Last night's discussion on neuroscience reminded me that I want to dive back into Andy Clark's Surfing Uncertainty where he posits that "Perceiving, imagining, understanding, and acting are now bundled together, emerging as different aspects and manifestations of the same underlying prediction-driven, uncertainty-sensitive, machinery". Now that is a high-density sentence if I've seen one!
When I first bought this book a few years back, even the preface and introduction read like this to me:
Thankfully, after a few years of further exploration and many interest coffee chats and weekly discussion groups, the redactions have mostly gone away! Though it's still so high context writing that sometimes I find myself trying to look directly at the curve below:
That said, I'm enjoying the challenge, even if a page of this book takes 5x as long as a page of basically anything else I've read; the one exception may be reading a heavily-annotated edition of a James Joyce novel - no clue which one at this point.
While I'm still just in the first section, something intuitively feels right about the brain simply being the machinery that runs a complex process which is multideterminant as varied in outputs (some action; some learning; some evaluating). I'm curious to see how far into the math this book gets, and how they might weight different outputs. For example, does every thought generated get measured against prediction for perception, imagination, understanding, and action? How do these weights change as we spend more of our lives in one thought pattern than another?
Perhaps the most important, or at the very least, the most impactful question: is this a unified theory which explains all the phenomena that we have observed and studied in more narrowly-defined cases, but not one that directly unlocks new ways of improving our thought processes and how we interact with the world? Or is this a truly new paradigm which has promise to change how we engage with ourselves and the world?
Like most things, it's likely a bit of both. More to come on this as I dive into it further!
With thanks to: our weekly discussion group and many coffee chats with Bryan covering these topics
Written from home:
While listening to: some mild tinnitus but mostly the calm silence at home
