ACKNOWLEDGING BEFORE SENSING: 3/4: The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality by Andy Clark (Author)
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 10 March 2024
⏱️ 12 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
https://www.amazon.com/Experience-Machine-Minds-Predict-Reality/dp/1524748455
Widely acclaimed philosopher and cognitive scientist Andy Clark unpacks this provocative new theory that the brain is a powerful, dynamic prediction engine, mediating our experience of both body and world. From the most mundane experiences to the most sublime, reality as we know it is the complex synthesis of sensory information and expectation. Exploring its fascinating mechanics and remarkable implications for our lives, mental health, and society, Clark nimbly illustrates how the predictive brain sculpts all human experience. Chronic pain and mental illness are shown to involve subtle malfunctions of our unconscious predictions, pointing the way towards more effective, targeted treatments. Under renewed scrutiny, the very boundary between ourselves and the outside world dissolves, showing that we are as entangled with our environments as we are with our onboard memories, thoughts, and feelings. And perception itself is revealed to be something of a controlled hallucination.
Unveiling the extraordinary explanatory power of the predictive brain, The Experience Machine is a mesmerizing window onto one of the most significant developments in our understanding of the mind.
1953 NEVADA TEST GROUNDS
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Book your ticket to happiness with Sun Express Airlines. This is on CBS I in the world. I'm John Bachelor. I'm visiting with Professor |
| 0:27.9 | Andy Clark of the University of Sussex. He's a professor of cognitive |
| 0:31.9 | philosophy. What is that? The book is The |
| 0:34.4 | Experience Machine, how our minds predict and shape reality. I think therefore I am. We |
| 0:39.5 | learn that in grade school almost but certainly in college. |
| 0:43.7 | And what Andy's work and the work of his colleagues have done these last years, |
| 0:48.0 | this is the frontier of thinking about integration, causal loop for our thoughts, our bodies, our environment, our tools. |
| 0:58.7 | All of this comes together. |
| 1:00.8 | There is a poetic way that Anas Nin puts it once upon a time. We do not see things as they are. |
| 1:08.0 | We see things as we are. |
| 1:11.0 | Professor, it's poetic, but at the same time it was very convincing to me when I came across |
| 1:16.8 | at your part of the book. |
| 1:18.7 | Our whole biome participates in our perception, which we can qualify as this wonderful word |
| 1:26.4 | qualia. We can also qualify it as emotions. So, and emotions is markers. I hope I've learned correctly, Professor. So what is it that |
| 1:35.4 | Annas Nin is telling us? How is it that our bodies participate in our perception of the world? |
| 1:55.8 | Yes, I think the lesson that I would take from that is that the predictions that seem to structure the way we experience the world and not just predictions of what's out there like the white deer that you mentioned earlier but predictions of what's going on inside our own body what the current energy needs of our |
| 2:02.4 | body are what's the state of our heart |
| 2:04.3 | rate what's the sort of what's the state of galvanic skin response right now |
| 2:10.1 | so we're busy predicting the external world, but that prediction is constantly |
| 2:16.4 | overlaid by these or underpaid, I guess, by these predictions of the internal world. |
| 2:21.2 | And I think that means that changing the internal predictions can change what we seem to see and perceive. So there are experiments |
| 2:29.8 | that show that if you give someone false cardiac feedback you make them think that their heart is beaten |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from John Batchelor, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of John Batchelor and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.

