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jealcalat's review against another edition
3.0
No es un libro de divulgación, por lo que yo esperaba un tratamiento más técnico de algunos temas. No por ser pretencioso, pero muchas explicaciones habrían sido más sencillas con el uso de ecuaciones, pero el autor divaga mucho tratándose de explicar sin usarlas, y por momentos sólo es superficial.
clivemeister's review against another edition
3.0
How do we know what's going on in the world? How do people come to take action based on that understanding - be it catching a ball, typing a book review, learning long division, or building a hadron collider (of any size)? Andy Clark sets out a compelling story of how all this has been coming together in neurophysiology over the last few years into a model based on a hierarchy of processing elements, from the raw sensations upwards, with feedback from the higher levels back to the lower ones.
This model is called 'predictive processing', and if offers a compelling, unified view of how brains seem to work in the world. Crucially, the hierarchies of processing layers in brains don't just sit there waiting for input, but rather they are always predicting what they expect to see coming up from the lower level, noticing any errors, and passing those errors up to the next level whilst simultaneously passing back down an updated prediction as to what might be going on. This means we actively build and re-build models as we go and as we act, rather than waiting for a complete model to become available and then deciding how to act.
The story told here is compelling, detailed, and fits with our emerging understanding both of the data from animal (including human) experiments and of computational models such as neural networks. It explains all sorts of things like dreams, saccade movements of our eyes, and some of the mechanics of language processing. It's a great story, and I suspect the truth as we eventually uncover it will be more or less along these lines.
Having said all of which, I didn't find this an easy book to read. Andy Clark is a Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at Edinburgh University, and even as a sciency person myself, I found his prose style dry and, well, academic. There were a few typos that I spotted, and a bit of a heavier hand with the editing might have helped. My complaints here vary from his desire to make up new words like "surprisal" where we already have perfectly good ones like "suprise", to mixing between a description of hierarchies as sometimes going from front to back, and sometimes going from low to high - occasionally using both in the same sentence. It meant I could only read a few pages at a time before I lost the thread - although I would say there were helpful summary sections at the beginning and end of each chapter, which helped me keep my grip on things, more or less. My favourite of these was for Chapter 8, The Lazy Predictive Brain, which opened up talking about a famous 1989 paper on robotics called "Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control". Which always sounds like a fun Saturday night to me! (or perhaps that's just my brain hierarchy switching from up-down to front-back...)
The book is dense with footnotes and references, which is great if you're another person in this field, but less useful if you're a more general reader. So although this was a very interesting book in many ways, and I suspect really really good if you're in this field, I'm only going to give it 3 1/2 stars for myself, rounded down to three for prose density.
This model is called 'predictive processing', and if offers a compelling, unified view of how brains seem to work in the world. Crucially, the hierarchies of processing layers in brains don't just sit there waiting for input, but rather they are always predicting what they expect to see coming up from the lower level, noticing any errors, and passing those errors up to the next level whilst simultaneously passing back down an updated prediction as to what might be going on. This means we actively build and re-build models as we go and as we act, rather than waiting for a complete model to become available and then deciding how to act.
The story told here is compelling, detailed, and fits with our emerging understanding both of the data from animal (including human) experiments and of computational models such as neural networks. It explains all sorts of things like dreams, saccade movements of our eyes, and some of the mechanics of language processing. It's a great story, and I suspect the truth as we eventually uncover it will be more or less along these lines.
Having said all of which, I didn't find this an easy book to read. Andy Clark is a Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at Edinburgh University, and even as a sciency person myself, I found his prose style dry and, well, academic. There were a few typos that I spotted, and a bit of a heavier hand with the editing might have helped. My complaints here vary from his desire to make up new words like "surprisal" where we already have perfectly good ones like "suprise", to mixing between a description of hierarchies as sometimes going from front to back, and sometimes going from low to high - occasionally using both in the same sentence. It meant I could only read a few pages at a time before I lost the thread - although I would say there were helpful summary sections at the beginning and end of each chapter, which helped me keep my grip on things, more or less. My favourite of these was for Chapter 8, The Lazy Predictive Brain, which opened up talking about a famous 1989 paper on robotics called "Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control". Which always sounds like a fun Saturday night to me! (or perhaps that's just my brain hierarchy switching from up-down to front-back...)
The book is dense with footnotes and references, which is great if you're another person in this field, but less useful if you're a more general reader. So although this was a very interesting book in many ways, and I suspect really really good if you're in this field, I'm only going to give it 3 1/2 stars for myself, rounded down to three for prose density.
d6y's review against another edition
5.0
This is the argument that minds are prediction machines. They are not in the business of receiving inputs and producing outputs. Instead, there is a back and forth (and sideways) flow: predictions shape perception, and action and perception influences prediction. The neat phrase is that "perception is controlled hallucination."
I should note that this is not a pop-sci book. It's quite a slog in terms of detail. You're going to need some background in cognitive science or philosophy of mind to make the most of it.
I should note that this is not a pop-sci book. It's quite a slog in terms of detail. You're going to need some background in cognitive science or philosophy of mind to make the most of it.
ksotala's review
4.0
Invaluable and insightful theoretical explanation; at the same time, the writing tends to repeat itself and keep talking about how beautiful the brain is according to this theory. Was definitely worth reading for the content, but the style felt like it could have used an editor; frequently had to force myself to keep reading.
loppear's review
4.0
An enthusiastic and rigorous roundup of the "predictive processing" view of the nervous system, pulling together conceptual, imaging, psych, and computational/robotics studies to make the case for a multi-layered bi-directional feedback model (no surprise yet) at all levels where the key insight is that bottom-up feedback to higher generative models takes the form of dynamically-context-weighted *prediction error* signals.
Really excellent wide-ranging applications are given from bootstrapping learning from sensations, motor control to feelings to language, to schizophrenia to autism to visual tracking and relying on other humans... there's a lot more in here, jargon heavy but engaging reading within that.
Really excellent wide-ranging applications are given from bootstrapping learning from sensations, motor control to feelings to language, to schizophrenia to autism to visual tracking and relying on other humans... there's a lot more in here, jargon heavy but engaging reading within that.
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