[williamcotton]

Beyesians accept an epistemological foundation of statistical priors updated by experience.

Predictive processing is well established in the neuroscience community.

Capital T Truth is really of very little interest to anyone outside of faith-based epistemology like religion.

[discreteevent]

Physicists are very interested in capital T Truth. They work with explanations not just statistical priors.

[dS0rrow]

This talk by Feynman is slightly related:

https://youtu.be/obCjODeoLVw

[foolrush]

The issue is that the definition of “statistics” is anchored in a magnitude of frequency of glyphs. The “information” is fabricated in this regard, pulled up out of the ether, and by decree christened as “meaning”.

Numbers carry no meaning, nor do the magnitudes arbitrarily assigned to meaning. The map is not the territory.

[naasking]

> The “information” is fabricated in this regard, pulled up out of the ether, and by decree christened as “meaning”.

No, not fabricated, but inferred from a structured corpus of information generated by other semantic processes (humans).

> Numbers carry no meaning, nor do the magnitudes arbitrarily assigned to meaning.

Prove it.

> The map is not the territory.

Except if the territory is information, in which case the map is literally the territory. Knowledge is information, is it not?

[stevenhuang]

Have you heard of information theory?

Numbers can mean anything. A multitude of numbers as voltage potentials and ion gradients sufficiently describe your brain.

Biology manifests this arrangement as a brain, without which this arrangement would also be similarly meaningless.

Your argument against deriving meaning from statistics completely ignores that the brain also works this way.

[dS0rrow]

> Have you heard of information theory?

> Your argument against deriving meaning from statistics completely ignores that the brain also works this way.

The brain is not predicting it's compressing.

[naasking]

> The brain is not predicting it's compressing

Compression requires prediction, therefore your brain requires prediction.

[dS0rrow]

Some form of prediction being used by the higher-level neurons doesn't make the brain a prediction engine.

[naasking]

I'm not sure who claimed the brain was a "predictive engine" or what that means exactly. The OP specifically referenced predictive coding which describes precisely what is meant, and has empirical support.

If you meant this as a comparison to machine learning, then a predictive coding model closely matches.

[stevenhuang]

The current prevailing theory in neuroscience is in fact the brain is a prediction engine.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictive_coding