Our brain is a prediction machine that is always active
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a) Consciousness is just your brain trying to anticipate the future.
b) Your brain compresses (normalises?) repetition in memories. So even if day to day events happen at normal speed, the years seem to fly by when you reflect on them. If your life seems to be flying-by then maybe you need more novelty.
My personal theory is consciousness is a coalescence of weighted distributions that learn via a closed loop feedback and an injection of true randomness via quantum tunneling. That is, the brain is a mechanism by which true randomness gets turned into a weighted distributions that equate to decisions and actions with a feedback loop. As experiences get encoded as complex neuron paths or "memories" (this includes things like muscle memory, not just what we normally think of as memories), they build stronger paths and more connections, effectively increasing their "weight". This holds true down to how neurons function on an individual level.
Edit: To further explain, I apply the basic principles that govern life to all facets of life, all the way up to the complexities of human society, language, etc.. That is, DNA is a self-replicating system that through randomness was able to build more and more complex organisms over time. It generically represents a way to encode behaviors through time, a necessary subset of which include behaviors for self-replication and resource acquisition (mostly to satisfy the self-replication requirement). On a more complex level, human society is the organism, human language (including speech, writing, visual arts) is the DNA (a means to pass knowledge, behaviors, etc. through time), and humans are the "cells".
I'm not saying these cases are pseudorandom (the logistics of having a prng with state apply to biology looks hard), but that it doesn't seem to require true random
Edit: I guess I was wrong.
Edit: to your point about needing validation: the desire for acceptance is simply put, the desire for a positive feedback response on a personal or societal level. Remember, our brains are big reinforced learning machines and crave feedback as quickly and unambiguously as possible. The desire for acceptance is both a thing that keeps behaviors "in-line" with societal expectations while allowing for changes in those behaviors to shape societal behaviors (and expectations) over generations (time), and therefor make progress, or at least change.
Even assuming quantum phenomena are central to the brain's workings, the arguments still fail: you have no control over the quantum phenomena in your brain, so you still don't have free will in the naïve intuitive sense.
I see even less connection between quantum phenomena and consciousness. Consciousness need not depend on free will.
I'm just thinking that perhaps there is a possibility that the brain evolved to take advantage of quantum phenomena to increase capability.
Edit: In saying that, if I was looking up at a stack of 80 boxes and someone added another on top it might feel subjectively like the tower was extended by less of an amount than if it was the 3rd box being added.
Waiting a day doesn't feel nearly as long when you've already waited 18,000.
The experiences of even a novel day have less weight if you have hundreds of similarly novel days to compare against.
If we define the perception of time passing through novelty, then there's less novelty the more experiences you have. I think that's an interesting model (if not perfectly accurate).
Likewise, the accumulation of relevant experiences might make time seem to actually pass slower, because you're making more connections at each moment and (arguably, might be false) have a more coherent and active brain -- but if there's less novelty worth remembering, it may appear in retrospect (when you examine your memory) that less (perceptual) time has elapsed for the same wallclock time.
So I think this suggests two kinds of time: instantaneous perceptive time (how much your cognition is active -- for example, it may be near zero during anesthesia) and comparative memory time (how much you judge time intervals from your memory of events).
One interesting example is perhaps when we've had an exciting week and it both seems that a month has elapsed in that week (since so much has happened), and that "time passed so quickly!". The former is explained by comparative memory time; maybe the latter is explained by us simply not thinking about the passage of time at all, and "skipping our clocks" (like forgetting to increment a clock or calendar). This is of course mostly speculation.
Most of the prediction that's going on in the brain seems to be at an unconscious level, and our conscious mind only seems to be alerted when something unexpected happens, like when you're walking along and suddenly step into a shallow hole you didn't notice: your brain was unconsciously predicting when your foot would hit the ground and something else happened.
When watching baby playing with toys in living room, an hour flies by (thankfully because usually very sleep deprived).
Meanwhile, the very-novel first few years with kids seemed to go by in a flash. A month feels about a week long to me, now, and has for years.
For me the effect seems disconnected from circumstances, but connected to age—years had been feeling subjectively shorter for quite a while before I had kids, even, and they seemed to just be "getting shorter" as I got older, period, no relation to what's going on.
Almost. Consciousness is when the mechanism in your brain models (and thus anticipates the future) other brains, is used to model itself.
Perhaps your bar for "meaningful" is calibrated too high. Perhaps a dog-level of self-reflection is still quite a big deal, when compared to say a fish or whatnot.
Anyway, can you elaborate on why you think dogs ar "clearly" conscious?
Fish are probably conscious.
> Anyway, can you elaborate on why you think dogs ar "clearly" conscious?
Unless you think it's ok to torture dogs, you already agree with me that dogs are conscious.
Or, a more philosophical response:
1. I am conscious
2. My consciousness is, broadly speaking, seated in my brain
3. A dogs has a brain broadly similar to my own
4. Dogs respond to stimuli in a way similar to the way I do. Both of us appear to be able to respond to painful stimuli, for instance.
5. It therefore seems reasonable to conclude that the dog is capable of subjective experience such as suffering, i.e. dogs are conscious.
Of course, dogs appear to be much less intelligent, and it doesn't seem justified to assume that dog consciousness is on the same 'level' as human consciousness, whatever that might mean.
This is broadly similar to an argument like anyone who wishes to argue for solipsism needs to explain why they, one human being among billions, are the only one with consciousness.
edit: tweaks and additions
What the human brain added was a way to simulate other brains, because of growing communication ability for coordination's sake. It's basically a way to recognise smart freeloaders. E.g. men trying to sweet talk a woman for sex (and impregnation). He will make a lot of promises but how surely can you depend on him? It's of vital importance you know so you don't get duped.
So the human brain is an advanced bullshitmeter and bullshitter in an arms race, and this brain simulation machine has all kinds of unexpected side effects. At least, based upon some clues I read from some biologists, I came out on that understanding. If this has some truth, based on the world today, we still can get a lot better at it.
The ability to predict is surely what drove development of the cortex, since the benefits are massive - allows you to know what comes next when you hear the roar of a tiger, or see a poisonous snake, or make a plan, rather than waiting until something bad is actually happening to you.
Parts of our cortex specialized to social behavior would have come later. I doubt bullshit generation/detection would have been a specific driver though! As girls attracted to "bad boys" attest, the urge to merge is far more basic than that.
a) Consciousness is. Period.
> b) [...] maybe you need more novelty.
I have a few heuristics. One is that man is egocentric (I too use indefinite "you" when I do not want to sound egoistic).
The brain apparently can detect when a part is exactly repeated, even if it's long, but is thrown off by micro changes.
Somehow, I doubt that my limited understanding of the human mind was a decade in advance of state of the art science.
That is why some people have brains that lie to them less then others, while others have brains that lie more. You will find different degrees of bias and delusion in the people you encounter.
What if atoms are not defined by deterministic rules? What if it's defined by probabilistic rules? Then are our brains bounded by the same probabilistic rules?
It seems that given that all brains are made of the same stuff as the universe, the question of free will is more of a physics question. What is the universe made of? And does this fundamental unit allow for free will?
That is, even if your brain is only right some of the time, it matters more that the times it is right are important.
Constantly making small mistakes is the price to pay for successfully surviving when it matters.
A bias toward wrong predictions can be adaptive. If a wild animal comes across something that is 99% safe and 1% fatal, it could well be better off predicting doom and fleeing just in case.
It's been a decade+ since I read through it, so my memory is a little fuzzy, but my take away was: humans are hardwired for pattern recognition. Pattern identification improves our mental model of the universe. We use that model to predict things about the future. Making accurate predictions about the future is intelligence.
While looking for the mathematics of life (living things, not machines), several points came to life, one of which is that while machines have the luxury of plan s and makers,living things don't. How to resolve the difference led to the thesis that living things are anticipatory - they are driven by predictive "models".
The low level paramecium is able to swim towards "food" by using chemical sensors and measuring gradients; of course, that creature doesn't have anything like a human brain (the topic of this thread), so its models are more innate internal structures; humans have those too, but over time, the adult brain emerges as the supreme modelling agent. It is anticipatory.
What does anticipatory mean? A child lets go of a heavy object and it smashes the child's toe. Next time, the child won't let go of heavy objects because it learned an important correlation (causality isn't yet in play). Correlation is sufficient to teach that child a new anticipatory rule; simplest form: dropping heavy stuff --> pain.
That applies to reading and human prediction machines. Just try learning a foreign language by reading children's books - the pictures really help. Over time, you don't need them anymore. @hunta20097 on this page says this with different words, but the game is the same: model building and refinement.
There are books 'out there' which try to explain all of this in Bayesian terms, that we are always "updating our priors" as we encounter new experiences. It's way above my pay grade to know if that's right, but it still offers satisfying explanations.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Rashevsky [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Rosen_(biologist)
People often trot this strategy out like it's a good idea because children's books are "simple". Have you read children's books? The language in them is actually typically very weird and playful, the situations presented are often strange and non-sensical, and to that end they're not actually all that useful to a foreign language learner as a good starting point at all.
But there is a delay in sensor data, and if we waited before trying to finalize the constructs then we would always be behind and not be able to dodge falling rocks or anything. So the simulation must not only integrate over samples and time but also be predictive.
This is a consequence IMO. What we actually are is uncertainty minimizers, or certainty maximizers if you'd rather think of it that way
Throw the idea of entropy into the mix and you have some interesting comparisons for fun.
1. Universe(Uncertainty Maximizer) || Humans(Certainty Maximizer)
2. Universe(Eventually Inconsistent) || Humans(Eventually Consistent)
3. Universe(Entropy) || Humans(Negentropy)
Seems like life contributes towards a certain required organization principle of the universe to balance out the chaos.
I don't think this has been observed to be true yet. At least not true within a framework of very specific theoretical rules. Otherwise all our science and logic is useless.
Why would having a self not be a binary feature? If the theory is that a human's self is less minimal because the human understands itself more richly, that seems like two features are being conflated.
No.. I think this phenomena is related to the fact that our brain is indeed a prediction machine. When a prediction is wrong (i.e we encounter something surprising/unexpected), our brain updates it's prediction based on reality (exactly like training a "predict next word" language/sequence model like GPT-3).
As we get older, with more and more life experience, we don't get surprised so often (been there, done that - know how it's going to turn out), so our brain makes less and less prediction mistakes and therefore prediction-failure memory updates.
Of course we have multiple types of memory - short term vs long term, etc, so these prediction-failure updates are only part of the picture, but I think this is still the core reason why "the years fly by" when you're just doing more of the same. If you want to lay down more memories then novelty should help, but it's really surprise you'd want to maximize... no good being novel if you can already anticipate/predict how it's going to go.
Seems like reading a string of random words vs. reading a text the listener was very familiar with, or had even memorized previously, would have been the obvious test to see if there was a clear difference. Perhaps taking the familiar text and swapping some words, too.
Otherwise, the conclusion is that people anticipate the familiar and get surprised when the familiar behaves abnormally?
PNAS... kind of an odd little club, that journal.
Ironically, you're kind of illustrating the point made in the text you quote. You expect things to be written in a style and jargon familiar to you. That was written in a style and jargon from a different specialty, thus it's unfamiliar. Often these seemingly-odd phrasings are the result of authors trying to be very precise about what they are or are not claiming - especially they are not making the more general, ambiguous, and seemingly obvious claim. They use terms that have very specific meanings in their own field for that purpose. But instead of considering that, you just cast aspersions on the entire organization or specialty. Congratulations, you've done yeoman's work for the Anti Science Brigade.
See:
Dear Prof. Handler:
My request for resignation from the National Academy of Sciences is based entirely on personal psychological quirks. It represents in no way any implied or explicit criticism of the Academy, other than those characteristics that flow from the fact that most of the membership consider their installation as a significant honor.
Sincerely yours,
Richard P. FeynmanAren't we more than that?
What do you mean by "in the deepest sense"? If the actual laws of physics were to change, then our world would instantly change - perhaps in such a way that we no longer can exist. If our understanding of the laws of physics were to change, that doesn't undo what we already know. For example, apples won't start falling up from trees. Greater understanding of the laws of physics refines our knowledge, for example what, exactly, happens inside a black hole? As far as the physics governing our daily lives and even our biology, it appears to be rather mundane and well-known. It's not apparent that resolving QFT with GR is going to answer the question for how life arises.
I think it therefore stands that we could, in principle, build something equivalent to a human being - I just see no reason why we would choose to do so. After all, we're already pretty good at building new human beings!
Even granting your premise that the laws of physics allows for such a thing you've also made the assumption that humans are intelligent enough to "built something else that also exhibits our same behavior but is a purely non- biological organism". You presumably don't think a dog could invent such a thing but are assuming evolution has given humanity the ability to do so.
Can physicists explain in extreme detail how the mind physically implements omniscience?
Personally, the more I learn about the intelligence of myself and others, the less I believe that we are more than a bunch of pattern recognition layers.
It used to haunt me. I have come to acceptance. Of course I could be wrong, but that’s my intuition at this point.
Consciousness feels like it may at least partially be our fancy word for “soul” in the 21st century.
Measures of basic intelligence appear to us in crazy places in the animal kingdom. We will find it is not special at all.
I believe we are nothing but of a bunch of chemical states, the patterns and flow of which could be replicated in another system, natural or artificial.
On this planet, we just have the fastest, most complex and efficient processor going at this time.
Edit: I should add there may be more to human intelligence than “just” patter recognition, but that seems to do the bulk of the work.
Not neccesarily. We haven't really figured out how to benchmark other species' brains properly and I wouldn't be surprised if something like individual bottle-nosed dolphins or elephants couldn't rival at least some individual humans.
Depending on application. For arithmetic operations we're hopelessly outclassed even by pocket calculators.
I am as unconcerned about the hard problem as I am about elan vital, because there is just as much "compelling" evidence for either.
You can take the position that qualia are direct evidence and so our body of knowledge is mistaken, or you can take the position that qualia are likely deceptive and so cannot be taken as direct evidence, just like all of our other perceptions.
I'm constantly amazed how many people think the former position is more plausible.
In fact we do have the beginnings of viable neuroscientific theories of consciousness, including qualia [1], thus showing that the claims of a hard problem were just the same old smoke and mirrors we've seen time and time again in claims to human specialness, just like with vitalism.
[1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2116933119
> and you are saying that our understanding of the world implies that magic doesn’t exist and so I must be mistaken about the magic of my legs and probably their existence as well.
Nah, our only disagreement is over the magic. I don't deny the perceptions of qualia, simply their special, "ineffable", "experiential" character that you implicitly conclude they must have. That's the magic that doesn't fit into our body of knowledge and that's the only "hard problem" of consciousness, a problem that doesn't really exist because it's based on erroneous assumptions, as described in the paper above.
Just like placing a pencil in a glass of water gives the illusion that the water has broken the pencil, so your introspective perceptions trick you into erroneous conclusions about your awareness.
That is the erroneous conclusion. "Qualia", whatever they are, fits squarely into physicalism and there exists literally no evidence that anything more is required. The paper I linked is proof that qualia can be accounted for within science as it exists. Again, you're asserting a god of the gaps.
> It clearly exists widely and many people report having it.
People report perceiving phenomenal experience in the same way that they report seeing water breaking pencils: https://scienceathomekids.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/IMG...
That doesn't mean that water actually breaks pencils. The meaning of any observation is always interpreted within a consistent body of knowledge. The problem is that people really want to take the perception of their experience as a direct observation of reality that doesn't need to go through that interpretation step, and that's simply incorrect.
What AI doesn't have is access to this world. Instead it has a fixed training set. The world is a much richer, dynamic training set. So AI would need an android body and to become part of human society to experience the real world as we do.
My recent tangent on this…
If the corpus of human creativity is the training set, then the prevalence of the AI overlords is recursive, isn’t it?
Are we more than that? What evidence do you have, aside from "God loves us"?
You are carrying around an amazing machine in your noggin, but I haven't seen any convincing evidence that it can't be duplicated. As far into it as we have seen, it is all laws of physics, chemistry on top of that, and biology on top of that.
We definitely haven't cracked the "self learning algorithm" yet. You can show a person a couple pictures of a dog, and they can construct a 3-D mental model of a dog, and what it looks like from all angles and in all poses. Yet you have to give thousands of examples to do the same thing for a ML/DL system.
How much of the ability of those models is baked into the genetic code of humans? How much is learned as a toddler playing with blocks to figure out basic physical properties like object permanence, gravity, friction, and such? By just watching and interacting?
Some philosophers alive today say we have essentially made zero progress and probably never will on this.
Besides learning object permanence or geometry by playing with blocks, you felt enjoyment and the rough surface of the blocks.
Are you ignoring those, denying them, or think they are like other properties?
Do you find that hard to believe? Why?
Why could having qualia not be some kind of inherent, perhaps emergent property of all systems complex enough to be called intelligent? And why is this an issue at all? This could be some unknowable mysterious meta-physical property that has no practical bearing on anything.
What is the angle here? Are you worried it is important? There is literally zero indication it is important or am I missing something here?
By the time a human brain can do this, aren't they also exposed to thousands of examples? How do we learn to speak for example? It's a long painful process of trial and error. How is this significantly different from a supervised learning algorithm? Teaching a child to catch is very similar. At first, they can't recognize the trajectories of thrown objects very well and they aren't coordinated enough to move their hands to where the projectile is. After time and many repetitions, they get to the point where they can catch a ball without consciously following the ball or can even catch without looking based on initial trajectory.
And anything that can be calculated by a human can possibility be calculated by an AI as well.
But I don't see this fact as dismissive of humanity's grandeur - the idea that we were placed here and made conscious by something outside of creation (quite literally a deus ex machina) is clunky. How much more elegant is it that we're instead of a kind with the rest of the universe around us and a link in that spectacle?
Nature is cruel, and if given half a chance, will for example snatch the life from a 2-month-old baby. That baby did nothing wrong, but did not have the "human right" to life and liberty, just a hope for it.
We can still institute rules we agree to abide by, in hopes that our lives will be better overall. But that's just self-interested agreement, not some immutable "right" inherently bestowed upon us.
It seems to me to be relativistic to the point where I would call it nihilism, but it is, at least, consistent.
I don't believe humans are particularly special, but "human rights" are nothing more than what societies deem as requirements for leading fulfilling lives and the degree to which we have those rights is determined solely by the willingness of society to protect those rights. There are no "natural rights" only rights that we recognize and implement for ourselves at a societal level. There is nothing stopping a society from making access to something arbitrary a "human right" like the "right to be delivered a new blue hoodie every winter solstice" and then protecting and enforcing that right. If a society decides that humans have no rights, then you'd be correct in that there are no human rights which is what you may experience in some parts of the world.
I don't think so. I think that we're a brew made of very simple ingredients that results in something that strives to live and reproduce. That's the main missing ingredient in AI for me; desire, or preferences. We just show them a bunch of things in turn, and tell them if they're right or wrong with some reduction of those things. They don't even desire our approval, we've built systems that process, they don't desire.
I think it's because we've nearly figured out cognition (which is ultimately simple), but not the desire to live or to reproduce (which as people we half the time think of as sinful desires), which we probably have deeply hardcoded within ourselves. The desire to emulate others derives from those more fundamental desires (without which we each wouldn't have existed in an unbroken lineage from the first cell), because we can look at others as experiments to model ourselves after, or when we see them fail, make guesses as to how they may have been mistaken in their choices.
We're physical things. The really mysterious part of our situation imo is how our perspective (for lack of a better word) attaches to our bodies (and minds.) Why am I me and not you? Why am I physically located in this mind? Would a perspective attach to a machine with cognition and desires? Would there be any physical way to prove that one hadn't, so would we morally just have to accept a machine's experience as similar to ours? We can't prove other people aren't machines, so we (generally, with extreme difficulty with people very unlike us) just take them at their word.
That's actually a reason I'm against full AI, because it involves creating a bunch of machines that we wouldn't have the moral authority to shut down. Especially if we haven't refined the technology and it's just as power-inefficient as what we have now. Sparking neural networks where electricity isn't used for the signal, just as a potential within the cell walls, and the spark is a little cough of neurotransmitter that is immediately sucked back in. That's just unbelievably low power (even though iirc it's still half or more of the calories you eat.) And brains are so space-efficient. I could cram 100 people in a room full of one AI, and the 100 people would consume fewer calories.
We're accidental automatons that are very cool and very difficult to reproduce, and still very mysterious in a fundamental way.
I've handled this by looking at the (mis)usage of language. "Automatons", "pattern recognition", "statistics". These are words. And they all carry with them a palpable sense of dismissal, of a certain arrogance that I think is misplaced. Note: If you use these words fully egoless and objectively, great, that is excellent, but I don't think most do.
If you'd start to regard intelligence in it's abstract, non-material, form as a "divine" gift to all "living" beings the picture starts to change. There is a very real, very deep sense of wonder to what is happening that gets lost whenever you call intelligence - biological or digital - "just pattern recognition" or something to that effect. You reduce the wonder that is intelligence to something you hold in your head as simple and reductionist. It is in that very moment you diminish it and make it non-interesting. It's like calling human embryos just a bunch of cells. It's not wrong per se, but it's said in a way that reduces the complexity of the system to ridiculous levels. Even without invoking metaphysical/religious beliefs you can imagine an embryo being a highly-complex physical system with astronomical levels of emergent properties that are effectively incalculable, for us at the moment if not at a fundamental mathematical level.
If you look at machine intelligence like perhaps a small child would, full of awe and wonder, I bet your outlook on things can change. Humans are carriers of this "intelligence", they are not optimal and they are not alone. Who cares? Do we need to be the sole proprietors of intelligence in all its forms and shapes in order to be happy? I say enjoy the ride.
Instead, dualists have a vague assertion that the soul influences (perhaps determines) the choice itself. Getting to my point: if you believe that the soul drives the choice and the decisions wasn't just the result of billions of (purely physical) neural antecedents, where in your brain are the rules of physics violated in order to steer that neural outcome we call "choice"?
One hand wave is to say: quantum! Yes, quantum effects are not individually predictable, so one could imagine that a tricky soul which is trying to not be discovered somehow can cause just the right statistical fluctuation in the right neurons at just the right time to nudge the outcome to what it desires. But consider that that activation energy of a synapse is about 30 orders of magnitude greater than quantum fluctuations at the atomic level. Or put another way, not every butterfly flapping its wings causes a hurricane. Such things happen only if the interconnected decision points are on a knife's edge. It seems like wildly overconstraining to think that our brain configuration must be so delicately balanced for every decision we make to allow a soul to have the opportunity to effect every nudge that is required of it.
Taking a step away from humans, spiders have pinhead "brains". They can navigate the world, choose a place to build a web, build a web, catch prey, avoid harm, repair their web, mate, reproduce. I think few dualists would credit spiders with having a soul. Why is it surprising that a brain a billion times bigger is capable of making music?
I'm "getting" to watch a couple close relatives go through severe cognitive decline.
From what I've seen: no, we're not.
They frequently drop the last few minutes of memories on the floor and you can watch them reset, ask the same questions, react the same way, all in precisely the same tone as the first time. Over, and over, and over. We're little more than spinning tops—they've a condition that makes that plain, but I don't see why the rest of us would be any different. We just retain and re-apply more of our input, than they do, so it's less obvious that "the lights are on, but nobody's home".
- mind = memories, personality, aspirations, knowledge, pattern recognition, etc...
- consciousness = this unmistakable, unshakable certainty that "I exists, I am" that we all share (unless solipsism is true and you are a philosophical zombie :) )
To me it is then evident that the answer to your question is: we (and any sentient being for that matter) are more than that any AI will ever be.
This is your opinion. There are other possibilities.
They are unprovable but irrefutable delusions or part of frameworks people made up to come to peace with the truth.
Examples frameworks would be pitiful reasons to exist like "keep the species alive", "keep the family line going", "I need to be behave this and that way because my deity will judge me when I die" etc.
In reality atheists don't have anything in common with one another. There is no shared belief system or a set of scriptures for atheists. Stalin and Mao did however have a shared belief system and it wasn't atheism.
This seems unlikely.
> There is no shared belief system or a set of scriptures for atheists.
Large quantities of those I talk to on the internet seem to disagree.
Regardless, this (particularly, the conceptualization of the supernatural) is somewhat of a variation of the kind of thinking that I'm referring to. I don't disagree that this isn't formally documented in scripture, but nonetheless it seems to have somehow ended up broadly installed in minds (both theist and atheist, to be fair), not unlike how various behaviors can be observed in theists despite it not being a part of formal scripture.
Life is the evolution of (increasingly) complex adaptive systems in non-equilibrium state, driven by external energy and enabling a new regime of faster entropy increase, thus faster descent towards the "heat death". This is contrary to the popular belief that life somehow goes against the 2nd law of thermodynamics. In fact, it is the 2nd law of thermodynamics, the universal drive towards higher-entropy states (we are essentially specs of dust in a slow-motion explosion, since the Big Bang), that enables life-like systems to evolve under the right conditions to accelerate the slide towards a higher-entropy state.
Specifically in case of carbon-based biological life, one succinct tongue-in-cheek way to put it is "life's purpose is to hydrogenate carbon dioxide". See the "Nick Lane" discussion thread from today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32392937
Somehow, the prediction thing is not as surprising for me. We call that as judging in the mortal terms! Judging is generally perceived as a negative thing. I'd think judging is what the brain does implicitly. Our personality is a culmination of memories experienced so far. If you run through these memories on a brand new brain, you'd basically create your own version.
I've actually wondered if intelligence could be defined through information theory, i.e. intelligence would be the inverse of error rate. Super-intelligence could operate at the Shannon limit.
When the idea of consciousness comes up, too often I've heard the exact claim that consciousness cannot be from the brain. They assert the brain is just the receiver of the information coming from the soul. When asking why damage to a particular part of the brain usually results in a predictable deficit, they confidently reply that is also true of a radio receiver -- the non-physical soul is intact but the brain just garbles the message.
So there must be something extra non-formal for consciousness, and the meager electronics of modern computers plainly don’t seem it.
But the neurons of a brain do? Don't get me wrong, I like the theory that microtubules harness quantum weirdness to do something hard-problem of consciousness adjacent. But I would bet that if we were silicon-based lifeforms experimenting with carbon adding machines we'd say they plainly don't have the stuff for consciousness either. There's just no consensus theory[1] explaining how consciousness arises.
[1] though for my part I'd bet Tononi's model of information integration combined with quantum bayesianism and long relaxation times is on the right track.
Like music/song is a consequence of verbal communication.