Benji

• Contrary to the standard belief that our senses are a kind of passive window onto the world, what is emerging is a picture of an ever-active brain that is always striving to predict what the world might currently have to offer. Those predictions then structure and shape the whole of human experience, from the way we interpret a person’s facial expression, to our feelings of pain, to our plans for an outing to the cinema.

• Nothing we do or experience — if the theory is on track — is untouched by our own expectations. Instead, there is a constant give-and-take in which what we experience reflects not just what the world is currently telling us, but what we — consciously or nonconsciously — were expecting it to be telling us. One consequence of this is that 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.

• Emanating from the mind’s powerful predictive faculty is the haunting inevitability of personal responsibility for shaping our own experience. Centuries after Milton admonished in Paradise Lost that “the mind is its own place, and in it self can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n,” Clark writes in a sentiment of especial poignancy in the context of our present reckoning with consciousness and artificial intelligence:

• Human minds are not elusive, ghostly inner things. They are seething, swirling oceans of prediction, continuously orchestrated by brain, body, and world. We should be careful what kinds of material, digital, and social worlds we build, because in building those worlds we are building our own minds too.

The “insights” takeaways are very good at summing this up:

“Takeaways:

• Prediction is the new central paradigm for how society allocates attention, resources, and meaning.

• Modernism focused on unified identities and progress; postmodernism decomposed meaning into combinatorial renderings; prediction retools meaning as forward-looking bets.

• Technology, especially AI and prediction markets, amplifies our ability to forecast and materially commit to outcomes, reshaping culture and economics.

• Public prediction and forecasting art (as in memes, NFTs, and viral moments) becomes a new form of cultural production and ownership.

• Prediction contracts could function like patents did for earlier eras, providing a shared scaffold for progress in the predictive age”