Yeah, this has been a really good comment section for figuring out how my internal models are not as easily conveyed to others as I had hoped. I'll likely write a follow up post trying to explain this idea again with some revised language to make the point possibly clearer and lean more on specifics from existing research on these models since there seem to be some inferential gaps that I have forgotten about such that what feels like the exciting new part to me (prediction error signal = valence = ground of value) is maybe the least interesting and least important aspect to evaluate for others who lack the same beliefs I have about how I think what I'm gesturing at with "predictive coding" and "minimization of prediction error" work.

The tone of the following is a bit more adversarial than I'd like; sorry for that. My attitude toward predictive processing comes from repeated attempts to see why people like it, and all the reasons seeming to fall flat to me. If you respond, I'm curious about your reaction to these points, but it may be more useful for you to give the positive reasons why you think your position is true (or even just why it would be appealing), particularly if they're unrelated to what I'm about to say.

I'll reply to your points soon because I think doing that is a helpful way for me and others to explore this idea, although it might take me a little time since this is not the only thing I have to do, but first I'll respond to this request that I seemingly left out.

I have two main lines of evidence that come together to make me like this theory.

One is that it's elegant, simple, and parsimonious. Control systems are simple, they look to me to be the simplest thing we might reasonably call "alive" or "conscious" if we try to redefine those terms in ways that are not anchored on our experience here on Earth. I think the reason it's so hard to answer questions about what is alive and what is conscious is because the naive categories we form and give those names are ultimately rooted in simple phenomena involving information "pumping" that locally reduce entropy but there are many things that do this that are outside our historical experience of what we could observe to generate information which historically made more sense to think of as "dead" than "alive". In a certain sense this leads me to a position you might call "cybernetic panpsychism", but that's just fancy words for saying there's nothing so special going on in the universe that makes us different from rocks and stars than (increasingly complex) control systems creating information.

Another is that it fits with a lot of my understanding of human psychology. Western psychology doesn't really get down to a level where it has a solid theory of what's going on at the lowest levels of the mind, but Buddhist's psychology of the abhidharma does, and it says that right after "contact" (stuff interacting with neurons) comes "feeling/sensing", and this is claimed to always contain a signal of positive, negative, or neutral judgement. My own experience with meditation showed me something similar such that when I learned about this theory it seemed like an obviously correct way of explaining what I was experiencing. This makes me strongly believe that any theory of value we want to develop should account for this experience of valence showing up and being attached to every experience.

In light of this second reason, I'll add to my first reason that it seems maximally parsimonious that if we were looking for an origin of valence it would have to be about something simple that could be done by a control system, and the simplest thing it could do that doesn't simply ignore the input is test how far off an observed input is from a set point. If something more complex is going on, I think we'd need an explanation for why sending a signal indicating distance from a set point is not enough.

I briefly referenced these above, but left it all behind links.

I think there are also some other lines of evidence that are less compelling to me but seem worth mentioning:

• People have managed to build AI out of control systems minimizing prediction error, albeit doing, like I propose is necessary, by having some fixed set points that prevent dark room problems.
• Neurons do seem to function like simple control systems, though I think we have yet to determine with sufficient certainty that is all that is going on.
• Predictive coding admits explanations for many phenomena, but this risks just-so stories of the sort we see when evolutionary psychology tries to claim more than it can.

We Need To Explain Why Humans Differentiate Goals and Beliefs, Not Just Why We Conflate Them

You mention that good/bad seem like natural categories. I agree that people often seem to mix up "should" and "probably is", "good" and "normal", "bad" and "weird", etc. These observations in themselves speak in favor of the minimize-prediction-error theory of values.

However, we also differentiate these concepts at other times. Why is that? Is it some kind of mistake? Or is the conflation of the two the mistake?

I think the mix-up between the two is partly explained by the effect I mentioned earlier: common practice is optimized to be good, so there will be a tendency for commonality and goodness to correlate. So, it's sensible to cluster them together mentally, which can result in them getting confused. There's likely another aspect as well, which has something to do with social enforcement (ie, people are strategically conflating the two some of the time?) -- but I'm not sure exactly how that works.

This seems like an important question: if all these phenomena really are ultimately the same thing and powered by the same mechanisms, why do we make distinctions between them and find those distinctions useful?

I don't have an answer I'm satisfied with, but I'll try to say a few words about what I'm thinking and see if that moves us along.

My first approximation would be that we're looking at things that we experience by different means and so give them different names because when we observe them they present in different ways. Goals (I assume by this you mean the cluster of things we might call desires, aversions, and generally intention towards action) probably tend to be observed by noticing the generation of signals going out that usually generate observable actions (movement, speech, etc.) whereas beliefs (the cluster of things that includes thoughts and maybe emotions) are internal and not sending out signals to action beyond mental action.

I don't know enough to be very confident in that, though, and think like you that it could be due to numerous reasons why it might make sense to think of them as separate even if they are fundamentally not very different.

It's Easy to Overestimate The Degree to which Agents Minimize Prediction Error

I often enjoy variety -- in food, television, etc -- and observe other humans doing so. Naively, it seems like humans sometimes prefer predictability and sometimes prefer variety.

However: any learning agent, almost no matter its values, will tend to look like it is seeking predictability once it has learned its environment well. It is taking actions it has taken before, and steering toward the environmental states similar to what it always steers for. So, one could understandably reach the conclusion that it is reliability itself which the agent likes.

In other words: if I seem to eat the same foods quite often (despite claiming to like variety), you might conclude that I like familiarity when it's actually just that I like what I like. I've found a set of foods which I particularly enjoy (which I can rotate between for the sake of variety). That doesn't mean it is familiarity itself which I enjoy.

I'm not denying that mere familiarity has some positive valence for humans; I'm just saying that for arbitrary agents, it seems easy to over-estimate the importance of familiarity in their values, so we should be a bit suspicious about it for humans too. And I'm saying that it seems like humans enjoy surprises sometimes, and there's evolutionary/machine-learning reasoning to explain why this might be the case.

I've replied about surprise, its benefits, and its mechanism a couple [LW(p) · GW(p)] times [LW(p) · GW(p)] now. My theory is that surprise is by itself bad but can be made good by having control systems that expect surprise and send a good signal when surprise is seen. Depending on how this gets weighted, this creates a net positive mixed emotion where surprise is experienced as something good and serves many useful purposes.

I think this mostly dissolves the other points you bring up that I read as contingent on thinking the theory doesn't predict humans would find variety and surprise good in some circumstances, but if not please let me know what the remaining concerns are in light of this explanation (or possibly object to my explanation of why we expect surprise to sometimes be net good).

Evolved Agents Probably Don't Minimize Prediction Error

If we look at the field of reinforcement learning, it appears to be generally useful to add intrinsic motivation for exploration to an agent. This is the exact opposite of predictability: in one case we add reward for entering unpredictable states, whereas in the other case we add reward for entering predictable states. I've seen people try to defend minimizing prediction error by showing that the agent is still motivated to learn (in order to figure out how to avoid unpredictability). However, the fact remains: it is still motivated to learn strictly less than an unpredictability-loving agent. RL has, in practice, found it useful to add reward for unpredictability; this suggests that evolution might have done the same, and suggests that it would not have done the exact opposite. Agents operating under a prediction-error penalty would likely under-explore.

I ended up replying [LW(p) · GW(p)] to this in a separate post since I felt like similar objections kept coming up. My short answer is: minimization of prediction error is minimization of error at predicting input to a control system that may not be arbitrarily free to change its prediction set point. This means that it won't always be the case that a control system is globally trying to minimize prediction error, but instead is locally trying to minimize prediction error, although it may not be able to become less wrong over time because it can't change the prediction to better predict the input.

From an evolutionary perspective my guess is that true Bayesian updating is a fairly recent adaptation, and most minimization of prediction error is minimization of error of mostly fixed prediction set points that are beneficial for survival.

I have not read all the comments yet, so maybe this is redundant, but anyway...

I think it is plausible that humans and other life forms, are mostly made up of layers of control systems, stacked on each other. However it does not follow from this that humans are trying to minimise prediction error.

There are probably some part of the brain that is trying to minimise prediction error. Possibly organised as a control system that tries to keep expectations in line with reality. Because it is useful to be able to accurately predict the world.

But if we are a stack of control systems, then I would expect other parts of the brain to be control systems for other things. E.g. Having the correct level of blood sugar, having a good amount of social interaction, having a good amount of variety in our lives.

I can imagine someone figuring out more or less how the prediction control system works and what it is doing, then looking at everything else, noticing the similarity (becasue it is all types of control systems and evolution tend to reuse structures) and thinking "Hmm, maybe it is all about predictions". But I also think that would be wrong.

In other words: if I seem to eat the same foods quite often (despite claiming to like variety), you might conclude that I like familiarity when it's actually just that I like what I like. I've found a set of foods which I particularly enjoy (which I can rotate between for the sake of variety). That doesn't mean it is familiarity itself which I enjoy.

Agents trade off exploring and exploiting, and when they're exploiting they look like they're minimizing prediction error?

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.

(I'm not sure how to state it positively, but I think it would be great if at least one person from the LW community bothered to actually understand my post, as "understanding each sentence".)

FWIW I'm not actually sure this is possible without you writing a sequence explaining the model. There are tooany sentences loaded with inferential distance that I couldn't cross, and didn't know the relevant places to start to begin to cross them.

It looks like I read your post but forgot about it. I'll have to look at it again.

I am building this theory in a way that I think is highly compatible with Friston, although I also don't have a gears-level understanding of Friston, so I find it easier to think in terms of control systems which appear to offer an equivalent model to me.

(My sense was that Abram engaged pretty extensively with the post, though I can't fully judge since I've historically bounced off of a lot of the predictive processing stuff, including your post)

I appreciate this sentiment, and do think there's a dangerous, bad reduction of values to valence grounded in the operation of the brain that ignores much of what we care about, and that that extra stuff that we care about is also expressed as valence grounded in the operation of the brain. All the concerns you bring up must be computed somewhere, that somewhere is human brains, and if what those brains do is "minimize prediction error" then those concerns are also expressions of prediction error minimization. This to me is what's exciting about a grounding like the one I'm considering: it's embedded in the world in a way that means we don't leave anything out (unless there's some kind of "spooky" physics happening that we can't observe, which I consider unlikely) such that we naturally capture all the complexity you're concerned about, though it may take quite a bit to compute it all.

I have two points of confusion about this:

• How does it work? I made some remarks in this other comment [LW(p) · GW(p)], and more extensive remarks below.
• How is minimizing error from a fixed/slow-moving set-point different from pursuing arbitrary goals? What's left of the minimization-of-prediction-error hypothesis?

When I think of minimizing prediction error, I think of minimizing error of something which is well-modeled as a predictor. A set-point for sex, say, doesn't seem like this -- many organisms get far less than their satiation level of sex, but the set-point evolved based on genetic fitness, not predictive accuracy. The same is true for other scarce resources in the ancestral environment, such as sugar.

Is your model that evolution gets agents to pursue useful goals by warping predictive circuitry to make false-but-useful predictions? Or is it that evolution would fix the ancient predictive circuitry if it were better at modifying old-but-critical subsystems in big jumps, but can't? I find the second unlikely. The first seems possible, but strains my credulity about modeling the warped stuff as "prediction".

As for the how-does-it-work point: if we start with a predictive hierarchy but then warp some pieces to fix their set-points, how do we end up with something which strategically minimizes the prediction error of those parts? When I think of freezing some of the predictions, it seems like what you get is a world-model which is locked into some beliefs, not something which strategizes to make those predictions true.

As I mentioned in the other comment, I have seen other work which gets agents out of this sort of thing; but it seems likely they had different definitions of key ideas such as minimizing prediction error, so your response would be illuminating.

• Well-working Bayesian systems minimize prediction error in the sense that they tweak their own weights (that is, probabilities) so as to reduce future error, in response to stimuli. They don't have a tendency to produce outputs now which are expected to reduce later prediction error. This is also true of small parts in a Bayesian network; each is individually responsible for minimizing its own prediction error of downstream info, using upstream info as helpful "freebie" information which it can benefit from in its downstream predictions. So, if you freeze a small part, its downstream neighbors will simply stop using it, because its frozen output is not useful. Upstream neighbors get the easy job of predicting the frozen values. So a mostly-bayesian system with some frozen parts doesn't seem to start trying to minimize the prediction error of the frozen bit in other ways, because each part is responsible for minimizing their own error.
• Similarly for artificial neural networks: freezing a sub-network makes its feedforward signal useless to downstream neurons, and its backprop information little more interesting than that. Other systems of predictive hierarchies seem likely to get similar results.

The problem here is that these systems are only trying to minimize prediction error on the current step. A predictive system may have long-term models, but error is only back-propagated in a way which encourages each individual prediction to be more accurate for the time-step it was made, not in a way which encourages outputs to strategically make future inputs easier to predict [LW · GW].

So, the way I see it, in order for a system to strategically act so as to minimize future prediction error of a frozen sub-part, you'd need a part of the system to act as a reinforcement learner whose reward signal was the prediction error of the other part. This is not how parts of a predictive hierarchy tend to behave. Parts of a predictive hierarchy learn to reduce their own predictive error -- and even there, they learn to produce outputs which are more similar to their observations, not to manipulate things so as to better match predictions.

See my reply to jessicata's similar objection [LW(p) · GW(p)] and let's try to merge follow ups over there.