The Importance of Perception Action Loops

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The word loop is crucially important there, right? And maybe the way I like to think about it is, and perhaps this is true because of technology, but we have a naive metaphor for how the brain works as kind of like there's a video camera with a computer hooked up to it. It just taking in our sense data, processing it and doing something. But no, it's really not like that at all. If you think about something like running to catch a fly ball in baseball, where you're kind of running, trying to catch this is ball, it's flying out there,. The way to do that isn't to take in all the information about the flight so far

What is the mind, and what does it try to do? An overly simplified materialist view might be that the mind emerges from physical processes in the brain. But you can be a materialist and still recognize that there is more to the mind than just the brain: the rest of our bodies play a role, and arguably we should count physical artifacts that contribute to our memory and cognition as part of "the mind." Or so argues today's guest, philosopher/cognitive scientist Andy Clark. As to what the mind does, it tries to predict what happens next. This simple idea provides a powerful lens through which to interpret all the different things our minds do, including the idea that "perception is controlled hallucination."

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Andy Clark received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Sussex. He is currently Professor of Cognitive Philosophy at Sussex. He was Director of the Philosophy/Neuroscience/Psychology Program at Washington University in St Louis, and Director of the Cogntive Science Program at Indiana University. His new book is The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality.

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