Underlying Assumptions 1. The cortex is "basically locally randomly initialised" 2. The brain does self supervised learning 3. The brain does reinforcement learning * Genetically hardcoded reward circuitry * Reinforces cognition that historically lead to reward * RL is the mechanism by which shards form and are strengthened/weakened

Shards and Bidding * "Shard of value": "contextually active computations downstream of similar historical reinforcement events" * Shards activate more strongly in contexts similar to those where they were historically reinforced * "Subshard": "contextually activated component of a shard" * Bidding * Shards bid for actions historically responsible for receiving reward ("reward circuit activation") and not directly for reward * Credit assignment plays a role in all this that I don't understand well yet