How the brain shapes reality - with Andy Clark

2024-03-05に共有
Join philosopher and cognitive scientist Andy Clark as he challenges our conventional understanding of the mind's interaction with the world.

Watch the Q&A for this talk (exclusively for our channel members) here:    • Q&A: How the brain shapes reality - w...  
Buy Andy's book here: geni.us/cxB87

This Discourse was recorded at the Ri on 26 January 2024.

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This innovative concept suggests that the brain operates as a dynamic prediction engine, continually shaping our perception of our bodies and the surrounding environment. Through a complex interplay of sensory data and expectations, the brain orchestrates every facet of human experience, from the everyday to the extraordinary.

In this thought-provoking Discourse, Andy will guide us through the inner workings of the predictive brain, exposing its profound implications for our well-being, mental health, and society. For instance, chronic pain and mental disorders often result from subtle disruptions in our unconscious predictions, offering promising avenues for more precise and effective treatments. As we scrutinise the boundaries between ourselves and the external world, we'll uncover the intricate connections between our environments, memories, thoughts, and emotions. This journey reveals perception as a carefully controlled form of 'controlled hallucination.'

Join us as we delve into the extraordinary explanatory power of the predictive brain. Discover how it revolutionizes our comprehension of perception and reality, all without resorting to hyperbolic language or clichés.

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Andy Clark is a Professor of Cognitive Philosophy at the University of Sussex. His interests include artificial intelligence, embodied and extended cognition, robotics, and computational neuroscience. From 2017-2021 he was PI on a European Research Council Advanced Grant: Expecting Ourselves: Embodied Prediction and the Construction of Conscious Experience. He is PI on an ERC Synergy Grant, XScape and Material Minds: Exploring the Interactions between Predictive Brains, Cultural Artifacts, and Embodied Visual Search.

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コメント (21)
  • @jameseats4144
    My son is autistic and this talk has given me a new way to think about how he interprets the world and why he reacts the way he does.
  • For years there was a futon in my brothers bedroom. My parents removed it at some point, and the first time I looked in there after that, I hallucinated for a split second that it was still there. I hypothesized it was due to the expectation at the time and it’s interesting to learn more about it here!
  • @d.lav.2198
    As much a fan as I am of the Predictive Processing approach to mind/brain, as someone who suffers from a misdiagnosed chronic health problem, I know for a fact that the complexity of the body's capacity to malfunction can outstrip the much more coarse-grained diagnostic capacity of the medical profession. Some poorly understood chronic conditions really are somatically derived rather than model-driven.
  • Great talk and I shall be ordering the book. Also got to say how much I loved Professor Clark's suit!
  • What really interests me about all this is the realisation that the thought sequence we experience that gives us the sense of time,passing in a certain order, in reality is an illusion.
  • @tonyevans9999
    This has been very helpful for me, thank you. Fascinating
  • @TommyEfreeti
    What you believe you expect to perceive your senses will "receive", to paraphrase Bohm. "Reality is what we take to be true. What we take to be true is what we believe. What we believe is based upon our perceptions. What we perceive depends on what we look for. What we look for depends on what we think. What we think depends on what we perceive. What we perceive determines what we believe. What we believe determines what we take to be true. What we take to be true is our reality." - Bohm
  • @jaytsecan
    What a fantastic and highly informative and engrossing video. Thank you so much for sharing!
  • @scotimages
    How superb it is to see a philosopher who is is empirically engaged. It gives me hope that there is a future for philosphical enterprise!
  • @arinco3817
    This is my favourite talk from this channel. I've been obsessed with AI for the last year but I feel like I'm gonna go down a neuroscience rabbit hole now lol
  • With the sine wave speech examples, I understood the exames pretty well on the initial playthrough. I suspect that a major reason behind it is that I have been using communications radios for a while and the voices that come through those can get pretty close to the stripped sine wave voices.
  • My wife is late-deafened -- she says the listening exercise @7:30 is EXACTLY what it's like to learn to hear with a cochlear implant. (she did fantastically well - she learned VERY quickly)
  • I wasn't prepared for how impactful the sine wave speech demonstration would be. I'm floored
  • @KribensaUK
    Based on what you said, the case of the construction worker sounds like the brain also weighing up the consequences of a pain response or lack thereof. The nail could have damaged the foot in a way that also disrupted the usual pain signals, so not feeling pain and so walking on it could cause more damage. So it erred on the side of a pain response until further evidence was obtained
  • In addition to the convex-/concave- mask "illusion/prediction" and the effectiveness of even the "honest placebo", there is also the vertigo that is induced when some people (yours truly, for instance) step onto a motionless escalator: even though i know "it's all in my head", and I'm prepared to experience a moment of vertigo yet again (every time), I still experience it... Presumably, if I had never seen an escalator in my life, I would experience no vertigo.
  • @arinco3817
    I'm only 10 mins in but absolutely loving this talk!
  • My brother-in-law has been crippled by lower body pain for a few years now. He was an exercise addict and assumed he had injured his back so tried to get treatment, but the doctors –after extensive investigation– couldn't find any problem. He, naturally, insisted there was a problem and kept looking for answers. The doctors then went further and told him the pain was all in his head (not to say he was not actually in pain). Long story short, he rejected this idea and had a mental breakdown and was institutionalised by the family when he expressed suicidal intentions. He's since accepted he has a 'mental' illness but he is pretty much bed ridden, unless my wife wants to take him indoor climbing, where he suddenly can move almost normally, albeit slowly. The account presented in this lecture makes a lot of sense in his case. PRT sounds like a good option for him. Thanks Dr Clark!