Phantom phone buzzes? Painless mosquito bites? Toy masks flipped inside-out? It might be your brain bringing order to its complex world. In episode 109 of Overthink, Ellie and David interview cognitive philosopher Andy Clark, whose cutting edge work on perception builds off theories of computation to offer an intriguing new model of mind and experience. He explains why the predictive processing model promises a healthier relation to neurodiversity, and they all explore its real-world applicat...
Hello and welcome to Overthink, the podcast.
Where two philosophers like to share exciting, cutting edge research from fellow philosophers now and again.
I'm Dr.
David Pena Guzman.
And I'm Dr.
Ellie Anderson.
There's been a real revolution, I would say,
in the cognitive sciences in recent years, which has constituted a turn towards consciousness.
In the 1990s, talking about consciousness within cognitive science was somewhat taboo.
But in recent decades, a lot of cognitive scientists have become interested in the problem and nature of consciousness.
And this is good news for philosophers
because philosophers have very long been interested in the problem and nature of consciousness.
And so there have been some really exciting dialogues in recent decades between cognitive scientists
and philosophers and people working at the intersection of those two,
people who are trained in both philosophy and cognitive science, including our guest for today and most recently,
I would say I don't know what your experience has been of this, David,
but in the circles that I run in, in phenomenology, studying selfhood and consciousness, really,
model of what's known as predictive processing has come to the fore where the idea is that the brain's primary purpose,
obviously is to keep us alive, where keeping us alive means predicting what surrounds us in the world.
Simply put, experience is a kind of prediction or set of predictions.