Experience Machines: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality

Experience Machines: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality with Andy Clark. Wednesday March 13th at the Wagner Hall, doors open 7:15, talk starts at 8:00pm.

Human brains are nature’s own ‘prediction machines’ - evolved organs that are constantly trying to predict flows of sensation, both from within our own body and from the wider world. This casts perception and feeling as forms of ‘controlled hallucination’ in which raw sensory information delivers experience only relative to our brain’s best predictions. These accounts suggest new ways of understanding both typical and atypical forms of human experience. They also suggest various ways we can 'hack our own brains', pushing back against unhelpful hidden predictions. The upshot should be a new appreciation of both the continuity and the diversity of human experience.

Andy Clark is Professor of Cognitive Philosophy at the University of Sussex, UK. He is the author of several books including The Experience Machine (Penguin Random House, 2023) and Supersizing the Mind (Oxford University Press, 2008).