The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality

"So Andy Clark, with David Chalmers—whose book Reality+ was on my list last year—wrote a famous paper 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 Being You . 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’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. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . The neuroscientist Kevin 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."