Experience Machine

What Hacker News says

1. macrolimeNov 2023
   Just finished Being You by Anil Seth and The experience machine by Andy Clark. Both great popular science book on current neuroscience and consciousness research.
   thread
2. wraptileNov 2023
   It's not only language or some tasks - it's literally everything. Predictive Processing Theory proposes that our whole model is predicting future and only then confirming it through our input signals (eyes, ears etc). I highly recommend The Experience Machine by Andy Clark which explains and arguments this theory very convincingly to the point where I firmly believe it to be true.
   thread
3. ultrasandwichJul 2023
   I learned a lot about this kind of predictive modeling function of our brains from _The Experience Machine_ by Andy Clark. He was on Sean Carroll's podcast not too long ago and they had a great conversation on this topic.
   thread
4. yborisSep 2026
   The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality by Andy Clark

   So far read about 20%, seems like a lovely theory tying together a lot about how the mind works.

   thread
5. jlhawnJan 2026
   Now I can't stop thinking about _The Experience Machine_ by Andy Clark. It theorizes that this is how humans navigate and experience the real world: Our brains generate what we think the world around is like and our senses don't so much directly process visual information but instead act like a kind of loss function for our internal simulations. Then we use that error to update our internal model of the world.

   In this view, we are essentially living inside a high-fidelity generative model. Our brains are constantly 'hallucinating' a predicted reality based on past experience and current goals. The data from our senses isn't the source of the image; it's the error signal used to calibrate that internal model. Much like Genie 3 uses latent actions and frames to predict the next state of a world, our brains use 'Active Inference' to minimize the gap between what we expect and what we experience.

   It suggests that our sense of 'reality' isn't a direct recording of the world, but a highly optimized, interactive simulation that is continuously 'regularized' by the photons hitting our retinas.

   Show morethread
6. jlhawnJan 2026
   the book I mentioned (_The Experience Machine_ by Andy Clark) talks about this.
   thread