← All source episodes Machine Learning Street Talk / episode intelligence
Your Brain is Running a Simulation Right Now [Max Bennett]
30 Dec 2025 30 published claims 2 attributable people
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
belief 16evaluation 7uncertainty 3prediction 2recommendation 1preference 1
Evidence policy
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Claim ledger
The useful parts, with receipts.
30 published records
“But for semantic memories, we're terrible. And so externalizing that with writing is 1 of the key technologies that enables us to be way smarter than we are in fact, because we now have this external device that enables us to store largely infinite numbers of memories and translate them across generations.”
- Publisher
- Machine Learning Street Talk
“I think I think there's is a reason why, so much of the neuroscience community, I mean, what I'm saying there is not really novel so much the neuroscience community has sort of rallied around this idea of predictive coding, which is very related to active inference and generative models. Because there's just so much evidence that what's going on in the neocortex, the imagination of things, episodic memories, I mean there's been some good evidence that episodic memory, other words, thinking about past and imagine the future are in fact the same underlying process happening in the neocortex, which is again consistent with this idea that there's a generative model.”
- Publisher
- Machine Learning Street Talk
“I think a lot of people I've had this exact sort of argument with a lot of people and 1 counterargument that people have towards this idea, I don't know if I fully agree with it, but it's interesting, is that attention heads really are doing something more magical than we give them credit for, which is they are kind of dynamically rerouting and effectively resetting the network based on the context that the prompt is getting.”
- Publisher
- Machine Learning Street Talk
“I think there might possibly be some breakthroughs around the corner. I I don't know if you know, but I'm I'm Carl Friston's personal publicist.”
- Publisher
- Machine Learning Street Talk
“We just kind of, generate these post hoc confabulations, and then we explain our behavior, and we kind of pretend that that was what we wanted to do, that we had beliefs and so on, but we just kind of make it up as as we go along using this kind of active inference. So I guess the the the question is, like, we do think of ourselves as being like, even though we are emotional and subjective and, like, you know, like, we believe in religion and lots of things that that we presumably made up, but but we have Wikipedia.”
- Publisher
- Machine Learning Street Talk
“The most famous form of this, which I think still shows threads in modernity, is from Aristotle where, he sort of took the same kind of ideas that you see in Maclean's triune brain, where, you know, other animals might have these basic instincts.”
- Publisher
- Machine Learning Street Talk
“There's only, it feels like there's a ranking and only 1 of these is gonna matter. So I think as an example of ways to reduce this sort of status seeking, I see this in sort of business all the time, which is the more you can create an environment where it's not 0 sum, where everyone's pulling their weight and together we all win, the more sort of the best version of humans emerge.”
- Publisher
- Machine Learning Street Talk
“We're talking about the actual language in in our culture. And I guess I I think of that as as almost a distinct form of intelligence.”
- Publisher
- Machine Learning Street Talk
“I think I think people conflate the machinations of of language models with how we represent them statistically or or abstractly. Because if you look at lot of papers, they they actually represent it like a probability, you know, like a joint probability distribution.”
- Publisher
- Machine Learning Street Talk
“I I think there was a, 1 guy at Toyota Research was quite famous because he would get people to ask why 5 times.”
- Publisher
- Machine Learning Street Talk
“You know, sometimes I think about this as like, you know, if me and a group of 20 friends ended up on an island, how much of human and we were the only 20 humans left, not that I think about this all the time.”
- Publisher
- Machine Learning Street Talk
“You need to do things a certain way. And even though it's not technically constraining our brains and how we think, like, live in a very, very constrained and weird world now.”
- Publisher
- Machine Learning Street Talk
“I'm gonna now render some tests where I could differentiate them, and I'm gonna perform those tests, and then I'm gonna conclude that the world is not is not flat. So so, when 1 says that Chachapiti does not have a world model, I think some people misinterpret that as suggesting that it's just dumbly looking at the statistics.”
- Publisher
- Machine Learning Street Talk
“The second perhaps more practical reason is I think understanding the evolution of the human brain and the evolution of human intelligence is a key tool in our toolbox to understanding how the brain works and how human intelligence works.”
- Publisher
- Machine Learning Street Talk
“I I think chat GPT, it's in the the world of text, and it's learned all of this structured narratology and things on Reddit and things on Twitter.”
- Publisher
- Machine Learning Street Talk
“Know, Yan Lakun talks a lot about this and are less selfish. And so yeah, I think that's a great opportunity, but there's definitely risk because the second you give an autonomous agent the opportunity to produce its own sub goals, you need to have really rich either constraints or a really well defined reward function or know, 1 ability that I think comes from mentalizing actually is, and this is an idea in alignment research, which is, if you can convince an AI agent to try and do what it thinks the human wants it to do, What you're actually doing is you're requiring it to engage in some form of mentalizing to infer the preferences of the requester and then try and do what is best for that that individual.”
- Publisher
- Machine Learning Street Talk
“I'm just explaining it after the fact. So so it's definitely the case that humans have that component, but it means there's also another component which we which I would argue is is unique and important, which is our ability to pause, render a plan, and then execute against that plan.”
- Publisher
- Machine Learning Street Talk
“There's lots of speculations, but we don't know why this occurred with primates.”
- Publisher
- Machine Learning Street Talk
“I think the Thinking about the level of granular prefrontal cortex in the new primate regions as enabling something akin to knowledge, I think is a really wonderful way to look at it.”
- Publisher
- Machine Learning Street Talk
“However, it is not nearly as, rich because what happens in non human primates is it's primarily grounded in just the actions that I'm taking, which is much less rich than I can share not only the the data of what you see me actually do, but I can also include in the data I'm transferring to you things that happen only in my mind.”
- Publisher
- Machine Learning Street Talk
“It's a great book called The Elephant in the Brain that talks about how much of human behavior can be explained by this sort of status seeking behavior. And the reason why it's so hard to study is because it's what they call, I think, a cognitive taboo or an intellectual taboo, where we don't want to admit it to ourselves.”
- Publisher
- Machine Learning Street Talk
“Yeah. It's really interesting what you said because the way I read that is things like chat GBT and language models, they are entropy smuggling or agency smuggling.”
- Publisher
- Machine Learning Street Talk
“I I think part of it is it's a kind of acquiescence. So I think you're sequestering your agency when you externalize too much of your cognition, particularly if it's parts of your cognition that are useful in the sense that it has core knowledge which would generalize and help you acquire new knowledge or, it's just the the the proto ability of, you know, discovering knowledge.”
- Publisher
- Machine Learning Street Talk
“, the way this would function is that a group of humans that, are sharing knowledge with each other is gonna survive better than another group of human that's not, and that's how evolution will ensue. This is actually quite controversial in evolutionary biology because that's invoking something called group selection, which now some people the modern incarnation of this, something called multilevel selection, where, there's some consensus that, yes, there are group level effects, where that kind of can impact things.”
- Publisher
- Machine Learning Street Talk
“Well, I think I I do I think history is such a good I love thinking about history as a tool when trying to reason about how people in the future will think about us because I think, you know, we are the people in the future to the past, which is obvious, but a useful tool.”
- Publisher
- Machine Learning Street Talk
“So for example, someone might come up to me and say, blue swirly thing is over there. And I'll say, well, I don't know what you mean about the blue swirly thing because I've I've never seen 1 before.”
- Publisher
- Machine Learning Street Talk
“I mean, because the way I read it in active inference literature, it's a very principled definition of an agent. And there's still a bit of a gap because I think Friston would argue, in the natural world, because of the the laws of physics and particles and and whatnot you get the emergence of things and things become agents when they have a certain you know depth of planning shall we say.”
- Publisher
- Machine Learning Street Talk
“Doesn't mean it won't work well, but we should be concerned about how well this will generalize to real tasks where we might care about this much more deeply. So for example, with a human, because part of this good evidence to suggest that part of my ability to reason about your mind is because I have a mind that works quite similarly, We are almost bound together by some common mechanistic synergy between the way in which our brains work because our brains are quite similar, which which enables a lot of data efficiency, which is I'm pretty good at predicting what people do.”
- Publisher
- Machine Learning Street Talk
“I think there is absolutely something to the idea that just because you can recognize something so that would be a feed forward network that can observe a stapler alone is insufficient to what most people would mean when they use the word understanding.”
- Publisher
- Machine Learning Street Talk
“Evolutionary neuroscience, so what do we know about the past brains of humans and the ordered set of modifications of how brains came to be. And then AI, which is how do we ground sort of the highfalutin conceptual discussions about how the brain works in what works in practice, I think, a really important grounding principle because it helps really hold us accountable towards the principles that we think work.”
- Publisher
- Machine Learning Street Talk