Creutzer comments on Stupid Questions November 2015 - Less Wrong

4 Post author: Tem42 19 November 2015 10:36PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (64)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Creutzer 21 November 2015 11:31:52AM *  4 points [-]

The term you will want to use in your Google search is "Bayesian cognitive science". It's a huge field. But the short answer is, yes, the people in that field do assume that the brain does something that can be modelled as keeping and updating a probability distribution according to Bayes' rule. Much of it is computational-level modelling, i.e. rather removed from questions of implementation in the brain. A quick Google search did, however, find some papers on how to implement Bayesian inference in neural networks - though not necessarily linked to the brain. I'm sure some people do the latter sort of thing as well, though.

Comment author: RichardKennaway 21 November 2015 01:54:45PM 2 points [-]

Search also for "Bayesian brain".

Comment author: SilentCal 23 November 2015 11:18:38PM 1 point [-]

That said, being a statistical or philosophical Bayesian does not require one to believe this cognitive science hypothesis. If Bayesian cognitive science were soundly disproven tomorrow, http://www.yudkowsky.net/rational/bayes/ would still stand in its entirety.