Back Cover Blurb
- 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.
Review: FT Best 5 Philosophy Books of 2023
- Interview of Nigel Warburton by Cal Flyn (FT - Warburton - The Best Five Philosophy Books of 2023)
- Let’s talk about the fourth book on your list of 2023 philosophy books, Andy Clark’s The Experience Machine. He’s a cognitive philosopher.
- So Andy Clark, with David Chalmers — whose book Reality+ was on my list last year — wrote a famous paper ("Chalmers (David) & Clark (Andy) - The Extended Mind") about ‘the extended mind’: the idea that something like a phone could be literally part of your mind. They argue it’s a mistake to think of the mind as necessarily contained within the skull or the skin, as people traditionally have. Together they put forward the argument that some things that we use as tools are integrated with our lives, and available to us, and are relied upon in similar ways to the memories in our brains. We might outsource the memory of phone numbers, for example, to our smartphones. And in cases like that, we can talk about literally extending our minds. There’s a long history of people doing just that, using all sorts of devices. But there’s a cut-off where you say, that’s just a tool, not part of the mind.
- That idea is discussed in this book by Clark, but the broader aim of the book is to give accessible insight into some of the most interesting interdisciplinary research in the area of cognitive science, about how rather than being passive recipients of information, we project expectations on the world. According to Clark, we should rethink everything about human beings in terms of predictive processing, the ways that our senses supply correctives of our projections, and don’t give us a reliable picture of reality that we receive passively.
- This is an idea that Anil Seth discussed in very interesting ways in his book "Seth (Anil Kumar) - Being You: A New Science of Consciousness". It’s very much in vogue, as it were. But Clark is a very accessible writer, like Seth, and also like him a researcher in this area. The way he puts it is that potentially the prediction processing model of understanding our place in the world is something that can give us a unifying picture of the mind and its place in nature. It’s one of those hypotheses that has huge philosophical implications if we take it seriously. It’s not just about sensations, how we experience things, but our sense of self, how we relate to the universe, everything. Everything important will be transformed if we understand the world through this model, if we recognise that we’re not passive recipients of information but caught up in a range of hypotheses that we generate about the world. It’s almost as though we are hallucinating the world all the time. It’s one of those approaches to philosophy that is like that famous duck-rabbit illusion: you see the duck, then suddenly you see the rabbit. There’s a shift and you see the world differently. Clark’s book presents an accessible way into this different way of seeing the world. It’s a model of how to make complex ideas accessible to the general reader.
- I had an interesting conversation with a cognitive scientist at Oxford called Dick Passingham a few years ago. He said that he essentially thought that neuroscience was making a lot of philosophy of mind obsolete. Coming at it from a different way, through observation: scientific advances meant there was no space for philosophy left.
- I’m skeptical about that. It’s true that anybody who wants to understand the mind today has a very rich source of data in the sense that there’s an explosion of interesting discoveries in neuroscience. Computing power allows a much more refined understanding of the physiology of the active brain. There have been many counterintuitive discoveries. That has to be part of your understanding if you’re a philosopher of mind. There are people who don’t keep up with the science, who ignore it and go back to Descartes or other philosophers instead. But it seems very strange to turn away from real discoveries about the neuroscience of consciousness. But even with all this empirical research, philosophical questions about how to interpret and integrate those sorts of theories remain.
- Many of the best philosophers of mind, like Andy Clark, are immersed in the world of philosophy and that of neuroscience. There are plenty of philosophers who don’t carve up their way of thinking about the mind into ‘philosophy’ and ‘neuroscience’; we just want a picture of what the mind is like, and any sources of information about that are relevant. There are big questions about where consciousness comes from, how it evolved, what it is, and how we experience the world. There’s a cluster of unresolved issues, and plenty of them still have a philosophical flavour.
- The neuroscientist Kevin J. Mitchell just published a book about the nature of free will: Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will. It’s impossible to write intelligently about that as a neuroscientist, I think, without touching on the long philosophical history around that topic. And even if you want to be a hardcore neuroscientist saying, well, philosophy has nothing for me, moral issues don’t go away just by looking at the brain. Or, if they seem to, you end up with a very strange moral philosophy.
Reviews cited by Amazon
- For those who want to know more about an important and growing field of neuroscience, The Experience Machine is an excellent primer
→ New Scientist
- A predictably groundbreaking exploration of the predictive basis of our extended minds from one of our deepest and clearest thinkers, and a true pioneer of this transformational view of who we are and how we work. The Experience Machine delivers a remarkable combination of profound insight and practical relevance, and it showcases Clark's ability to convey complex ideas with fluent and accessible language
→ Anil Seth, author of "Seth (Anil Kumar) - Being You: A New Science of Consciousness"
- Rare among science books, this one has changed the way I experience the world. I now feel the experience machine doing its work as I pay attention, am surprised, or catch myself having made completely ridiculous predictions. It's a book that will help you understand the way you see, think and act - and it is also a pleasure to read
→ Susan Blackmore, author of Consciousness: An Introduction and "Blackmore (Susan) - The Meme Machine"
- It's tempting to think that our eyes and ears passively record the world like cameras and microphones, but our perceptions are much more interesting than that. Andy Clark is a leading figure in understanding the brain as a prediction machine -- we don't passively take in the world, we're constantly anticipating it and interpreting it accordingly. This thoroughly readable book will convince you that the brain and the world are partners in constructing our understanding
→ Sean M. Carroll, author of The Biggest Ideas In The Universe
- The Experience Machine is one of the most fascinating and profound books I have ever read. With incredible clarity, Andy Clark presents a grand unified theory of brain processing and describes its enormous implications for our understanding of ourselves. Clark's writing is elegant and entertaining, with many mind-blowing examples of the ways our expectations can shape our reality. This book sets the highest possible bar for popular science writing and is sure to become an instant classic of the genre
→ David Robson, author of The Expectation Effect
- This is a book that grabs you and literally changes your mind. I perused the preface after my morning coffee and found myself on the last page before nightfall! The Experience Machine is a further testament to Andy Clark's standing as one of the greatest theoreticians and influencers in philosophy of mind. It is a wonderfully lucid and compelling - and occasionally touching-account of our sentient behaviour, and the way we construct our experienced world
→ Karl Friston, theoretical neuroscientist at University College London
- In this stunning book, Andy Clark is once again reshaping our understanding of the mind. Clark expertly mobilises the full extent of the predictive Experience Machine, unifying mind, body and the environment. He then reveals the surprising predictive hacks that enable us better grasp our own unfolding experiences
→ Jakob Hohwy, author of The Predictive Mind, Director of the Monash Centre for Consciousness and Contemplative Studies
- There are many metaphors for how your brain works: a magician, an architect, a fortune-teller, a scientist. Andy Clark's marvellous book, The Experience Machine, unpacks these metaphors to reveal your brain's mind-bending (and mind-making) predictive powers that construct the reality you see, hear, and feel. Without them, there is only buzzing, blooming confusion. Strap on your seatbelt and prepare to be amazed!
→ Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made and Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain
- Is the universe a simulation? Yes! But the simulation takes place in your brain. In this engaging and fascinating book Andy Clark explains how our expectations dominate the input of our senses to construct our individual perceptions of reality. After reading it, you'll look at human experience in a new way
→ Leonard Mlodinow, author of Emotional
- If you would like to read the most promising theory of how your brain works (and who doesn't), told by the clearest and most colourful storyteller, this is the only book you need. Tender yet assertive, Andy takes us by the hand as deep into our mind as anyone can glean.
→ Moshe Bar, author of Mindwandering
- There's a growing body of evidence that suggests we don't receive information from the outside world passively. Instead, our minds act as predictive engines, anticipating what we'll encounter next, filling in blanks and bridling at the unexpected... This mind-bending stuff is at the forefront of science, technology, philosophy and much else. Clark makes it thrillingly understandable.
→ Prospect Book of the Year 2023
Book Comment
Allen Lane; 1st edition (2 May 2023)
Text Colour Conventions (see disclaimer)- Blue: Text by me; © Theo Todman, 2025
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