First of all, to make sure we’re on the same page, there’s a difference between “self-supervised learning” and “motivation to reduce prediction error”, right? The former involves weight update, the latter involves decisions and rewards. The former is definitely a thing in the neocortex—I don’t think that’s controversial. As for the latter, well I don’t know the full suite of human motivations, but novelty-seeking is definitely a thing, and spending all day in a dark room is not much of a thing, and both of those would go against a motivation to reduce prediction error. On the other hand, people sometimes dislike being confused, which would be consistent with a motivation to reduce prediction error. So I figure, maybe there’s a general motivation to reduce prediction error (but there are also other motivations that sometimes outweigh it), or maybe there isn’t such a motivation at all (but other motivations can sometimes coincidentally point in that direction). Hard to say. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I absolutely believe that there are signals from the telencephalon, communicating telencephalon activity / outputs, which are used as inputs to the calculations leading up to the final reward prediction error (RPE) signal in the brainstem. Then there has to be some circuitry somewhere setting things up such that some particular type of telencephalon activity / outputs have some particular effect on RPE. Where is this circuitry? Telencephalon or brainstem? Well, I guess you can say that if a connection from Telencephalon Point A to Brainstem Point B is doing something specific and important, then it’s a little bit arbitrary whether we call this “telencephalon circuitry” versus “brainstem circuitry”. In all the examples I’ve seen, it’s tended to make more sense to lump it in with the brainstem / hypothalamus. But it’s hard for me to argue that without a better understanding of what you have in mind here.
Thanks!
First of all, to make sure we’re on the same page, there’s a difference between “self-supervised learning” and “motivation to reduce prediction error”, right? The former involves weight update, the latter involves decisions and rewards. The former is definitely a thing in the neocortex—I don’t think that’s controversial. As for the latter, well I don’t know the full suite of human motivations, but novelty-seeking is definitely a thing, and spending all day in a dark room is not much of a thing, and both of those would go against a motivation to reduce prediction error. On the other hand, people sometimes dislike being confused, which would be consistent with a motivation to reduce prediction error. So I figure, maybe there’s a general motivation to reduce prediction error (but there are also other motivations that sometimes outweigh it), or maybe there isn’t such a motivation at all (but other motivations can sometimes coincidentally point in that direction). Hard to say. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I absolutely believe that there are signals from the telencephalon, communicating telencephalon activity / outputs, which are used as inputs to the calculations leading up to the final reward prediction error (RPE) signal in the brainstem. Then there has to be some circuitry somewhere setting things up such that some particular type of telencephalon activity / outputs have some particular effect on RPE. Where is this circuitry? Telencephalon or brainstem? Well, I guess you can say that if a connection from Telencephalon Point A to Brainstem Point B is doing something specific and important, then it’s a little bit arbitrary whether we call this “telencephalon circuitry” versus “brainstem circuitry”. In all the examples I’ve seen, it’s tended to make more sense to lump it in with the brainstem / hypothalamus. But it’s hard for me to argue that without a better understanding of what you have in mind here.