Essence of the predictive faculty?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

We know something of how it works. Once you have burned your hand on something, you can draw on that experience to avoid ever burning yourself again. The mind can predict effects from causes.

Ok, but that kind of prediction is firmly grounded in sensory experience. Math is arguably not grounded in experience, or if it ultimately is, it is distanced from it by more degrees of separation than my first example. A mind learns to abstract particular objects into the intellectual objects we call numbers. A mind learns to perform various operations between numbers and becomes aware of patterns in their behavior. In some cases, the behavior of numbers maps pretty well onto relevant aspects of life, and a mind may make accurate predictions about the real world based on non-sensory observations about the behavior of numbers. For instance, say a grad student has $2000 in the bank. Their income is such that expenses exceed it by $200 per month. The grad student can predict that he will be broke in 10 months at this rate, which will result in greater suffering, all other things being equal.

It’d be silly to take too polarized a position on which of these two types of experience plays a larger role in the predictive faculty- obviously they both play their part. I think it is safe to posit that the presence of sensory experience, abstract experience and prediction itself are possible in the first place only because human brains possess the relevant structures to produce them. If a brain structure is responsible for the capacity for prediction, it must be the case that there is some essence of the predictive faculty to be discovered there.

Except that it can’t be purely a brain structure issue. Certain kinds of information have to pass through the brain structure before a consciousness produces a prediction- in the above example, someone has to get burned before they learn not to burn themselves. The proof? It is that before you ever burned yourself, you went and burned yourself, and thus learned not to burn yourself.

Except… maybe you didn’t. It is of course possible for other people to communicate with you and instruct you to not burn yourself without your ever having done it. Even without this, most people seem to understand not to jump off a cliff or poke themselves in the eye. The point is that a mind doesn’t have to have sensory experience of important phenomena in order to make predictions about them. How far out could a well-trained mind make predictions? We could draw an analogy to how many moves in advance a chess computer can calculate, only ‘moves’ isn’t the relevant metric in human life. No?

So far all of these examples have involved the avoidance of harm. What about predictions resulting in positive outcomes? If G does A, B and C, they will get laid. If F does X, Y and Z, they will grow rich. If E does P, Q and R, they will become more physically fit.

Some persons’ behavior seem to exhibit more effective use of the predictive faculty than others. Would it be better if more people were handier with the predictive faculty? Would they be better friends, spouses, parents, employees? Maybe they would be better voters and citizens, or at the very least not be afflicted by avoidable illnesses and poverty (see that word, ‘avoidable’? I’m not saying all illness and poverty are the victims’ fault.)? If the best use of the predictive faculty is facilitated by the experience of definable structures of information, it could be possible to deliver those structures via the education system and thereby enjoy a happier population. It could be within our own power to nurture in the people the ability to avoid some of their worst problems before they occur!

So. Have you ever made any hard-to-explain predictions? Got any insight into what structures of information would facilitate the predictive faculty in a receptive person? Is that even the right way to approach this question? What about intuition, ‘gut feeling’, or even visions/hallucinations? Could these be subconscious or involuntary expressions of the predictive faculty?

The question boils down to what are the most elementary elements the predictive facility consists of?

2

Following the line of logic, it would also seem that one would, by experience, learn the law of cause and effect, which is that two simultaneous events are not necessary in a cause-and-effect relationship, and even if they are, A is not necessarily the cause of B, it might be vice versa.

Judging by posts in forums like this, it is amazing how many people live long and fruitful lives without ever having learned this simple principle, along with other basic elements of logical thought. When people get burned by making non-logical decisions, they attribute the effect to some other unrelated cause (like, luck), and their ignorance of cause and effect goes unmitigated, despite the burn.

3

Well, I think “intuition” is often based on inner brain workings that the person just isn’t aware of. However, it is quite common for people to get very confused about cause-and-effect and come up with “predictions” that make no sense at all. For example, a lot of people get caught up in superstitious behavior and magical thinking. “Oh, I was wearing this green shirt when I won, so I have to wear it in order to win.” We have people believing in things like astrology, or that vaccines cause autism, or that children are in grave danger of being kidnapped by strangers, or that keeping a gun under your pillow makes you safer.
In other words, people tend to be quite bad at predicting future events based on their current state of knowledge.

4

Applause… You’ve nailed two of the most glaring examples.

5

Didn’t mean to vanish, sometimes life takes over…

I took a look at one source of “bad knowledge” in another thread about agnotology. People sometimes make bad decisions en masse because they are fed bad information on important matters. And of course changing somebody’s mind on a subject they are wrong about can be difficult to impossible. It seems everyone having good information from which to make predictions would be good for the many but bad for the few.

I thought that was a great topic, though it seemed to have been threadshitted by a guy who wanted to rail about !liberal bias! and that sort of thing, even though the nub of that subject was an issue in another country on which I didn’t take any firm position. I guess some people regard pointing out that certain views are just bullshit as “liberal bias”?

Two things here: Is the sort of hysteria in America today about all things liberal something that is encouraged as a means of keeping people separated from actual knowledge? It sure seems like it sometimes, this reflex to view everything as having two sides, with one side being sinisterly suppressed, when all that is really happening is a discussion.

And, if you read that other thread and while we’re here, am I right in seeing that as a threadshit? Obviously I didn’t handle it well, but sometimes ISTM there are hatchet guys out there seeking to disrupt any conversation that takes too critical a view of the rampant bullshit stampeding through today’s realm of ideas.

6

Why did you write human brains there? After all,

…can’t a cat do that, as per Mark Twain? Or a dog, as per Ivan Pavlov?

(David Hume once famously got partway through a sentence discussing how a human of course learns to shy away from a flame after touching it – only to interrupt himself with a quick aside about how even animals do the exact same thing.)

7

<checks other thread>

Ok, you’re not accusing me of threadshitting. But you are introducing politics into this subject. Neither libs nor cons hold an exclusive on being right about things. Conservatives have certainly shown they can deny objectively provable facts, but liberals can just as readily take good and bad information and make incredibly stupid decisions. It seems to me that most anti-vaxxers are liberals, as are the alternative medicine crowd. Everyone, and I mean everyone, is prone to believing a comforting lie over an uncomfortable truth.

8

I would say that prediction requires a mental model of the universe that we can “run” and anticipate the outcome.

The models can take different forms. They might be abstract, as with your example of $2000 depleting over time. They might be highly physical, as with jumping off a cliff. Or somewhere in-between, as with playing a cartoonish video game.

Much of this modeling happens in real-time, without any conscious input. Our two eyes see a 2D image of the world, and our brains have to reconstruct the most plausible 3D scene that’s consistent with what we see (is that car tiny or just really far away?). Sometimes this goes wrong and we call those optical illusions. We must have dedicated structures for this kind of prediction.

But other times it requires some conscious effort. Build something from scratch and you have to anticipate how the pieces fit together; they can’t violate physical law by being the wrong size or intersecting or having some other problem.

In all cases, though, there is an underlying “physics” to the system that we apply to the model. How well this succeeds depends on the precision of the model in the first place, and how accurate the physics is. These abilities aren’t equally distributed in the population, whether innate or learned.

Also, the mental model may not be a good fit for the problem at hand–perhaps after burning your hand on the stove, you come up with a model where stoves are covered with an invisible material that hurts you, as opposed to one where hot things cause damage. Your prediction then is that you won’t get burned if you never touch a stove, instead of one where you shouldn’t touch hot things regardless of what they are. Our mental models will always be somewhat imprecise, since we can’t simulate the whole universe, but some models are better than others.

9

Well for one thing, the kind of predictions that are grounded in language without direct sensory experience require structures that are found only in the human brain, or at least limited to higher order creatures. But maybe I’m wrong about that. It would be interesting to find the simplest life form that somehow exhibits predictive behavior and begin the inquiry there, since the essence of a thing can likely be observed in its simplest examples.

It could be that prediction is included in the definition of life itself; maybe all living things must make predictions as a precondition of life. I suppose the dividing line there is prediction vs. determinism. Physics can describe the behavior of inert matter very well, so that we can know with confidence what it will do in the future. But inert matter isn’t predicting anything just because it is predictable. It doesn’t look out for itself. It has inertia, mass, energy, but is limited only to the organizing principles found in raw matter itself.

Life seeks to collect energy for itself, at the very least. Any organism must make a prediction about how to exploit an energy source in order to exploit it, right? Or do we draw a line between purely instinctual organisms and creatures, plants v animals maybe, and assign the predictive faculty only to the creatures and special exceptions?

And back to human brains, maybe it is a mistake to isolate predictions in just the brain. The whole organism participates, no? It takes the whole organism to sense the inert matter and organisms in its environment.

It really is pretty interesting. It could be debatable whether humans are the best at making predictions. If they are, then we look at the predictive faculty from both ends, the most basic and the most advanced. We could say that humans are the best predictors because we have dominated the planet, and dolphins, ravens, primates &etc. have not (maybe you’d make a case for insects. But a single insect species? I doubt it.).

But then again, dominating the planet could be our downfall. Plus that could be the wrong yardstick to measure predictions. Dominating a thing involves seeing it as a separate thing. I think animals’ seeming lack of abstract thinking keeps them more in touch with the physical world, it is the source of their sangfroid. Perhaps it follows that they don’t see themselves as separate from their environment- they don’t see themselves at all. This in-tuneness with the big picture keeps them from being responsible for destroying the planet.

Only that is probably just a bunch of idealistic poetry. If the ants could manage it, Earth would be one ginormous anthill. But they can’t, humans can, therefore humans are the best predictors.