Jeff Hawkins: Predictability Is The Very Definition Of Reality

Real-world objects can be concrete, like a lizard, a face, or a door, or they can be abstract, like a word or a theory. The brain treats abstract and concrete objects in the same way. They are both just sequences of patterns that occur together over time in a predictable fashion. The fact that certain input patterns repeat time and again is what lets a cortical region know that those experiences are caused by a real object in the world.

Predictability is the very definition of reality. If a region of cortex finds it can reliably and predictably move among these input patterns using a series of physical motions (such as saccades of the eyes or fondling with the fingers) and can predict them accurately as they unfold in time (such as the sounds comprising a song or a spoken word), the brain interprets these as having a causal relationship. The odds of numerous input patterns occurring in the same relation over and over again by sheer coincidence are vanishingly small. A predictable sequence of patterns must be part of a larger object that really exists. So reliable predictability is an ironclad way of knowing that different events in the world are physically tied together.