Experience Machine

It's a well-written introduction into predictive processing as a key feature of human cognition. This is a framework that got me very excited in the early 2010s and I still believe it offers very deep insights into what cognition is (and more speculatively, how it probably arose).

Yet in the end the book did not do much more for me than provide an entertaining read. If you want a crash course on the predictive mind (with some excursions into the extended mind), then do pick up this book. If you're already relatively informed about the topic, there may not be enough on display here.

They were some pretty interesting ideas around how people perceive the world, but most chapters felt incredibly repetitive. There were a few core ideas that took up 20-30% of the book, while the rest of the book was mainly examples, causing it to be a slog to go through.

A pop update to the author's more academic Surfing Uncertainty on the predictive processing view of consciousness, with most of those details in a brief appendix and the focus on cognitive study examples, cognitive biases and confusions that seem clearer when viewed through this lens, and ways to think of our predictive brains as embodied and extended in the world.