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CLARK, Andy. Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. xviii + 401 pp. Cloth, $29.95-Clark's book puts forth an ambitious hypothesis: minds work by constantly predicting how they will be stimulated. It then advances a specific, speculative proposal about how brains carry out such predictions: they engage in Predictive Processing (PP). Like Gaul, the book is divided into three parts. Part 1 articulates the PP proposal and demonstrates how it may explain a wide range of mental phenomena, such as perception, attention, memory, and imagination. Part 2 expands the range of phenomena PP plausibly explains and demonstrates how the PP proposal is consonant with theories of embodiment, enactivism, and neoGibsonian ecological accounts of mind. Part 3 further develops these ideas and the phenomena they might explain. It relates them to Clark's extended mind thesis, demonstrating how social norms and practices may augment the PP abilities of human minds.
The result is a wide-ranging, speculative, and highly ambitious work. The aim is not only to unify the mind and brain sciences under the aegis of PP, but to "fundamentally reconfigure our thinking about the debate between nativism and empiricism, and about the nature and possibility of 'carving nature at its joints.'" The book's scope makes it a nice introduction to a variety of empirically informed explanations of phenomena from binocular rivalry, motor control, natural language parsing, and autism. Along the way, it tees up a number of provocative proposals for debate by philosophers of mind, science, metaphysics, and epistemology.
The PP proposal detailed in part 1 combines several separate hypotheses about cognitive architecture. The first has it that the mind functions in a radically top-down manner, with predictions of incoming stimuli constantly influencing how it processes incoming stimuli. Specifically, the brain deploys "predictive...