The "Bayesian" brain, with a bit less Bayes

Abstract: The idea that the brain is a probabilistic (Bayesian) inference machine, continuously trying to figure out the hidden causes of its inputs, has become very influential in cognitive (neuro)science over recent decades. Here I present a relatively straightforward generalization of this idea: the primary computational task that the brain is faced with is to track the probabilistic structure of observations themselves, without recourse to hidden states. Taking this starting point seriously turns out to have considerable explanatory power, and several key ideas are developed from it: (1) past experience, encoded in prior expectations, has an influence over the future that is analogous to regularization as known from machine learning; (2) action generation (interpreted as constraint satisfaction) is a special case of such regularization; (3) the concept of attractors in dynamical systems provides a useful lens through which prior expectations, regularization, and action induction can be viewed; these thus appear as different perspectives on the same phenomenon; (4) the phylogenetically ancient imperative of acting to ensure and thereby observe conditions beneficial for survival is likely the same as that which underlies perceptual inference. The Bayesian brain hypothesis has been touted as promising to deliver a "unified science of mind and action". In this paper, I sketch an informal step towards fulfilling that promise, while avoiding some pitfalls that other such attempts have fallen prey to.