all of us bayesians May 31, 2008
Posted by ocmpoma in : supernaturalism , trackbackVia Mind Hacks, a post at Reverendbayes’s Weblog which is an article appearing in New Scientist about a postulated over-arching theory of how our brains work, starting from Bayes’s Theorem (wonderful explanation of the theorem by none other than OB’s Eliezer Yudkowsy here):
“In fact, making predictions and re-evaluating them seems to be a universal feature of the brain. At all times your brain is weighing its inputs and comparing them with internal predictions in order to make sense of the world.”
I’m a big fan of the idea of human-mind-as-hypersensitive-pattern-imposer, so this fits in well with that framework (and hence feels nice to me, making me less likely to be critical of it…). One (speculative, of course and as almost always) thing that occurred to me as I read the post was that, if our brains do indeed function along the lines of predict-and-refine, than it would be very easy for them to interpret phenomena based on predictions — which themselves are heavily influenced by our social brains’ also-hypersensitive and highly-developed theory of mind — which point have as their starting point sentient intent… In other words, the idea that there is an actively intelligent force (or forces) behind the workings of the universe stems from our brains predicting (based on prior information) that things happen because they are intended to happen. If we feel a breeze on our face, we predict that something somewhere is ‘blowing’ just as we realize that another person — or we ourselves — blowing on us causes the sensation of a breeze. Humans evolved to see supernatural spirits all around just as we evolved to see faces in clouds.
Tags for this article: bayesian , brain , cognition , evolution , mind , neuroscience , science , supernaturalism , theory of mind
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