot this strategy out like it's a good idea because children's books are "simple". Have you read children's books? The language in them is actually typically very weird and playful, the situations presented are often strange and non-sensical, and to that end they're not actually all that useful to a foreign language learner as a good starting point at all.
- jialutu 4y agoI have no idea when it happened, but recently I have been explaining to my girlfriend that we are all Bayesian machines, that we are constantly working with priors and posteriors, and while that subconciously our posteriors are updated a lot slower, I often ask her to try to conciously to update our posterior to try to (re)evaluate our beliefs sooner based on our observations.
- extragood 4y agoThis is supported by a great book by Jeff Hawkins (Palm Computing/Handspring founder), [On Intelligence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Intelligence) (2004). It's been a decade+ since I read through it, so my memory is a little fuzzy, but my take away was: humans are hardwired for pattern recognition. Pattern identification improves our mental model of the universe. We use that model to predict things about the future. Making accurate predictions about the future is intelligence.
- ilaksh 4y agoWe do not perceive anything directly. Our perceptions are constructs tuned by sensor sample inputs. But we can only sense small amounts at once and must create a simulation for it to make any sense at all. But there is a delay in sensor data, and if we waited before trying to finalize the constructs then we would always be behind and not be able to dodge falling rocks or anything. So the simulation must not only integrate over samples and time but also be predictive.
- sawyna 4y agoI see brain as this vast hashmap with excellent lookup capabilities. Somehow, the prediction thing is not as surprising for me. We call that as judging in the mortal terms! Judging is generally perceived as a negative thing. I'd think judging is what the brain does implicitly. Our personality is a culmination of memories experienced so far. If you run through these memories on a brand new brain, you'd basically create your own version.
- HarHarVeryFunny 4y ago> Your brain compresses (normalises?) repetition in memories No.. I think this phenomena is related to the fact that our brain is indeed a prediction machine. When a prediction is wrong (i.e we encounter something surprising/unexpected), our brain updates it's prediction based on reality (exactly like training a "predict next word" language/sequence model like GPT-3). As we get older, with more and more life experience, we don't get surprised so often (been there, done that - know how it's going to turn out), so our brain makes less and less prediction mistakes and therefore prediction-failure memory updates. Of course we have multiple types of memory - short term vs long term, etc, so these prediction-failure updates are only part of the picture, but I think this is still the core reason why "the years fly by" when you're just doing more of the same. If you want to lay down more memories then novelty should help, but it's really surprise you'd want to maximize... no good being novel if you can already anticipate/predict how it's going to go.
- mikewarot 4y agoAlways minimize surprise == How we think
- posterboy 4y agowaif, I thought it was an hydraulic steam machine