Philosopher of Mind Andy Clark on the Power of Expectations and How the Mind Reveals Truth – The Marginalian

Attention is less a lens on the world than a mirror of the mind. “My experience is what I am willing to attend to,” wrote William James in his seminal book on mindfulness in the last years of the nineteenth century. In the past, we have discovered what “unintentional, unapologetic” attention is, how much it shapes our experience of reality. But we are just beginning to discover that, far from being a passive observer of the external world, our attention is its active creator as the brain makes continuous conscious and unconscious predictions of what it expects to find when it looks, and you get just that; we are just beginning to understand how right Thoreau was when, in Jacob's time, he observed that “we hear and grasp only what we already know.”

That is the philosopher of knowledge Andy Clark checks in The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality (public library) – an enlightening investigation of the human brain as a predictive machine that evolved to create reality as a combination of sensory input and anticipation, full of implications for neuroscience, psychology, medicine, mental health, neurodiversity, the relationship between the body and the self, and the way we live our lives.

Clark writes:

Contrary to the common belief that our senses are a kind of passive window to the world, what emerges is a picture of an always-active brain constantly striving to predict what the world has to offer at the moment. Those predictions then shape and shape all human experience, from how we interpret facial expressions, our feelings of pain, to our plans to go to the movies.

Nothing we do or experience – if the theory is on track – is not affected by our expectations. Instead, there is a constant give and take that our experiences reflect not only what the world is telling us right now, but what we – consciously or unconsciously – expected it to tell us. One result of this is that we never simply see what “really is,” exposed to what we expect or restricted by what we have experienced. Instead, all human experience is a phantom – a product of deep-seated predictions.

Because these predictions are informed by our past experiences, the truth is not how the present man interprets the world but how the Russian doll we carry around – all the people we've ever met, and all the experiences we've had – builds the world before his eyes. Our sensorium is a constantly running simulation of ourselves. Clark traces this predictive process as it unfolds in the meeting place of motivation and expectation:

Incoming sensors help correct errors in forecasting, but forecasts are in the driver's seat now. This means that what we see today is very much a reflection of what we experienced yesterday, and every day before that. Every part of our daily experience comes to us filtered through hidden webs of assumptions – best mental expectations based on our past histories.

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When the brain strongly predicts a certain sight, sound, or feeling, that prediction plays a role in shaping what we seem to see, hear, or feel.

Emotions, feelings, and even planning are all based on guesswork as well. Stress, anxiety, and fatigue all reflect changes in the hidden impulses that shape how we feel. Change those predictions (for example, by “re-creating” the situation using different words) and our experience itself changes.

At the heart of this similarity is the realization that changing our expectations changes our experience – not in a New Age way, but in a neurocognitive way. Looking for the opportunity to “hack our own predictive minds,” which Bruce Lee put in his insistence that “you'll never get more out of life than you expect,” Clark notes:

Since experience is always shaped by our expectations, there is an opportunity to improve our lives by changing some of those expectations, and the confidence they are held to.

Both the kind of expectations we hold and the confidence we hold are shaped by a constellation of biological and psychological factors, from brain structure and neurochemistry to environment and personal history. Drawing on a larger body of research, Clark explores how the brain's unconscious compulsion to predict information shapes everything from our most basic feelings of heat and pain to our most complex experiences of self-consciousness and transcendence, revealing our brains to be not passive receptors but “active systems that are constantly awaiting signals from the body and the world.” You write:

Seeing is finding predictions that best fit sensory evidence. To act is to change the world to fit one of those predictions… It is this deep harmony between prediction and action that positions the predictive brain as the perfect internal organ to create extended minds – minds that are enhanced and augmented by the use of tools, technology, and the complex social world in which we live and work. Expanded minds are possible because the predictive brain automatically seeks actions that will improve our knowledge states, reducing uncertainty as we approach our goals (highly predicted future states). When such actions become part of adaptive systems that require resources that are powerful, reliable, and fully integrated into our daily ways of dealing with the world, we become beings whose cognitive resources are active beyond that of the biological brain alone.

What emerges from the mind's powerful predictive intelligence is the tragic inevitability of personal responsibility for shaping our own experience. Centuries after Milton admonished Paradise Lost that “the mind is its own place, and of itself it can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven,” writes Clark with a special sense of sadness in the context of our current reckoning with knowledge and artificial intelligence:

The human mind is not a mysterious, internal ghost. They are hot, churning oceans of prediction, constantly being programmed by brain, body, and earth. We have to be aware of what kinds of physical, digital, and social things we are building, because in building those worlds we are building our own minds as well.

In the remainder of the Hobby MachineClark continues to explore how conscious expectations and unconscious predictions affect human experiences as diverse as chronic pain and mental illness, and what we can do to hack these mental compulsions to improve our suffering and increase our potential. Fill it with the fascinating science of the expanded mind, then revisit Mary Oliver on what it means to pay attention and Iris Murdoch on how to uncover the universe.