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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.

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> 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.

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

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

> The brain is not predicting it's compressing

Compression requires prediction, therefore your brain requires prediction.

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

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.

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