UCMerced CogSci
“Only Predict? On the Nature, Scope and Limits of Predictive Processing”
Monday, April 2, 2018
Andy Clark
School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, Edinburgh University
Abstract: Recent work in computational and cognitive neuroscience depicts the brain as an ever-active prediction machine. In this talk, I first show how these stories encompass a wide variety of routes to adaptive response. These include rich, knowledge-driven processing, but also more ‘fast and frugal’ action-involving solutions of the kind highlighted by work in robotics and embodied cognition. The ‘predictive processing’ framework thus shows great promise as a means of both understanding and integrating many of the core information processing strategies underlying perception, thought, and action. But this leaves many questions unanswered. Can a story that posits prediction error minimization as cognitive bedrock accommodate the undoubted attractions of novelty and exploration? Is it falsifiable? What is the true scope of this story – can it really be a theory of ‘everything cognitive’?
Andy Clark is Professor of Logic and Metaphysics in the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, at Edinburgh University in Scotland. He is the author of several books including Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind (Oxford University Press, 2016), Mindware (Oxford University Press, Second Edition 2014), Supersizing the Mind (Oxford University Press, 2008), and Being There: Putting Brain, Body And World Together Again (MIT Press, 1997). Academic interests include artificial intelligence, embodied and extended cognition, robotics, and computational neuroscience. He is currently PI on a European Research Council Advanced Grant ‘Expecting Ourselves’, looking at Consciousness and the Predictive Brain.
Source
