A grand new vision of cognitive science that explains how our minds build our worlds
For as long as we've studied the mind, we've believed that information flowing from our senses determines what our mind perceives. But as our understanding has advanced in the last few decades, a hugely powerful new view has flipped this assumption on its head. The brain is not a passive receiver, but an ever-active predictor.
At the forefront of this cognitive revolution is widely acclaimed philosopher and cognitive scientist Andy Clark, who has …
A grand new vision of cognitive science that explains how our minds build our worlds
For as long as we've studied the mind, we've believed that information flowing from our senses determines what our mind perceives. But as our understanding has advanced in the last few decades, a hugely powerful new view has flipped this assumption on its head. The brain is not a passive receiver, but an ever-active predictor.
At the forefront of this cognitive revolution is widely acclaimed philosopher and cognitive scientist Andy Clark, who has synthesized his ground-breaking work on the predictive brain to explore its fascinating mechanics and implications. Among the most stunning of these is the realization that experience itself, because it is guided by prior expectation, is a kind of controlled hallucination. We don't passively take in the world around us; instead our mind is constantly making and refining predictions about what we expect to see. This even applies to our bodies, as the way we experience pain and other states is shaped by our expectations, and this has broader implications for the understanding and treatment of conditions from PTSD to schizophrenia to medically unexplained symptoms. From the most mundane experiences to the most sublime, it is our predictions that sculpt our experience.
A landmark study of cognitive science, The Experience Machine lays out the extraordinary explanatory power of the predictive brain for our lives, mental health and society.
It's a well-written introduction into predictive processing as a key feature of human cognition. This is a framework that got me very excited in the early 2010s and I still believe it offers very deep insights into what cognition is (and more speculatively, how it probably arose).
Yet in the end the book did not do much more for me than provide an entertaining read. If you want a crash course on the predictive mind (with some excursions into the extended mind), then do pick up this book. If you're already relatively informed about the topic, there may not be enough on display here.
