I disagree that all prediction error equates to suffering. When you step into a warm shower you experience prediction error just as much as if you step into a cold shower, but I don’t think the initial experience of a warm shower contains any discomfort for most people, whereas I expect the cold shower usually does.
Furthermore, far more prediction error is experienced in life than suffering. Simply going for a walk leads to a continuous stream of prediction error, most of which people feel pretty neutral about.
I would say the warm shower causes less prediction error than the cold shower because it’s less shocking to the body, but there’s still a very subtle amount of discomfort which is hidden under all the positive feelings. The level of discomfort I’m talking about is very slight, but you would notice it if there was nothing else occupying your attention. I don’t mean to say it causes negative emotions. It’s more like the discomfort of imagining an unsatisfying shape, or watching a video at slightly lower resolution. If you compare any activity to deep sleep or unconsciousness, you can find sensations that grab your attention by being slightly irritating. As long as it’s noticeable I think it causes slight negative valence. But this is often outweighed by other aspects of the activity that increase valence.
Sitting at home doing nothing might involve the negative sensations of boredom, restlessness, and impatience, all of which disappear when we go for a walk, so any discomfort is hard to notice underneath the obvious increase in valence.
I think that the key is in the way that preferences inform our world model and thus what causes the prediction error to occur. There are errors you would observe that would strongly indicate that your preferences are less able to be met in the posterior model. This will cause suffering whereas an update towards a model in which your needs are met more easily is likely to cause a good feeling. For example, you sit down to eat a sandwich at Subway for the first time and the sub is actually way better than you expected. You will experience a pleasant feeling, and if things like this keep happening you might feel like you’ve really figured out some good strategy for operating.
In a sense you are actually decreasing prediction error more than you are increasing it when a good thing happens to you because you always generate prediction error based on the difference between your ideal world and your observed reality. So when you have a very positive experience, this error between the ideal and observed is lessened. This could outweigh the prediction error of the prediction itself being wrong. The example I think of for this is the ecstatic child in Disney world.
On the other hand, the more you get accustomed to a pleasurable stimulus, the less pleasure you receive from it over time (hedonic adaptation). Since this happens to both positive and negative emotions, it seems to me that there is a kind of symmetry here. To me this suggests that decreasing prediction error results in more neutral emotional states rather than pleasant states.
I disagree that all prediction error equates to suffering. When you step into a warm shower you experience prediction error just as much as if you step into a cold shower, but I don’t think the initial experience of a warm shower contains any discomfort for most people, whereas I expect the cold shower usually does.
Furthermore, far more prediction error is experienced in life than suffering. Simply going for a walk leads to a continuous stream of prediction error, most of which people feel pretty neutral about.
I would say the warm shower causes less prediction error than the cold shower because it’s less shocking to the body, but there’s still a very subtle amount of discomfort which is hidden under all the positive feelings. The level of discomfort I’m talking about is very slight, but you would notice it if there was nothing else occupying your attention. I don’t mean to say it causes negative emotions. It’s more like the discomfort of imagining an unsatisfying shape, or watching a video at slightly lower resolution. If you compare any activity to deep sleep or unconsciousness, you can find sensations that grab your attention by being slightly irritating. As long as it’s noticeable I think it causes slight negative valence. But this is often outweighed by other aspects of the activity that increase valence.
Sitting at home doing nothing might involve the negative sensations of boredom, restlessness, and impatience, all of which disappear when we go for a walk, so any discomfort is hard to notice underneath the obvious increase in valence.
I think that the key is in the way that preferences inform our world model and thus what causes the prediction error to occur. There are errors you would observe that would strongly indicate that your preferences are less able to be met in the posterior model. This will cause suffering whereas an update towards a model in which your needs are met more easily is likely to cause a good feeling. For example, you sit down to eat a sandwich at Subway for the first time and the sub is actually way better than you expected. You will experience a pleasant feeling, and if things like this keep happening you might feel like you’ve really figured out some good strategy for operating.
In a sense you are actually decreasing prediction error more than you are increasing it when a good thing happens to you because you always generate prediction error based on the difference between your ideal world and your observed reality. So when you have a very positive experience, this error between the ideal and observed is lessened. This could outweigh the prediction error of the prediction itself being wrong. The example I think of for this is the ecstatic child in Disney world.
There might be more work here though.
On the other hand, the more you get accustomed to a pleasurable stimulus, the less pleasure you receive from it over time (hedonic adaptation). Since this happens to both positive and negative emotions, it seems to me that there is a kind of symmetry here. To me this suggests that decreasing prediction error results in more neutral emotional states rather than pleasant states.