Predictive Coding
Today I’m going to talk about Predictive Coding, one of the most influential theories of modern neuroscience. This has been perhaps the most impactful theory from neuroscience on my own life, completely changing the way I understand my place in the universe. I’m first going to try and explain the fundamentals before I give some examples of how it impacts my personal reflection.
Predictive coding suggests that the brain is always guessing at reality. Rather than receive reality from the senses, the brain generates a prediction of reality, checking it against information from the senses. If the prediction is correct, all is well and less resources are dedicated to the sensory information. If the senses contradict our prediction, the brain flags a “prediction error” and is forced to update the prediction. This is energetically expensive and involves a period of uncertainty before a new prediction is able to match and suppress the sensory information. This process is happening at multiple levels of the brain’s hierarchy, processing visual information to maintain a perfect picture of consciousness, as well as conceptual information to maintain your steady digestion of this relatively mind-bending neuron candy.
This perspective has helped me keep track of my own ever-changing predictions of the world. The science of humor holds generally that people find something funny if it violates their expectations without causing them harm (a benign violation). Everyone likes prediction error if it’s in the miniature, as long as we can keep our big ideas safe, but what happens when something larger is violated? To understand yourself, it’s important to find which predictions sit most foundational to your hierarchy. “If you want to get to know someone, find out what makes them angry,” touted a wise young character of one of my favorite Japanese anime series Hunter x Hunter. It can go far beyond anger, though. What if someone you love unexpectedly passes away? You had a very central prediction of that person remaining in your life, and many other predictions rested on it. This requires significant energy to adjust to, letting go of a deeper identity of self becuase that person had become a part of you. This trauma goes further, into the challenge of opening up to someone again, knowing (or should I say predicting) that those you depend on could at any point be taken away from you.
While we feel at peace when the many predictions of our brain are more aligned, they often have to contradict. “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it” (Aristotle). This wisdom is perhaps truer now in the age of information than it ever has been. Constantly flooded with contradicting media we are often left feeling only one underlying truth: “One thing I know is that I know nothing” (Socrates).
While the uncertainty of the ever changing and contradictory world can dig away at our psychological stability (it is accurate predictions which hold our psyche together), we can attempt to find peace in our acceptance of this one deep truth. The one constant in life is transience. This teaching is deeply woven into many eastern religions and is often the focus of meditation. It may be that meditation is successful because you are focused on the only stable prediction you have while accepting the fleetingness of all the rest. There is likely a necessary component of faith in this acceptance, wherever that faith is derived from.
If you expect to be proven wrong - if you expect to not have control - you may find yourself at least at peace with the fact that you were right about your own fragility. Send yourself out into the winds of entropy and do your best to accept the inherently dissonant world. Find solace in the arcs of superimposed features of nature which dance in synchrony within a predictive mind. Focus on these somewhat miraculous examples of predictability, and let go of the rest.
With love,
Michael
