Why read The Experience Machine?

Book cover of The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality

Book description

For as long as we've studied the mind, we've believed that information flowing from our senses determines what our mind perceives. But as our understanding has advanced in the last few decades, a hugely powerful new view has flipped this assumption on its head. The brain is not a passive…

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Experience Machine as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Susan Blackmore

Author

I loved this book because it changed the way I see the world. Andy describes the latest thinking about perception as ‘controlled hallucination.’ What we are doing when we see is making predictions about the world and then updating them as the information comes in.

Our nervous system is a multi-layered hierarchical predictive processing network, and our experiences are the hallucinations it creates while trying to make sense of the world.

I found all my experience changed – and is still changing – by beginning to understand the theory of predictive processing. This applies as much to my daily meditation…

From Susan's 3 favorite reads in 2023.