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Busting Out: Predictive Brains, Embodied Minds, and the Puzzle of the Evidentiary Veil
Author(s) -
Clark Andy
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
noûs
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.574
H-Index - 66
eISSN - 1468-0068
pISSN - 0029-4624
DOI - 10.1111/nous.12140
Subject(s) - clearance , predictive coding , inference , embodied cognition , cognitive science , action (physics) , predictive value , psychology , cognition , neuroscience , skull , cognitive psychology , computer science , artificial intelligence , sociology , biology , anatomy , medicine , social science , physics , quantum mechanics , coding (social sciences) , urology
Biological brains are increasingly cast as ‘prediction machines’: evolved organs whose core operating principle is to learn about the world by trying to predict their own patterns of sensory stimulation. This, some argue, should lead us to embrace a brain‐bound ‘neurocentric’ vision of the mind. The mind, such views suggest, consists entirely in the skull‐bound activity of the predictive brain. In this paper I reject the inference from predictive brains to skull‐bound minds. Predictive brains, I hope to show, can be apt participants in larger cognitive circuits. The path is thus cleared for a new synthesis in which predictive brains act as entry‐points for ‘extended minds’, and embodiment and action contribute constitutively to knowing contact with the world.