To Make Sense of the Present, Brains May Predict the Future
quantamagazine.org
quantamagazine.org
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
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
"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
Seems like disparate departments within organizations do the same.
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.
What tosh. Of course we can predict the future... and sometimes our prediction is correct.
Data compression works by modelling the data stream and predicting the next symbol based on that model, and then recording in an efficient way the degree to which the prediction was correct. The comparison between the prediction and the actual outcome is the key point -- just as it is in the article.
I'm fine with calling it probabalistic inferencing. It's not future prediction, especially when the models one is reasoning about are models of cognition.
Thank you for not down voting though, that's appreciated.
is flawed. You never see things for how they are truly. You see them through a filter of your sensory capabilities, your mental organization, and, as this article discusses, your aptitude for prediction.
That doesn't negate the fact that there's measurable, testable reality that can be reproduced using scientific rigor.
It's just a perspective from someone who has experienced being carried away with the waves. Aptitude for prediction helps you and tells you it's all working as expected until it slams you with hard consequences that leave enough impact to know where to draw your own line.
My own father told me these things. I didn't listen. Guess what happened?
It's arrogant to assume people can't catch up. Even if they don't understand exactly, you can't predict all the consequences of how people interact with a person who thinks they can predict the future, and especially people who act like some people are better at it than others. It works, until it doesn't.
Yes it does. Who decided what scientific rigor was? What instrument did they use to come to that conclusion? How do they perceive the results of their experiments?
If we collectively decide we can't trust our own individual senses, what do you think happens to our chances for survival?
True, I don't like the word prediction in general, aside from maybe being used for the most minimal stability one requires for survival.
That seems essential for the human mind to have enough security in it's own existing understanding to avoid descending into a state of analysis paralysis.
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.
> 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.
From this part, it sounds to me like you're taking the meaning of "premonition" and applying it to "prediction"...
If a predictive model is only predicting data about it's own model, it's going to be self proving.
There is still a giant space of everything else. And the more ones thoughts become consumed with models of prediction, the easier it is to ignore the space of everything else.
But I guess simple, boring language describing the phenomona isn't interesting enough.
What is the difference between a cognitive model that 'predicts' it's own behavior, and a premonition, when none of the data has anything to do with anything besides thinking about thinking?