Andy Clark, “Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and Embodied Mind” (Oxford UP, 2016)
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What is the predictive processing hypothesis and why does it matter?
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Hello, and welcome to New Books and Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Books Network. I'm Carrie Figdor, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Iowa, and I'm co-host of the channel along with Robert Talese, Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. Together, we bring you conversations with philosophers about their new books, drawing from a wide range of areas of contemporary philosophical inquiry. Today's interview is with Andy Clark, professor of logic and metaphysics at the University of Edinburgh. His new book, Surfing Uncertainty, Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind, is just out from Oxford University Press. The predictive processing hypothesis is a new unified theory of neural and cognitive function, according to which our brains are prediction machines.
They process the incoming sensory stream in the light of expectations of what those sensory inputs ought to be. On this view, only prediction errors are fed forward into the processing stream, and these are used to update subsequent predictions and guide action. In Serving Uncertainty, Clark explains the theory from the perspective of embodied cognition, addressing such questions as how it alters the classical view of cognition as being sandwiched between perception and action, and also how attention is employed to modulate the sensory flow. He considers the current empirical support for the theory, as well as its implications for traditional debates in epistemology, our understanding of schizophrenia and autism, and concerns about implicit bias.
Let's turn to the interview. Hello, Andy Clark. Are you there?
Yes,
I'm here.
Hi.
Hi. Welcome to New Books and Philosophy. I'm glad to welcome you to the podcast.
It's great to be here. Thanks for having
me. So we'll be talking about your new book, Surfing Uncertainty, Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind, which is just out from Oxford University Press. Before we get into the discussion of the book itself, maybe you can tell us something about your philosophical background or your background in general, I should say, in relation to the book, and then how you came to write this particular book.
Yeah, I guess I've always been in some sense a philosopher of cognitive science. I started out many years ago basically working on connectionism and artificial neural networks. I wrote a couple of books on that. Then I got interested in robotics and embodied cognition, and there was a book on that. And after that, I became interested in or maybe simultaneously, but I became interested in the extended mind, and there was some work on that as well. That's something that might come up a bit later in our discussion today. And there's a certain sense in which I see these kinds of stories, the predictive processing, as I prefer to call them, stories I'm talking about in the book,
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the predictive processing hypothesis and why does it matter?
0:00–7:50
2
How did Andy Clark’s background lead to the ideas in *Surfing Uncertainty*?
7:50–16:31
3
What is the role of prediction errors in shaping perception and action?
16:31–24:28
4
How does the theory integrate action, not just perception, into the brain’s predictions?
24:28–34:17
5
What does a hierarchical predictive model look like across neural levels?
34:17–42:11
6
How do precision weighting and attention modulate prediction error signals?
42:11–52:10
7
What are the implications of predictive processing for epistemology and realism?
52:10–1:02:59
8
How does the framework explain schizophrenia, bias, and future research directions?
1:02:59–1:08:14
Speakers
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