tldr: recent late night thoughts about the human brain and predicting the effects of experiences
"No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man." - Heraclitus
Our brains have weird, but sample-efficient learning mechanisms: all events are not treated equally, and many people have transformative experiences that are the root cause of some new behavior in their life.
Recently, some of my thoughts about meditation, religion, and psychedelics have led to me developing some ideas about human behavior with respect to our brains. One main line of thinking I now think about is that when someone intentionally plans some experience, that person often has some internal representation of the experience that their mind predicts about how it will impact the mind itself. A simple example is someone thinking that going on a vacation will help their mind be more relaxed from their day-to-day life. This reasoning is often derived from previous experiences + the experiences of other people. How about unique events that no one else can accurately predict? Differing religious and psychedelic experiences have notoriously been hard to explain; how can a human brain that does not have an understanding of something predict its impact on itself? I think there are some fundamental limitations here that make the human brain changing from experience very interesting.
Inherently, when someone dives into the deep end of a new experience, that underlying prediction their mind makes about the unknown experience is often miscalibrated and largely based on partial signals from random hypotheses and other people’s opinions. And based on larger-scale human behaviors, I think someone can confidently say that humans cannot accurately predict what certain life experiences will do to themselves. Obviously, random variance in experiences is part of the reasoning on why we can’t predict how we will change1, but is there something more fundamentally broken about the human brain and its ability to piece experiences together into a larger picture?
Why is the human brain not able to consistently set hard underlying goals, and correspondingly act in that direction? From my understanding, there are two lines of reasoning (possibly both are true) on why this is the case:
- Action-taking from the mind is miscalibrated with underlying goals/thinking2.
- The human brain is always updating its predictive nature of experiences but constantly struggles in understanding itself.
For miscalibration, I think a glaring example of this is addiction. An addicted person can often not act upon long-term thinking (many addicts know they are addicted and quitting would help their health in some manner), but their actions are best connected to short-term goals that focus on maximizing those. Our human brain obviously models multiple goals at the same time, but is bad decision-making purely based on some goal luckily being the one that is chosen to be acted upon? Obviously, addiction is not just about goal miscalibration but about fundamental changes in reward processing and function, but there is some underlying goal miscalibration happening.
For the mind struggling to understand itself, in my eyes, the most glaring example of this is human suicidal thoughts. If someone went through life experiences to reach some state where their brain decides it does not want to function, their mind likely miscalibrated what some experiences would be like, acted on them, and made some transformation from their previous state that is not ideal. This idea of misunderstood transformations is most clear by brain scans that can show the existence of things like depression or PTSD; the human brain made some transformation that is unideal. Moreover, a suicidal person often cannot accurately predict the right steps to transform their mind into some bearable state; external help is often the best step3. Is the act of suicide the mind giving up on its own predictive ability to transform itself into some bearable state? We might understand it as the brain becoming trapped in a severely constrained predictive space. The person may still be actively predicting and processing, but through a lens that systematically filters out possibilities for positive change. This isn't a failure of prediction so much as prediction operating under extreme constraints, like trying to navigate using a map that only shows dead ends.
Could some mental health treatments be understood as ways of "resetting" or "recalibrating" our brain's predictive machinery? Both psychedelics and meditation seem to temporarily disrupt our normal predictive processes, potentially allowing new patterns to emerge. However, it seems like meditation and psychedelics can often have similar effects to people, where therapeutic benefit comes not from the temporary disruption itself, but from the integration of those new circuits into the brain’s predictive capabilities.
However, I am careful to read too much/change the way I act based on this line of thinking, as a big issue with this is that it seems to assume a more unified "self" than may actually exist. When discussing how "the mind predicts its impact on itself," this potentially falls into a homunculus fallacy; treating the brain as if there's a little person inside doing the predicting. Consciousness and decision-making are likely more distributed processes that might require different levels of explanation for different phenomena (modern neuroscience does this).
Notes:
- Humans have world models but not perfect contrastive understanding; we can reason about the world but it is only to a certain degree of precision.
- This might be a feature rather than a bug. Our brains evolved to handle immediate survival challenges first, with longer-term planning as a more recent evolutionary addition.
- External help is often crucial; other people can offer new predictions and possibilities that the suffering person's brain isn't currently able to generate.