Experience Machine

Most of this book is the exploration of a compelling thesis - that the mind is fundamentally geared towards prediction and reducing prediction error. When confined to more instantaneous, anatomically grounded phenomena this is well supported by the research discussed here, however it falls apart in other contexts that Clark avoids (e.g. imagination, planning). Beyond that, he conflates cognitive processes with psychological phenomena, which while admittedly a spectrum leads his section on "extended minds" to become nearly meaningless. If everything is neuroscience, then nothing is. The earlier chapters, however, mostly make up for these failings if you read while taking those issues into account. Highly recommend

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.

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.