Abstract
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Brains do not sit back and receive information from the world, form truth evaluable
representations of it, and only then work out and implement action plans. Instead, tirelessly
and proactively, our brains are forever trying to look ahead in order to ensure
that we have an adequate practical grip on the world in the here and now. Focused primarily
on action and intervention, their basic work is to make the best possible predictions
about what the world is throwing at us. The job of brains is to aid the organisms
that they inhabit, in ways that are sensitive to the regularities of the situations that
those organisms inhabit. Brains achieve this by driving activity that is dynamically
and interactively bound up with, and sensitive to, the causal structure of the world on
multiple spatial and temporal scales. Understanding brains as doing fundamentally predictive
work of this sort—as ‘action oriented engagement machines’ [300]—is perfectly
in tune with the recent trends of conceiving of cognition as embodied, ecologically
situated, extended, and enculturated. These are the main messages of Surfing Uncertainty.