Jakob Hohwy, “The Predictive Mind” (Oxford UP, 2014)
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What is the prediction error minimization hypothesis and why is it important?
Hello and welcome to New Books and Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Books Network. I'm Carrie Figtor of the University of Iowa and I'm co host of the channel along with Robert Talise of Vanderbilt University. Together we bring you conversations with philosophers about their new books in ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, and many other areas of contemporary philosophical inquiry. Today's interview is with Jacob Hovey. Associate Professor of Philosophy at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. His new book, The Predictive Mind, is just out from Oxford University Press. The prediction error minimization hypothesis is the first grand unified empirical theory about how the brain implements the mind and
The hypothesis, which is as bold as it is controversial, proposes to explain the mind via one core mechanism, a process of comparing predicted sensory input with actual input, updating our hypotheses in the light of the difference, and then generating new predictions. In his new book, Hovey introduces this theory to a wider audience, develops the theory's explanation of perception, and explores its potential for explaining consciousness, attention, representation, and mental illness. In this interview, Hovey considers how the theory turns the usual view of perception on its head and addresses some of its implications for the relation between cognition and perception and for the possibility of knowledge of the external world.
Let's turn to the interview. Hello, Jakob Hovey. Are you with me?
I'm with you, Carrie.
Hi, welcome to New Books and Philosophy.
Thank you.
I am delighted to be talking to you about your new book, The Predictive Mind. Um which is just out from Oxford uh University Press. Um Let me uh before we get into the actual um meat of the book. Um I wondered if you could tell us a little bit about how you got to the topic of uh of this basic theory in neuroscience and of the mind, um and how you how you got to maybe to philosophy generally and then how you uh came to write this particular book.
Yeah. I mean it's always a good question, you know, to ask philosophers what made them go into philosophy. I think You know, in my case probably
Um, so philosophy is a natural place to go in that in that case. Um And I rather quickly got interested in issues pertaining to perception, uh, philosophy of language, philosophy of of mind. Um But this particular interest in in the philosophy of of neuroscience started when we did some work um almost fifteen years ago. on uh on delusions in schizophrenia. Um where I having to share an office with Ian Gold who's now in in Canada. And we looked at these um forward modelling accounts of of delusions. And the more I looked into it, the more I discovered that It was part of a a bigger project. in terms of uh predictive coding and uh some computational ideas from from machine learning that were starting to really emerge
uh in in neuroscience and about a decade ago um So from this work on on delusions I discovered that this is really big, exciting theory, um that had great explanatory uh power. Um and then I moved to um to Denmark from from Australia. And started working with a a sort of a motley crew of neuroscientists and anthropologists that are also getting excited about this this theory. This group was um Norhol's University led by um Andreas Holstorff, who's this really Amazing um Academic Uh an it very quickly dawned on us that that here we had something special, um with the whole um prediction error minimization idea. Uh and I guess the the idea for the book arose already around two thousand and four, um when it became clear that with this theory a l lots of different aspects of perception could be explained.
So I wanted to write the book already a decade ago, but A lot of the formal machinery is very difficult to grasp. And also they are just constantly uh um being published new facets of of the theory that really increased its explanatory reach. Um so so every year there's a new aspect that could be explained, uh action, attention and so on get got piled on.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
What is the prediction error minimization hypothesis and why is it important?
0:06–9:19
2
How did Jakob Hohwy become interested in predictive coding and develop his book?
9:19–17:43
3
What is the core idea of the predictive‑mind theory?
17:43–27:15
4
How does the brain generate and update hypotheses about sensory input?
27:15–37:36
5
How does Bayesian updating work in minimizing prediction error?
37:36–49:18
6
What is active inference and how does it relate to perception?
49:18–1:02:05
7
How does the theory address cognitive penetrability and epistemology?
1:02:05–1:05:55
Speakers
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