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How is it that thoroughly physical material beings such as ourselves can think, dream, feel, create and understand ideas, theories and concepts? How does mere matter give rise to all these non-material mental states, including consciousness itself? An answer to this central question of our existence is emerging at the busy intersection of neuroscience, psychology, artificial intelligence, and robotics.
In this groundbreaking work, philosopher and cognitive scientist Andy Clark explores exciting new theories from these fields that reveal minds like ours to be prediction machines - devices that have evolved to anticipate the incoming streams of sensory stimulation before they arrive. These predictions then initiate actions that structure our worlds and alter the very things we need to engage and predict. Clark takes us on a journey in discovering the circular causal flows and the
self-structuring of the environment that define "the predictive brain." What emerges is a bold, new, cutting-edge vision that reveals the brain as our driving force in the daily surf through the waves of sensory stimulation.
List of contents
- Table of Contents
- Preface: Meat That Predicts
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Guessing Games
- Part I: The Power of Prediction
- Chapter 1: Prediction Machines
- Chapter 2: Adjusting The Volume (Noise, Signal, Attention)
- Chapter 3: The Imaginarium
- Part II: Embodying Prediction
- Chapter 4: Prediction for Action
- Chapter 5: Sculpting the Flow
- Chapter 6: Engaging the world
- Chapter 7: Expecting Ourselves
- Part III: Scaffolding Prediction
- Chapter 8: The Lazy Predictive Brain
- Chapter 9: Being Human
- Chapter 10: The Future of Prediction
- Appendix 1: Bare Bayes
- Appendix 2: The Free Energy Formulation
- References
- Index
About the author
Andy Clark is Professor of Logic and Metaphysics in the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, at Edinburgh University in Scotland. He is the author of
Being There: Putting Brain, Body And World Together Again (1997),
Mindware (OUP, 2nd Edition 2014),
Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies and the Future of Human Intelligence (OUP, 2003), and
Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension (OUP, 2008). His interests include artificial intelligence, embodied cognition, robotics, and the predictive mind.
Summary
How is it that thoroughly physical material beings such as ourselves can think, dream, feel, create and understand ideas, theories and concepts? How does mere matter give rise to all these non-material mental states, including consciousness itself? An answer to this central question of our existence is emerging at the busy intersection of neuroscience, psychology, artificial intelligence, and robotics.
In this groundbreaking work, philosopher and cognitive scientist Andy Clark explores exciting new theories from these fields that reveal minds like ours to be prediction machines - devices that have evolved to anticipate the incoming streams of sensory stimulation before they arrive. These predictions then initiate actions that structure our worlds and alter the very things we need to engage and predict. Clark takes us on a journey in discovering the circular causal flows and the self-structuring of the environment that define "the predictive brain." What emerges is a bold, new, cutting-edge vision that reveals the brain as our driving force in the daily surf through the waves of sensory stimulation.
Additional text
This is a truly important book. It is evocatively written and reflects a truly gargantuan amount of work. It sets the stage for future debates not only about the empirical merits of Bayesian characterizations of human cognition, but also the broader philosophical picture in which such Bayesian characterizations are embedded. I predict that many of us will be reading, discussing, and analysing this book in the months and years to come.
Report
Surfing Uncertainty will be a much discussed and seminal work in the field of the philosophy of cognitive science. David D. Hutto, Australasian Journal of Philosophy
