We like music because our brains crave pattern recognition.

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Music showers my brain!

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I think this is getting it backwards. Here I’ll go (warning, evopsych style speculation follows):

Our brains are great pattern recognizers because it makes us better at learning music (and other structured forms such as poetry). Music is older than all the civilizations on earth. We learn music because it’s an incredibly powerful aid to memorization. Memorization and oral recitation is the oldest form of cultural transmission we have.

Culture is the secret of our success as a species. It’s the original problem solver that gave us so many tools and techniques to survive on every continent on the planet (except Antarctica of course). Culture is the reason we learned to prepare so many foods which would have been poisonous otherwise (such as cassava).

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Imo it's very unlikely that we grew to like music that already existed rather than growing to like audio patterns and then noticing we can make music.

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Almost nothing in evolution happened sequentially. We almost certainly didn’t start creating music before our brains were equipped for it. Instead these things would’ve evolved in tandem. Each one driving the other, in a virtuous cycle.

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This is a cool take! I don't think I agree though. I assume we developed pattern recognition before music/language. Many animals have the ability to note attributes about plants and animals even without the ability to communicate complex ideas (ie language or oral tradition). I assume that type of pattern recognition was a good blueprint for functions like music and language, but my guess is it started from a general pattern recognition, then was retuned for music and language.

Again, pure speculation, but there is some logic behind it!

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It's absolutely worth an entire lifetime of exploration. But dismissing things you can't explain away immediately with chemical processes, as some sort of unknowable sorcery is exactly why I call it reductive. As far as I'm concerned, maintaining a reverence for the fact that you will never be capable of conclusively explaining such things, because there is vastly more detail involved than even a thousand lifetimes could ever uncover, is necessary if you want to actually begin to learn about what's really happening.

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I strongly believe that our brains are fundamentally just prediction machines. We strive for a specific level of controlled novelty, but for the most part 'understanding', i.e. being able to predict, the world around us is the goal. We get boredom to push us beyond getting too comfortable and simply sitting in the already familiar, and one of the biggest pleasures in life is the 'aha' moment when understanding finally clicks in place and we feel we can predict something novel.

I feel this is also why LLMs (ChatGPT etc.) can be so effective working with language, and why they occasionally seem to behave so humanlike -- The fundamental mechanism is essentially the same if massively more limited. Animal brains continuously adapt to predict sensory input (and to an extent their own output), while LLMs learn to predict a sequence of text tokens during a restricted training period.

It also seems to me the strongest example of this kind of prediction in animals is the noticing (and wariness) when something feels 'off' about the environment around us. We can easily sense specific kinds of small changes to our surroundings that signify potential danger, even in seemingly unpredictable natural environments. From an evolutionary perspective this also seems like the most immediately beneficial aspect of this kind of prediction. Interstingly, this kind of prediction seems to happen even on the level of individual neurons. As predictive capability improves, it also necessitates an increasingly deep ability to model the world around us, leading to deeper cognition.

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I agree, LLMs have the amazingly human ability to bumble into the right answer even if they don't know why.

It seems to me that a good analogy of our experience is a whole bunch of LLMs optimized for different tasks that have some other LLM scheduler/administrator for the lower level models that is consciousness. Might be more layers deep, but that's my guess with no neurological or machine learning background.

Possibly linux

I think it is way more deep than that.

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We like music for the same reason we like games, stories and successfully accomplishing tasks.

It's the vibe that it evokes.

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Listening to the same song over and over is no longer for enjoyment, it is for the feelings of safety that your body is comfortable in.

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No, that is definitely for enjoyment