FOR RENÉ DESCARTES, minds were essentially thinking (or feeling) things. For the founding fathers of behaviorism, minds were identical with behaviors—talking, habits, dispositions to act in one way or another. More recently, minds have been imagined as a kind of computer: the software running on the hardware of the brain.
For Andy Clark, a cognitive scientist and philosopher at the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom, minds are first and foremost prediction machines. “Instead of constantly expending large amounts of energy on processing incoming sensory signals,” he writes in , “the bulk of what the brain does is learn and maintain a model of body and world.” Our mind/brain is “a kind of constantly running simulation of
