The Experience Machine: Cognitive Philosopher Andy Clark on the Power of Expectation and How the Mind Renders Reality

“We are never simply seeing what’s ‘really there,’ stripped bare of our own anticipations or insulated from our own past experiences. Instead, all human experience is part phantom — the product of deep-set predictions.”

Attention is less a lens on the world than a mirror for the mind. “My experience is what I agree to attend to,” William James wrote in his foundational treatise on attention in the final years of the nineteenth century. In the epoch since, we have discovered just what an “intent...