Andy Clark

Cognitive Entanglement: Predictive Brains and the Intimacy of Mind and World

This talk is about our ongoing Synergy Grant project ‘Material Minds’. The project seeks to understand the many ways human minds become increasingly entangled with our human-built worlds. More specifically, my target in the talk is a ‘thesis of cognitive entanglement’ according to which the various complex worlds we build and live in fundamentally and non-trivially alter the shape of human thought and reason. Claims of this kind can be found in a wide variety of literatures including philosophy, cognitive science, and cognitive archaeology. But despite this, there is no widely accepted account or model of what cognitive entanglement might involve or exactly how (indeed, if) it could occur. In the talk, I explore the potential for work in predictive processing (active inference) to help plug that gap. Attention, I suggest, is one key resource whose continuous reciprocal interactions with materiality result in cognitive entanglements at multiple scales of space and time.