Mmm, not really unpredictable, it is easy for thought exercises to avoid the dirty real world, but in the real world, Large Language Models have recently proven that many quite difficult abstract probability exercises, when taken to the real world and applying training, can be succesfully solved well beyond our most wildly expectations of precision, speed and accuracy.
So yes, the prediction of the decision to have a ham sandwich tomorrow, for any given person is now, by the state of the art of applied mathematics and information science, a relative doable - if not plain easy - feat.
And according to some hypothesis, the brain could be doing this exactly kind of predictions, even more better than LLMs, with more accuracy/speed using way less energy.
> the prediction of the decision to have a ham sandwich tomorrow, for any given person is now, by the state of the art of applied mathematics and information science, a relative doable - if not plain easy - feat.
Sure, the LLM may be able to guess by reasoning (e.g. 'He always eats ham sandwiches for breakfast and he probably wouldn't break his routine'), the same way we could guess at another person's behaviour, but we're talking about reducing the brain into a deterministic input/output machine, which is a far larger ask.
Now if you said 'doable' that may be right in the long term, but 'easy'? Absolutely not. There's no current way to feed 'me' or 'you' into an equivalent LLM. The human brain has more axons then there are stars in the galaxy and we are nowhere close to even mapping these connections.
>The brain could be doing this exactly kind of predictions, even more better than LLMs, with more accuracy/speed using way less energy.
That's definitely an option. The fact that many of the brain's operations could be done by LLMs is a strike against the original thesis.
I think the actual assumption is that we are currently seeing just one direction of the arrow of time, but if there is no arrow of time, maybe we are already seeing the future and not realizing it is the future.
I commented further in this line of though in another comments, about a probable (ironically), "Inverted 2nd. Law of Thermodynamics" of sorts, which it would be basically just the Law of Probability, interpreted from the point of view of not having an actual arrow of time and the fact that we have - all the time, again ironically - the information of what happens in the future (the one probability in the range which ends being the right one, actually ocurring).
Yeah, I know it would be another Law, and the universe would upside down once again for us the poor meatbags, but we were already in this position several times, discovering the electricity, quantum mechanics, relativiy, you name it.
Just commented about interpreting the Probability Law as sort of "Inverted 2nd. Law of Thermodynamics".
I'll expand here how if the arrow of time actually doesn't exist, the future could change the past without breaking our - current - understanding of physics (tragiclly because we will probably have maybe hundred of years till we change our minds about what are the properties of the universe).
In a range or probabilities of one event, one of the probabilities will always be the one is going to actually happen. Closer to the event to occur the most certain you can be about which one of those, could be the one that will happen.
Here's the catch, you have to change your mind a bit, in our current understanding of physics, the information of the future event which has not happen yet, already exists here in the past for that event.
Now, if you know - and you know - the outcome of an event, you most certainly will be able to choose if you go along that path, or you choose to change the future event to something else. Whoalá, the future changed the past.
Brains of earth continously do this, every second of our entire lives, animal brains do this too, almost all life on Earth has some neurological, physiological, chemical predictive mechanism in place.
An example, you're about to walk across a street, you see a car coming, now your brain "predicts" you'll be hit by that car if you just keep walking, you stop walking to avoid certain death, done, the future changed the past. The information - really close to 100% of probability of death - extracted by the brain from the sheer reality of the universe, allowed you to survive.
And no current understanding of physics got harmed anywhere along the way of the future changing the past.
The regular arrow of time from the human perspective, "leaks" changes into the future. The future is constantly being changed by the past.
You can measure those changes by many ways, the 2nd. law of thermodynamics is everywhere just to make sure you see this happening across everything.
So, probably there are other non-discovered underlying mechanisms in the reality that are already signaling changes from the future "leaking" into the past, changing the past right infront of us, without us noticing it.
A probably omnipresent mechanism for observing the future changing the past, valid in the whole cone of light visible to us, is the probability law.
If you have 10 millions of possible events in a probability, one of them is the exact thing it will happen in the future, hence the information of what happens in the future is right here, existing in the past.
Yeah, you can say how would the nature could use this information without powerful processors predicting branches trillions of times per second on Earth right now?
Well, the brain is a pattern predictor, quite several parts of the brain are firmly attached to the physics of the universe, biochemically but what if the pattern prediction mechanisms in the brain are actually an adaptation of the evolution, just like wings to fly, but with those mechanisms the brain uses probability to "see" information from the future, and here in the "present", it changes the past (from the perspective of the future created originally from the past), if the brain "chooses now" to do something different that what originally created the future it "saw" by analizing patterns, essentially evaluating probabilities.
So the Probability Law would be a kind of Inverted 2nd. Law of Thermodynamics.
It would work perfectly as law of the universe: from the future to the past, the revered time of arrow, one single event created "a" future, but from the regular arrow of time, there would a range of probable future outcomes which you cannot precisely say it has "1" (100%) probability of ocurring, right to exact moment till the future becomes the present.
And it was right there all the time, something obvious infront of everybody in the world, like electricity (which was suspected by many across thousands of years, but just "discovered" recently).
So yes, the prediction of the decision to have a ham sandwich tomorrow, for any given person is now, by the state of the art of applied mathematics and information science, a relative doable - if not plain easy - feat.
And according to some hypothesis, the brain could be doing this exactly kind of predictions, even more better than LLMs, with more accuracy/speed using way less energy.