How do our minds build our worlds? One of the most important living thinkers in cognitive science and philosophy joins us with a grand new vision to explain our lived experience.
In the last decade a powerful new theory in cognitive science has been steadily gaining momentum that overturns centuries of belief about how we see and think. Everything we see, sense and feel, even our moods and emotions, are based on what our brain predicts we will experience – and our senses are the mechanisms by which the brain corrects for its prediction errors.
Hugely renowned in the cognitive sciences for the Extended Mind hypothesis, which explained the way in which tools seem to become part of ‘us’ many years before smartphones, laptops, and the internet made all of us feel one with our machines, philosopher Andy Clark is the leading researcher of Predictive Brain theory – the nearest thing we have to a unified science of the mind.
With profound consequences for how we make sense of our selves and of society, from how we treat PTSD and schizophrenia to cultural issues such as ‘social bias’, and consequences for sport and performance and other highwire mental balancing acts, this theory will forever reframe your understanding of the world we live in and the worlds we create.
Praise for Andy Clark’s The Experience Machine:
‘Rare among science books, this one has changed the way I experience the world” Susan Blackmore, author of Consciousness: An Introduction and The Meme Machine
‘…will convince you that the brain and the world are partners in constructing our understanding of it’ Sean Carroll, author of The Biggest Ideas in the Universe
‘…one of the most fascinating and profound books I have ever read’ David Robson, author of The Expectation Effect
‘a further testament to Andy Clark’s standing as one of the greatest theoreticians and influencers in philosophy of mind’ Karl Friston, theoretical neuroscientist at University College London
‘a true pioneer’ Anil Seth, Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience, University of Sussex
