hakomi.com

The Fundamental Situation

….prediction is the ultimate and most pervasive of all brain functions….
— Rudolpho Llinás (i of the Vortex)

Hakomi deals with the organization of experience and all experience is the outcome of complex organizing processes of the brain which take place outside of consciousness.  One of the most important of those nonconscious processes is prediction. According to Hawkins it’s the primary function of the neocortex.

The intuitive but incorrect assumption that has kept us from understanding brains and building intelligent machines is:    intelligence is defined by behavior. I’m gonna tell you that’s wrong. What it is: intelligence is defined by prediction. — (Jeff Hawkins (Can a New Theory of the Neocortex Lead to Truly Intelligent Machines? found at:
http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/316

William Calvin also talked about intelligence and prediction, and Here’s what he had to say:
Just as intelligence has been described as ‘What you use when you don’t know what to do,’ when no standard response will suffice, so too consciousness is prominently involved when the situation contains ambiguity or demands creative responses, ones that cannot be handled by a decision tree. Many mental activities can be handled by subroutines; consciousness helps to deal with the leftovers (and create new subroutines for the next time).

For most situations where you do know what to do, you do it without thinking about it, without needing to make conscious decisions. You speak your native language that way. You walk that way. You do almost everything that way. Yet, as Hawkins also says, we were all born knowing nothing about such things as the language, family, and culture we eventually become part of. Once we become part of them, we effortlessly do all the things that make us so. We do so without making conscious choices. We have learned how our world hangs together.
Another way to say this is: we are constantly and unconsciously making predictions about what follows what. We have learned the sequences and probabilities. The brain has stored them and it uses them to implement behavior.
One of the things that we’ve learned this way is: what we can expect from the people around us. We’re making these unconscious predictions of how they will act and especially how they will act towards us. We have unconscious ‘beliefs’ about these things. Our habitual behaviors suggest this. Our relationships are shaped by these habits, which are formed through experience and which act automatically, without conscious thought. It’s the nature of the human mind and we couldn’t do otherwise.
The situations we grow up in can be very limited examples of what’s possible. Our predictions may be very accurate within the situations we’re familiar with, or with the people we’ve known since childhood. On the other hand, they can be way off in new situations. Our predictions can be  causing us a lot of unnecessary suffering because they are way off. Let’s take an example.
How about someone who grew up in a world where he was always treated harshly. That person will learn to predict, with a high probability, that he can expect harsh treatment from people. He will believe—or rather, he will habitually act as if—he must be guarded, vigilant. What else could he believe? That’s been his experience. When he comes to us for help, there’s something we can do for him. We can notice his habits of vigilance and guardedness. We can see that he doesn’t feel safe. We can guess about his beliefs and experiences.

How and what we do to help is what this whole book is about.
One thing we do is make the client’s predictions fail.