Surfing uncertainty: prediction, action, and the embodied mind

Preface: Meat that predicts

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Guessing games

I: The power of prediction

1. Prediction machines: Two ways to sense the coffee ; Adopting the animal's perspective ; Learning in bootstrap heaven ; Multilevel learning ; Decoding digits ; Dealing with structure ; Predictive processing ; Signalling the news ; Predicting natural scenes ; Binocular rivalry ; Suppression and selective enhancement ; Encoding, inference, and the Bayesian brain ; Getting the gist ; Predictive processing in the brain ; Is silence golden? ; Expecting faces ; When prediction misleads ; Mind turned upside down

2. Adjusting the volume (Noise, signal, attention): Signal spotting ; Hearing bing ; The delicate dance between top-down and bottom-up ; Attention, biased competition, and signal enhancement ; Sensory integration and coupling ; A taste of action ; Gaze allocation: doing what comes naturally ; Circular causation in the perception-attention-action loop ; Mutual assured misunderstanding ; Some worries about precision ; The unexpected elephant ; Some pathologies of precision ; Beyond the spotlight

3.The imaginarium: Construction industries ; Simple seeing ; Cross-modal and multimodal effects ; Meta-modal effects ; Perceiving omissions ; Expectations and conscious perception ; The perceiver as imaginer ; 'Brain reading' during imagery and perception ; Inside the dream factory ; PIMMS and the past ; Towards mental time travel ; A cognitive package deal

II: Embodying prediction

4. Prediction-action machines: Staying ahead of the break ; Ticklish tales ; Forward models (finessing time) ; Optimal feedback control ; Active inference ; Simplified control ; Beyond efference copy ; Doing without cost functions ; Action-oriented predictions ; Predictive robotics ; Perception-cognition-action engines

5. Precision engineering: Sculpting the flow: Double agents ; Towards maximal context-sensitivity ; Hierarchy reconsidered ; Sculpting effective connectivity ; Transient assemblies ; Understanding action ; Making mirrors ; Whodunit? ; Robot futures ; The restless, rapidly responsive brain ; Celebrating transience

6. Beyond fantasy: Expecting the world ; Controlled hallucinations and virtual realities ; The surprising scope of structured probabilistic learning ; Ready for action ; Implementing affordance competition ; Interaction-based joints in nature ; Evidentiary boundaries and the ambiguous appeal to inference ; Don't fear the demon ; Hello world ; Hallucination as uncontrolled perception ; Optimal illusions ; Safer penetration ; Who estimates the estimators ; gripping tales

7. Expecting ourselves (Creeping up on consciousness): The space of human experience ; Warning lights ; The spiral inference and experience ; Schizophrenia and smooth pursuit eye movements ; Simulating smooth pursuit ; Disturbing the network (smooth pursuit) ; Tickling redux ; Less sense, more action? ; Disturbing the network (Sensory attenuation) ; 'Psychogenic disorders' and placebo effects ; Disturbing the network ('psychogenic' effects) ; Autism, noise, and signal ; Conscious presence ; Emotion ; Fear in the night ; A nip of the hard stuff

III: Scaffolding prediction

8. The lazy predictive brain: Surface tensions ; Productive laziness ; Ecological balance and baseball ; Embodied flow ; Frugal action-oriented prediction machines ; Mix 'n' match strategy selection ; Balancing accuracy and complexity ; Back to baseball ; Extended predictive minds ; Escape from the darkened room ; Play, novelty, and self-organized instability ; Fast, cheap, and flexible too

9. Being human: Putting prediction in its place ; Reprise: self-organizing around prediction error ; Efficiency and 'The Lord's Prior' ; Chaos and spontaneous cortical activity ; Designer environments and cultural practices ; White lines ; Innovating for innovation ; Words as tools for manipulating precision ; Predicting with others ; Enacting our worlds ; Representations: breaking good? ; Prediction in the wild

10. Conclusions: The future of prediction: Embodied prediction machines ; Problems, puzzles, and pitfalls

Appendix 1: Bare Bayes

Appendix 2: The free-energy formulation.