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Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind

Andy Clark · 3 HN comments
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Amazon Summary
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 in discovering the circular causal flows and the self-structuring of the environment that define "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.
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Hacker News Stories and Comments

All the comments and stories posted to Hacker News that reference this book.
Jul 03, 2020 · sutterbomb on GPT-3 Creative Fiction
The current leading theories on how the brain works are that yes, they are essentially very impressive prediction machines, which obviously rely on all sorts of pattern matching to make said predictions. You can look up Karl Friston's free energy principle or check this book for more details

https://www.amazon.com/Surfing-Uncertainty-Prediction-Action...

See also the book _Surfing Uncertainty_ (https://www.amazon.com/Surfing-Uncertainty-Prediction-Action...) which convincingly details many brain subsystems as approximating Bayesian updates.
Reminds me of this Slate Star Codex post[0] on the book "Surfing Uncertainty"[1].

Also it looks like the relevant paper is here[3] and a video example is here[4].

[0]: http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/05/book-review-surfing-unc...

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0190217014/

[3]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.00696

[4]: https://sites.google.com/site/robotforesight/

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