[FRIAM] crickets

[glen]

Of course. You have a knack for pushing my buttons. 8^D

What irritates me about all this active inference and predictive processing advocacy [⛧] is well-represented in the title of that chapter "From Sensorimotor Skills to Higher Cognition". [grrrr] The reason I took the time to download it and start skimming it was my hope for a thorough *composition* from the very small-fast feedback loops to the large-slow ones. There are a lot of citations. So maybe the clues are in there. But I'm lazy.

What I *want* ... what I really really want is evidence of predictive processing in a minimal model organism like C. Elegans or Drosophilia. Such exist [1-5]! But now we need something like connectome (or simpler?) circuits in more complex organisms that show how small-fast predictive processing composes into large-slow predictive processing. Does the model work at *all* scales? Only some scales? Is it like a percolating stew of predictions, some of which are suppressed by the larger circuits?

Speaking of which, I discovered this book just last night:

https://bookshop.org/p/books/from-human-reasoning-to-belief-an-empirical-account-joshua-mugg/de6c8394b4e24d99?ean=9781032736952

But as always, it's silly to keep buying books I'll never read. I post it here in the hopes that you readers out there might read it and tell me what it says ... or maybe I'll buy the epub and feed it to Claude ... or maybe it's read it already? I haven't checked. You'll remember we've had such arguments before, when you claimed I *must* believe in the floor in order to get out of bed in the morning. And my counter was that it is my *doubt* about the existence of the floor that allows me to get out of bed. IDK if Mugg's "DJ mixing board" model fits one of our stances better. But I do like it better than the overly simplistic fast vs slow thinking model.


[1] Dimakou A, Pezzulo G, Zangrossi A, Corbetta M. The predictive nature of spontaneous brain activity across scales and species. Neuron. Published online March 1, 2025. doi:10.1016/j.neuron.2025.02.009
[2] Kaplan H, Nichols A, Zimmer M. Sensorimotor integration in Caenorhabditis elegans: a reappraisal towards dynamic and distributed computations. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. 2018;373. doi:10.1098/rstb.2017.0371
[3] Kim A, Fitzgerald J, Maimon G. Cellular evidence for efference copy in Drosophila visuomotor processing. Nature neuroscience. 2015;18:1247-1255. doi:10.1038/nn.4083
[4] Lin A, Witvliet D, Hernandez-Nunez L, Linderman S, Samuel A, Venkatachalam V. Imaging whole-brain activity to understand behavior. Nature reviews Physics. 2022;4:292-305. doi:10.1038/s42254-022-00430-w
[5] Wang S, Segev I, Borst A, Palmer S. Maximally efficient prediction in the early fly visual system may support evasive flight maneuvers. PLoS Computational Biology. 2019;17. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1008965


[⛧] It seems to me that most of the peri-Friston work borders on advocacy of the model(s) as opposed to challenging them. But I'm not a scholar. So my scope is very small.

On 7/6/26 8:15 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:
> Hi, Glen,
> 
> I liked the predictive processing thing.  It coheres with an idea I have been kicking around of late.  People tend to think of cognitive processes as putting us in touch with the world as it is.  Then we look at that represented world and make decisions about the future.  Wouldn't it make more sense for cognitive processes to put us in touch with the world as it is going to be? To translate that back into monist talk, we live in a world of successive anticipations.   As I get more frail, I become aware of all the hard work my cerebellum must be doing to anticipate the consequences of any action I might take that changes my center of gravity.  A delayed prediction can lead to my taking actions that compound a balance prediction and send me to the floor.  it's like I am doing judo to myself.
> 
> Is that annoying enough to feed the beast?
> 
> Nick
> 
> On Mon, Jul 6, 2026 at 6:31 PM glen <gepropella at gmail.com <mailto:gepropella at gmail.com>> wrote:
> 
>     It's so dead, here, I figure it can't hurt to post arbitrary nonsense I've run across lately:
> 
>     Meningeal lymphatic architecture and drainage dynamics surrounding the human middle meningeal artery
>     https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2025.113693 <https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2025.113693>
> 
>     Constructing a lower-bound estimate of the global number of insect species on a hyperdiverse empirical foundation
>     https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2524283123 <https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2524283123>
> 
>     Predictive Processing: From Sensorimotor Skills to Higher Cognition
>     https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/15999.003.0011 <https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/15999.003.0011>
> 
>     As always, I'm reading them in fitful bursts, interleaved across each other and all the other open tabs and crap strewn about my desk. So .... grain of salt and all.
> 
>     -- 
>     8647 ⊥ ɐןןǝdoɹ ǝ uǝןƃ
>     ὅτε oi μὲν ἄλλοι κύνες τοὺς ἐχϑροὺς δάκνουσιν, ἐγὰ δὲ τοὺς φίλους, ἵνα σώσω.


-- 
8647 ⊥ ɐןןǝdoɹ ǝ uǝןƃ
ὅτε oi μὲν ἄλλοι κύνες τοὺς ἐχϑροὺς δάκνουσιν, ἐγὰ δὲ τοὺς φίλους, ἵνα σώσω.