The McGurk Illusion

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It's hard to know exactly where the boundaries of illusions and other kinds of inference lie. These kind of optical and auditory illusions almost seem fun and benign, but presumably we can take the basic picture that there's an enormous amount of information coming into our senses at every moment. We filter it to fit our perceptions and then correct for the errors. That must also work with abstract concepts or news items just as much as pictures that we get through our eyes. It does seem as if we're using internal information to help make the predictions that structure our experience of the external world.

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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