The Moral Decision to Carve Nature at the Joints

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The idea here would be that by dovetail and things together in this way, you get basically an emergent you. You are the thing that goes around with a sort of sense of its own capacities but doesn't really care how they get cashed out. So something that I think comes out quite strongly in the predicted process in stories is that brains are kind of location neutral when they estimate where they can get good information back from. And then there'll be a story to tell about how the actual selection process operates but we'll come around to that once we talk about for the two processing.

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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