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Comment by chrsw | Hacker News Reader

I heard someone who studies this sort of thing say basically what biological neurons are trying to do is predict as well. Predicting what exactly? I’m not sure. The next time they should fire or something. I can’t find the YouTube video now.

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In the last few decades, there has been an increased interest in the role of prediction in language comprehension. The idea that people predict (i.e., context-based pre-activation of upcoming linguistic input) was deemed controversial at first. However, present-day theories of language comprehension have embraced linguistic prediction as the main reason why language processing tends to be so effortless, accurate, and efficient.

https://www.earth.com/news/our-brains-are-constantly-working...

https://www.psycholinguistics.com/gerry_altmann/research/pap...

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/23273798.2020.18...

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1551-6709.2009...

Interesting.

And I also found the video I was referring to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHQfmJEpRmU

Predict activations in adjacent neurons, roughly; the relevant keyword is "Hebbian learning" (and "predictive coding" at a higher level).

Also called surprisal minimization in Karl Fristons free energy principle.

Predicting reality, under the "controlled hallucination" framing, corrected by sensory error signals. The brain has no access to ground truth, only input data that helps correct the hallucination.

Based on lots of human interactions, I think there are a lot of human beings out there who mentally aren’t much more than “next word predictors” who happen to be made of meat+neurons instead of silicon+code.

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