
To Make Sense of the Present, Brains May Predict the Future - tdurden
https://www.quantamagazine.org/to-make-sense-of-the-present-brains-may-predict-the-future-20180710/
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bobosha
Another theory along these lines is by Jeff Hawkins of Numenta in his book "On
Intelligence". He called in the Memory prediction framework.

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ilaksh
I was going to mention this
[https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.03971](https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.03971) which was
partially inspired by Hawkins' work.

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aalleavitch
Kind of tangential, but I've always liked to think of memory as "predicting
the past". I think we experience time in the direction that we do because it's
easier to predict what's going to happen in the direction of less entropy.
Given our current state, it's much easier to reconstruct what our state in the
negative time direction must have been, as opposed to what our state in the
positive time direction will be. Basically, our memory and our experience of
time has a direction specifically because of entropy.

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skate22
I pretty much assume that IF we were all knowing of the state of everything
(matter, energy, & anything else that is / could be) and IF we were all
knowing of the rules that defined the state transitions that we could predict
the future (the state of everything at some observation point)

We will likely never satisfy the above 2 assumptions, but our brains try to do
the best they can with their limited sample of data / last gen processors. So
sure, we may never predict future states with 100% certainty like above, but
definitely with some % > 0

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opportune
not on an infinitely small scale:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle)

on a macro scale, with a reasonable margin of error, sure. The problem comes
when small scale effects begin to have large scale consequences: human thought
might be chaotic enough (in the physical, not colloquial sense) to be like
this. In fact there is a whole branch of physics/math that deals with this
issue:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory)

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skate22
I'm no expert on chaos theory, or physics, or much of anything, but directly
from your 2nd link:

"Chaos: When the present determines the future, but the approximate present
does not approximately determine the future."

Seems to support part* of my theory more than defeat it. Perhaps our current
understanding of existence does not allow us to predict the future state of
complex systems due to our level of uncertanty at a micro scale. Perhaps some
day we will come to a better understanding that will.

Surely we don't have the full picture yet, but i think we have a lot more
reasoning to do before I will accept that existence is unreasonable

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ddmma
Interesting that now we transfer this prediction capability onto machines

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contingencies
_Different brain regions … trade in different kinds of prediction._

Seems like disparate departments within organizations do the same.

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s-shellfish
Calling it future prediction is problematic. We can't predict the future. It's
a controlled delusion and sometimes some people will try to override your own
reasoning system, and you honestly don't want to give them that power in
exchange for it.

It's called inferencing. Sometimes we have so much information we don't
understand why things make sense in the order they do. It's not future
prediction. It's confusion between information that is relatively predictable
because it's stable information with very little variation, plus confirmation
bias of being correct about highly variant information we are not accustomed
to being right about in a particular order.

Do not call it future prediction. Sometimes you will be correct about things
before things happen. That's just chance. If it can happen, it can happen,
it's in that space. But it's fundamentally flawed reasoning. There's still a
whole open space of things yet to be experienced. That's what existence is
defined as. You don't know what you know until you know what you know. It's
not magic. It's called experiencing new things.

Calling it future prediction primes you into bias. Which closes you off from
opportunities eventually, because you literally stop being able to see things
for how they are truly.

Pattern matching brain. Being able to comprehend reality is absolutely vital
to survival. Don't get lost in the waves of chaos. People can and do try to
take control of confusion.

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stephen_g
I think you're thinking of prediction at a way higher-level than this article
is (although I admit I only skimmed it).

What I got from the article I felt was fairly obvious - it's more like 'to
catch a falling object your brain predicts where it will be by the time your
hand moves into position'. This seems pretty elementary to being able to
function at all - things like predicting how we will need to shift our centre
of gravity to walk on uneven terrain, etc. It seems entirely reasonable that
we are constantly making these 'micro-predictions' on a subconscious level.
This is also necessary to be able to navigate a 3D environment based on our
vision, which is based on a pair of overlapping 2-dimensional projections.

So what you're talking about doesn't make much sense to me at this level.
Reasoning about future events is completely different to the subconscious
mental models of our vision system or language processing. At the level the
article talks about, mostly the worst you can be taken advantage of is things
like being tricked by an optical illusion.

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s-shellfish
Physics equations about balls falling are more accurate. The body and mind are
good at guessing. That doesn't mean they are right about everything it
guesses, especially models of cognition. Why bring up the the subconscious?
How does that support anything?

> mostly the worst you can be taken advantage of is things like being tricked
> by an optical illusion

Imagine living your whole life under an optical illusion. That should at the
very least, be a choice you can choose between.

