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Experience Machines: How our Minds Predict and Shape Reality with Professor Andy Clark

Biological brains are ‘prediction machines’, constantly trying to anticipate the flows of sensation and information coming from inside the body and out in the world. This is a powerful strategy that allows us to use what we already know to get a better grip on how things are. But it can also misfire, either by placing too much weight on the predictions, or on the current sensory signal.

A new wave of work in ‘computational psychiatry’ explores what happens when the balancing act goes wrong in these different ways. In the talk, Professor Andy Clark looks at this work, and at various ways we can 'hack our own predictive minds', pushing back against some of the hidden predictions that may be at work in (for example) chronic pain. The upshot is a new appreciation of both the continuity and the diversity of human experience.

About Andy Clark

Andy Clark is Professor of Cognitive Philosophy at the University of Sussex. He is the author of several books including The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality (Penguin Random House, 2023), Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind (Oxford University Press, 2016), and Supersizing the Mind (Oxford University Press, 2008).

Academic interests include artificial intelligence, embodied and extended cognition, robotics, human-technology systems, and computational neuroscience. He is currently PI on an ERC Synergy Grant exploring the many ways predictive brains interact with material culture.