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Andy Clark: Surfing Uncertainty (2016) 3 stars

Review of 'Surfing Uncertainty' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

Clark is an excellent thinker and in connecting the predictive processing approach to the embodied mind principle, no detail seems to escape his attention. The ideas are inspiring and they provoke the traditional cognitive neuropsychological views on how the brain supports cognition. He succeeds in making the point that predictive processing is fully compatible and indeed more effective if that approach incorporates embodiment.

The style of writing, however, is to my taste needlessly prosaic. His effort to find elegant wording for his ideas seems larger than his effort to empathize with the reader. For instance, he could be more explicit in the use of examples when crucial points are made. Visual representations of such examples or their implications could be helpful. Also, Clark has the tendency to use negation, where a large part of the sentences describe what is not the case, and ends with what Clark instead proposes. Among the most used phrases in his work must be 'The upshot of this", which indicates the preceding text doesn't do the job of explaining his point.