Clark (2017)

Clark, Andy. (2017) Busting Out: Predictive Brains, Embodied Minds, and the Puzzle of the Evidentiary Veil. Noûs 51 (4), 727-753.

Title	Busting Out: Predictive Brains, Embodied Minds, and the Puzzle of the Evidentiary Veil
Resource Type	journal article
Author(s)	Andy Clark
Year	2017
Journal	Noûs
Volume	51
Number	4
Pages	727-753

Abstract

Biological brains are increasingly cast as ‘prediction machines’: evolved organs whose core operating principle is to learn about the world by trying to predict their own patterns of sensory stimulation. This, some argue, should lead us to embrace a brain-bound ‘neurocentric’ vision of the mind. The mind, such views suggest, consists entirely in the skull-bound activity of the predictive brain. In this paper I reject the inference from predictive brains to skull-bound minds. Predictive brains, I hope to show, can be apt participants in larger cognitive circuits. The path is thus cleared for a new synthesis in which predictive brains act as entry-points for ‘extended minds’, and embodiment and action contribute constitutively to knowing contact with the world.