paraphrasing, "destroying the village to save the village". — TheMadFool
He is giving neuroscience its own proper physicalist foundation - Bayesian mechanics - to wean it off the Universal Turing Machine formalisms that want to treat the brain as a representing and simulating computer. — apokrisis
When he talks of surprise, it is as a technical term within a new mathematical structure. — apokrisis
The theory here is sort of like that. You need to destroy surprise in order to be surprised. You have to create a baseline where the world is made as predictable and unsurprising as possible. That then allows you to experience the counterfactuality of events which are actually surprising - events that have personalised meaning or information because they must force you to revise your beliefs about the world.
Surprise can’t exist in the usual sense if everything that happens counts as something out of the blue. That becomes just randomness.
The brain desires salience. It has to discover the signal by first eliminating the noise. — apokrisis
Friston's particular contribution is in bringing the Helmholtz free-energy approach to bear on the problem, and then trying to extend it beyond cognitive science to living systems in general. — SophistiCat
Any kind of science needs to be driven by evidence, not a desire for totalising unity. We do not accept theory on the grounds that it's neat, but on its accord with observation. — Kenosha Kid
Yes, a human is only one example of a biological system, but you only need one counterexample to falsify a law. — Kenosha Kid
Someone mentioned children - fresh minds, tabula rasa. To younglings, the world is full of surprises because they haven't had time or are in the process of constructing a faithful model of the world, one which would help them to anticipate events, prepare for them, etc. and then they mature into adults. As adults, growing older is just another name for accumulation of empirical data to refine said model which is an asymptote for actual/true reality. My guesstimate is the model any person develops should be a good map of the territory by the 25th year of life if it's to be of any use at all. — TheMadFool
As I recall, I was quite content in my darkened room until I was expelled from it by a nightmare squeezing that left me beached on a bloody sheet gasping for breath. Breath was the second surprise. Darkened rooms are unavailable for a longer lease than about 9 months. Thereafter, minimising surprise involves seeking out surprise, aka novelty, in order to familiarise oneself with it. I think this is known as "learning|". — unenlightened
So Kuhn was wrong about paradigms? — apokrisis
Do you see how you just employed the data processing paradigm that Bayesian mechanics replaces to try to argue against Bayesian mechanics? — apokrisis
You are creating your own confusion by talking about surprise as if it were just a “feeling” here and not an information theoretic metric. — apokrisis
That has absolutely nothing to do with it. — Kenosha Kid
Again, the definition is quoted above. I know your initial MO was to claim that, by disagreeing, I must be employing a different definition, — Kenosha Kid
mathematically, surprise is also the negative log-evidence for the model entailed by the agent. This means minimizing surprise maximizes the evidence for the agent (model).
When it finds something surprising, i.e. that the model could not predict, it rewards itself with a hit of dopamine. — Kenosha Kid
Evolution isn't really trying to minimise surprise; it's trying to maximise fitness. — Kenosha Kid
The difficulty with the surprise avoidance theory is that, even here, it provides an answer: the cave is to be avoided precisely because it holds surprises. You are right to draw attention tot he methodological issue, which seems to me to be the same as that addressed by Watkins, and used as the basis for a previous thread: namely that if any action on the part of an organism can be explained as avoiding surprise, then the explanatory value of the theory is zero. Those who see it as true in some a priori fashion (Apokrisis?) will always be able to explain any given observation in terms of the theory, but at the cost of introducing ad hoc hypotheses to make it fit.There are other, better, more factual reasons why we fear dark caves. — Kenosha Kid
The problem is in trying to model all human behaviour according to one general rule when in fact it is an interplay between many physical processes evolved at different times in different environments, some overriding. Our fear of lurking tigers _is_ quite different from our innate curiosity for the novel, and should be treated as such. — Kenosha Kid
Andy Clark (of The Extended Mind) — SophistiCat
No, although the theory here seems to imply that (that life, once there, is a drive towards minimal free Gibbs). — Cartuna
The explanatory power of surprise avoidance will take years, and much subtle empirical evidence, to evaluate. — Banno
Agreed. But what is also key is that the map of the territory is one that is a map of the territory with oneself in it as well. So it isn’t a map with the whole world represented, it is a map of the route you want to take to complete your self-defining life mission. It is a map of yourself as much as a map of the world you must inhabit.
This is the difference between a Cartesian representational model of what the brain does - the computer science model - and an enactive or embodied view of cognition. Our neural models of the world are maps which embody a personal point of view. — apokrisis
It is not about subserving a feeling - even if it might feel like something to be alerted, focused, engaged. It is about a certain kind of surprise or prediction error that leads to a positive orientation response. A global decision to approach closer and explore, gather more information. — apokrisis
You then go on to discuss it in terms of some pop-neuropsychology bullshit... — apokrisis
The difficulty with the surprise avoidance theory is that, even here, it provides an answer: the cave is to be avoided precisely because it holds surprises. — Banno
Those who see it as true in some a priori fashion (Apokrisis?) will always be able to explain any given observation in terms of the theory, but at the cost of introducing ad hoc hypotheses to make it fit. — Banno
I would not be at all surprised to see in a few years a crusading pedagogue explaining how the only way to teach kids is to minimise the surprises to which they are exposed. And there will be schools that follow that advice, with mixed success. — Banno
The explanatory power of surprise avoidance will take years, and much subtle empirical evidence, to evaluate. — Banno
But what it actually is saying is that the goal of minimising free energy is how a baseline for personal being gets established. The first requirement is to be able to have a structure of belief about the world - a reality model - that is not immediately being entropified away into uncertainty. That baseline is then what sets the scene for the second thing of actually getting to work on the world. — apokrisis
Why do you think that dopamine response evolved? Why do you think children are naturally drawn to novelty? Just for the luls? It's there to maximise information for building models about our environments. — Kenosha Kid
I'm dismissing it in terms of its fidelity to actual biology. — Kenosha Kid
the cave is to be avoided precisely because it holds surprises. — Banno
I was hungry, for real. I had 0 burgers, 0 hotdogs, 0 eggs, and 0 liters of milk. I'm, for some strange unfathomable reason, still hungry. — TheMadFool
I'm sure there is some dark room in which burgers are smellingly inviting you. — Cartuna
Do you read what I say? Of course once you can prevent the environment from increasing your belief uncertainty, you then lock in the possibility of ratcheting belief in the direction of ever-broader uncertainty. — apokrisis
And you are simply wrong on that score. — apokrisis
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