Hélio Steven’s Reviews > Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind > Status Update
Hélio Steven
is on page 146 of 416
LONG overdue, but finally got myself around re-starting it. As is known, it's much more technical than The Experience Machine, but all the more fascinating because of that. The nitty-gritty is indispensible for a real taste of just how powerful and promising PP is. Clark's constant emphasis on action-prediction loops and on integration with enactive/embodied cognition are major pluses here too. Beautiful stuff.
— Jan 16, 2026 10:01AM
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Hélio’s Previous Updates
Hélio Steven
is on page 194 of 416
And not only that, if you take active inference seriously and still wanna deploy a Cartesian skepticism argument, you'll have to grant that the very environment which the active PP-agent exploits is something besides the brain doing its guessing, something Matrix-style.
— Jan 29, 2026 02:40PM
Hélio Steven
is on page 194 of 416
... all that matters to the fundamental role embodied engagement with the world is to show that this is more empirically adequate than the "reconstructive inner model". if one wants one can still entertain Cartesian doubts, but embodied-PP lends no extra support here.
— Jan 29, 2026 02:37PM
Hélio Steven
is on page 194 of 416
Great treat: he's dispelled a philosophical spin sometimes given to PP, namely to take it as showing that we can't "really know" the world because all the brain does is inferential work about hidden causes. He argues this is an illicit move from the scientific context to the philosophical one: ...
— Jan 29, 2026 02:36PM
