Introducing the brain: as a predictive mechanism (Introduction)

by David Turell , Friday, June 16, 2023, 19:16 (524 days ago) @ David Turell

A book review:

https://www.sciencemagazinedigital.org/sciencemagazine/library/item/16_june_2023/410885...

"In The Experience Machine, philosopher Andy Clark masterfully synthesizes recent work on the predictive brain into an accessible and captivating book for the nonspecialist. He explains not only how predictive processing in the brain can account for accurate perception but also—and perhaps more fascinatingly—what happens when things go wrong. If sensory feedback is ambiguous or limited, for example, or if a brain assigns too much weight to an existing model of the world, then errors can occur. Clark illustrates these scenarios with familiar and compelling examples, describing why we sense phantom vibrations from our cell phones, why we hear speech in white noise, and why we experience a blue-and-black dress as white and gold.

"In Clark’s hands, the predictive brain is not merely a framework for understanding how our perceptual systems might work. Instead, it is a unifying theory of human minds. He weaves a compelling narrative that explores how perception, action, pain, emotion, and consciousness can all be understood as reflections of the relationship between our brain’s model of the external world and its model of our internal physiological states. And he explores how the predictive brain can explain various phenomena, including posttraumatic stress disorder, sporting expertise, the aesthetic response to artistic beauty, and even Patrick Swayze’s character’s dismissive attitude toward pain—“Pain don’t hurt”—in the 1989 movie Road House.

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"Clark’s focus on neural processing may surprise readers familiar with the author’s earlier work on embodied and extended cognition. He has spent several decades arguing that many of our cognitive abilities are not brain-bound but rather are inextricable from our bodies and environments. However, Clark is adamant that we should not misunderstand this new book’s framework as a return to neurocentrism. He proposes instead that the predictive brain’s ability to combine inward-looking and outward-looking sensory information is precisely what enables it to exploit non-neural resources to extend its cognitive reach. This notion is the book’s most intriguing and its most metaphorical. Clark proposes that human minds are “seething, swirling oceans of prediction, continuously orchestrated by brain, body, and world.”

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"Scientific work and philosophical work on predictive processing have been careful to distinguish neural prediction and precision weighting from what we do as conscious human beings when we estimate outcomes and consider probabilities. In this book, however, Clark is keen to unite our understanding of conscious and unconscious cognitive strategies. He suggests that our best understanding of affirmation and visualization techniques, for example, is in terms of the predictive brain’s error minimization strategy. Those hoping for an explanation of how our conscious expectations interact with nonconscious neural prediction mechanisms, however, will be left dissatisfied. This part of the puzzle, he acknowledges, is still missing. Nonetheless, The Experience Machine provides plenty of fodder to inspire the next generation of researchers to take on this task."

Comment: this supports my constant comment that the brain is built to help us in ways we do not intuitively recognize.