It sure seems like it’s possible for something to be both unpredictable and good (creativity, agenty people who positively surprise you, children, etc). Or predictable and bad (boring routines, highly derivative art, solitary confinement).
If that doesn’t falsify the theory, then what would?
This is a problem if we attempt to explain things only in terms of minimization of prediction error, usually considered in the form of the “dark room” problem. The solution to this is allow the system to have, as I mention, set points that are slow to update or never update. These ensure humans keep doing things they would otherwise not do because they would be surprising.
To consider your cases of surprising and good and predictable and bad, I believe I have plausible explanations of these phenomena that may explain what’s going on, although I will also freely admit that these are just plausible explanations border on being just-so stories because we currently lack the evidence to verify them ground up.
surprising and good:
creativity: In order to explore the space of possible solutions without getting stuck in local maxima, creativity seems valuable. My theory is that the drive to do surprising things that we call creativity is powered by control systems looking at other control systems and predicting they will generate negative signals indicating error. This makes the systems causing creativity something like financial derivatives.
agenty people who positively surprise you: I expect this is a kind of mixed emotion. Surprise is by itself bad, but when the surprise is mixed in with lots of other things that cause other control systems to send good signals because their set points are validated and can produce a net positive experience, even leading us to learn to expect surprise, via secondary control systems monitoring the output of other control systems to see when they are surprised, to directly end up thinking of surprise as secondarily good.
children: I expect much of the reasoning around children will be grounded in systems that intentionally don’t track truth but instead use set points that are evolutionarily adaptive to get people to do things that are good for differential reproduction and bad for truth.
predictable and bad:
boring routines: Not all people find boring routines bad, but among those who do I expect the mechanism to be set points encouraging more error (“creativity”) as described above.
highly derivative art: Derivative art probably looks a lot like boring routines: some people like them because they are predictable, others don’t because they are “restless” in that they control systems expecting more error (I don’t think this is exactly openness to experience but it does overlap that psychometric).
solitary confinement: This is disallowing many set points to come true that are not about predicting reality but about survival and are minimally mutable, so people experience solitary confinement as bad because they keep predicting they will be outside, see friends, etc. because to give those up is to give up import set points that enable survival and so it’s a kind of continual hell of being disappointed in every moment with the knowledge that it’s not going to change.
It’s probably helpful to note that when I say “prediction” I’m often equivocating with “set point” in that I don’t think of predictions in this theory as necessarily meant to always be predictions of what will actually be seen, even if they often are, but instead as set points in control systems that get them to combine in particular ways by predicting inputs, even if those predictions are sometimes forced by biology and evolution to be consistently wrong or right via observing other signals, etc.
It sure seems like it’s possible for something to be both unpredictable and good (creativity, agenty people who positively surprise you, children, etc). Or predictable and bad (boring routines, highly derivative art, solitary confinement).
If that doesn’t falsify the theory, then what would?
This is a problem if we attempt to explain things only in terms of minimization of prediction error, usually considered in the form of the “dark room” problem. The solution to this is allow the system to have, as I mention, set points that are slow to update or never update. These ensure humans keep doing things they would otherwise not do because they would be surprising.
To consider your cases of surprising and good and predictable and bad, I believe I have plausible explanations of these phenomena that may explain what’s going on, although I will also freely admit that these are just plausible explanations border on being just-so stories because we currently lack the evidence to verify them ground up.
surprising and good:
creativity: In order to explore the space of possible solutions without getting stuck in local maxima, creativity seems valuable. My theory is that the drive to do surprising things that we call creativity is powered by control systems looking at other control systems and predicting they will generate negative signals indicating error. This makes the systems causing creativity something like financial derivatives.
agenty people who positively surprise you: I expect this is a kind of mixed emotion. Surprise is by itself bad, but when the surprise is mixed in with lots of other things that cause other control systems to send good signals because their set points are validated and can produce a net positive experience, even leading us to learn to expect surprise, via secondary control systems monitoring the output of other control systems to see when they are surprised, to directly end up thinking of surprise as secondarily good.
children: I expect much of the reasoning around children will be grounded in systems that intentionally don’t track truth but instead use set points that are evolutionarily adaptive to get people to do things that are good for differential reproduction and bad for truth.
predictable and bad:
boring routines: Not all people find boring routines bad, but among those who do I expect the mechanism to be set points encouraging more error (“creativity”) as described above.
highly derivative art: Derivative art probably looks a lot like boring routines: some people like them because they are predictable, others don’t because they are “restless” in that they control systems expecting more error (I don’t think this is exactly openness to experience but it does overlap that psychometric).
solitary confinement: This is disallowing many set points to come true that are not about predicting reality but about survival and are minimally mutable, so people experience solitary confinement as bad because they keep predicting they will be outside, see friends, etc. because to give those up is to give up import set points that enable survival and so it’s a kind of continual hell of being disappointed in every moment with the knowledge that it’s not going to change.
It’s probably helpful to note that when I say “prediction” I’m often equivocating with “set point” in that I don’t think of predictions in this theory as necessarily meant to always be predictions of what will actually be seen, even if they often are, but instead as set points in control systems that get them to combine in particular ways by predicting inputs, even if those predictions are sometimes forced by biology and evolution to be consistently wrong or right via observing other signals, etc.