Every breath you take, every move you make, every glance you steal—literally all the time—there is something going on behind the scenes: your brain is running billions of calculations to answer one question… what the hell is actually happening right now?
Being alive means dealing with uncertainty, every moment of every day. Seriously, that’s what it means to be alive: to navigate uncertainty, to try to “infer” what’s going on, using only limited and noisy information. We need to be able to understand this complex and uncertain world around us, at least well enough to survive and reproduce.
But what does it mean to “understand” the world? It turns out this can be rigorously mathematized as Bayesian inference. Don’t worry! I’ll develop every intuition from the ground up and slowly derive the math from scratch. No background needed whatsoever.
By the end of this post, I hope to convince you that:
| inference | = | understanding the world |
| the brain | = | electric meatball inference machine |
Mysterious Tune 