Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind

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 to discover the circular causal flows and the self-structuring of the environment that defines 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.


Author: Andy Clark
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 04/01/2019
Pages: 424
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.30lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.10w x 1.10d
ISBN: 9780190933210

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 (1997), Mindware (2001), Natural-Born Cyborgs (2003), and Supersizing the Mind (2008). His interests include artificial
intelligence, embodied cognition, robotics, and the predictive mind. In 2018 he was profiled in The New Yorker.