Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action and the Embodied Mind Andy Clark, University of Edinburgh New York: Oxford University Press, 2016 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 they inhabit, in ways that are sensitive to the regularities of the situations 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’ (cf. p. 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. The book’s ten chapters – each sub-dividing into substantial sub-sections (sometimes as many as eighteen) – cover a vast terrain and touch on many diverse topics of interest to empirical informed philosophy of mind. The topics range from discussions of the best explanation of binocular rivalry; revising our thinking about motor control; learning implementation and design lessons in robotics; getting a grip on mental time travel; rethinking the role of mirror neurons in understanding action; explaining the signature response patterns in schizophrenia; and much more. All of these disparate explorations are part of a single-minded effort to establish the wide-ranging relevance and power of the predictive processing framework. In some cases, this takes the form of showing that framework’s empirical superiority to rivals. In others the aim is to show its great promise and potential, even if only by tantalizingly touching on specific topics. It would be impossible to give detailed review of all of the book’s many rich investigations in a short space, but it is possible to capture and evaluate some of the large- scale action of the book by focusing on its three parts. Part one of the book, ‘The Power of Prediction’, which comprises the first five chapters, presents the rudiments of the predictive processing framework for thinking about mind and cognition. It seeks to demonstrate how that framework offers “an attractive ‘cognitive package deal’ in which perception, understanding, dreaming, memory and imagination may all emerge as variant expressions of the same underlying mechanistic ploy” (p. 107, 137, see also p. xvi). In seeking to integrate these and other phenomena, Clark is utterly clear that his aim is not to provide “yet another ‘new science of the mind’ but something potentially rather better” (p. 10). That ‘something better’ is a way of understanding cognition that serves as: “a meeting point for the best of many previous approaches, combining elements from work in connectionism and artificial neural networks, contemporary cognitive and computational neuroscience, Bayesian approaches to dealing with evidence and uncertainty, robotics, self- organization, and the study of the embodied, environmentally situated mind” (p. 10). The exciting conceit of the predictive processing approach is that it conceives of minds in essentially anticipatory fashion, offering a dramatic reversal of the traditional – sense-model- act – way of understanding minds. Crucially, on the new view, the brain is always poised and