Your Brain is Running a Simulation Right Now [Max Bennett]

Tim sits down with Max Bennett to explore how our brains evolved over 600 million years—and what that means for understanding both human intelligence and AI. Max isn't a neuroscientist by training. He's a tech entrepreneur who got curious, started reading, and ended up weaving together three fields that rarely talk to each other: comparative psychology (what different animals can actually do), evolutionary neuroscience (how brains changed over time), and AI (what actually works in practice). *Your Brain Is a Guessing Machine* You don't actually "see" the world. Your brain builds a simulation of what it *thinks* is out there and just uses your eyes to check if it's right. That's why optical illusions work—your brain is filling in a triangle that isn't there, or can't decide if it's looking at a duck or a rabbit. *Rats Have Regrets* *Chimps Are Machiavellian* *Language Is the Human Superpower* *Does ChatGPT Think?* (truncated description, more on rescript) Understanding how the brain evolved isn't just about the past. It gives us clues about: - What's actually different between human intelligence and AI - Why we're so easily fooled by status games and tribal thinking - What features we might want to build into—or leave out of—future AI systems Get Max's book: Rescript: --- TIMESTAMPS: 00:00:00 Introduction: Outsider's Advantage & Neocortex Theories 00:11:34 Perception as Inference: The Filling-In Machine 00:19:11 Understanding, Recognition & Generative Models 00:36:39 How Mice Plan: Vicarious Trial & Error 00:46:15 Evolution of Self: The Layer 4 Mystery 00:58:31 Ancient Minds & The Social Brain: Machiavellian Apes 01:19:36 AI Alignment, Instrumental Convergence & Status Games 01:33:07 Metacognition & The IQ Paradox 01:48:40 Does GPT Have Theory of Mind? 02:00:40 Memes, Language Singularity & Brain Size Myths 02:16:44 Communication, Language & The Cyborg Future 02:44:25 Shared Fictions, World Models & The Reality Gap --- REFERENCES:Person: [00:00:05] Karl Friston (UCL) [00:00:06] Jeff Hawkins [00:12:19] Hermann von Helmholtz [00:38:34] David Redish (U. Minnesota) [01:10:19] Robin Dunbar [01:15:04] Emil Menzel [01:19:49] Nick Bostrom [02:28:25] Noam Chomsky [03:01:22] Judea Pearl Concept/Framework: [00:05:04] Active Inference Paper: [00:35:59] Predictions not commands [Rick A Adams] Book: [01:25:42] The Elephant in the Brain [01:28:27] The Status Game [02:00:40] The Selfish Gene [02:14:25] The Language Game [02:54:40] The Evolution of Language [03:09:37] The Three-Body Problem

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Your Brain is Running a Simulation Right Now [Max Bennett] is an episode from Machine Learning Street Talk by Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST).

This episode is 03:17:09 long.

This episode was published on Dec 30, 2025.

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