The Brain as a Prediction Machine: The Key to Consciousness?
The future, particularly cognition about the future, has been very much a back-burner issue in psychology for more than a century. Increasingly, there is interest in how the brain is oriented to, and organized around, forming predictions. And there is an evolutionary understanding why anticipatory cognition is so crucial
Understanding the brain as a prediction machine may help explain consciousness
A system that can model the environment and itself well can form simulations of the future environment and its adaptations to that environment
- Thoughts are physical representations or maps
- The mind is a kind of map
- More evolved brains can integrate past sensory experiences to form representations of things that are not presently “out there”
Understanding the central role of expectations in cognition is key to understanding many quirks of human functioning
The fact that expectations fundamentally shape perceptions and beliefs explains many of the brain’s most successful features, as well as its many problematic bugs.
- Seeing is believing.
- Our perceptions are shaped by top-down expectations/assumptions about what we are seeing, hearing, etc. This may lead us to form mistaken (and often, intransigent) beliefs.
Finding Purpose in a Godless World
The idea that events in nature might be purpose-driven has generally been considered unscientific-teleology has effectively been banished by science.
- Even though the universe does not have an inherent purpose, living organisms, which evolved spontaneously and unguided on at least this planet and quite probably in many other places in the universe, are purpose driven.
- A purposeless universe became infused with purpose, and for humans, imbued with meaning.
When you’re a brain inside a dark skull, guessing what’s presently out there is a form of prediction
Perception-figuring out what’s there-has to be a process of informed guesswork in which the brain combines these sensory signals with its prior expectations or beliefs about the way the world is to form its best guess of what caused those signals.
How do the brain’s thousands of representations/models produce a feeling of unitary consciousness?
The Thousand Brains Theory of Intelligence proposes that the columns work together through their connections with each other, some of which are long-range connections crisscrossing the neocortex.
- Through a process akin to “voting,” the different simultaneous models established by different columns encoding perceptions from different reference frames reach a “consensus” best guess (an algorithmic inference) as to what the object is that is being perceived, based on prior learned information.
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