Surfing uncertainty: prediction, action, and the embodied mind

How is it that thoroughly physical material beings such as ourselves can think, dream, feel, create and understand ideas, theories and concepts? How does mere matter give rise to all these non-material mental states, including consciousness itself? An answer to this central question of our existence is emerging at the busy intersection of neuroscience, psychology, artificial intelligence, and robotics.

Preface: Meat that predicts -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction: Guessing games -- I: The power of prediction -- 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 -- 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 -- The imaginarium: Construction industries ; Simple seeing ; Cross-modal and…