Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness
By:
Alva Noe
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Alva Noë is one of a new breedpart philosopher, part cognitive scientist, part neuroscientistwho are radically altering the study of consciousness by asking difficult questions and pointing out obvious flaws in the current science. In Out of Our Heads, he restates and reexamines the problem of consciousness, and then proposes a startling solution: Do away with the two hundred-year-old paradigm that places consciousness within the confines of the brain. Our culture is obsessed with the brainhow it perceives; how it remembers; how it determines our intelligence, our morality, our likes and our dislikes. It’s widely believed that consciousness itself, that Holy Grail of science and philosophy, will soon be given a neural explanation. And yet, after decades of research, only one proposition about how the brain makes us conscioushow it gives rise to sensation, feeling, and subjectivityhas emerged unchallenged: We don’t have a clue. In this inventive work, Noë suggests that rather than being something that happens inside us, consciousness is something we do. Debunking an outmoded philosophy that holds the scientific study of consciousness captive, Out of Our Heads is a fresh attempt at understanding our minds and how we interact with the world around us. Alva Noë is a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is also a member of the Institute of Cognitive and Brain Sciences. His previous book, Action in Perception, was published in 2004. Alva Noë is one of a new breedpart philosopher, part cognitive scientist, part neuroscientistwho are radically altering the study of consciousness by asking difficult questions and pointing out obvious flaws in the current science. In Out of Our Heads, he restates and reexamines the problem of consciousness, and then proposes a startling solution: Do away with the two hundred-year-old paradigm that places consciousness within the confines of the brain.
Our culture is obsessed with the brainhow it perceives; how it remembers; how it determines our intelligence, our morality, our likes and our dislikes. It’s widely believed that consciousness itself, that Holy Grail of science and philosophy, will soon be given a neural explanation. And yet, after decades of research, only one proposition about how the brain makes us conscioushow it gives rise to sensation, feeling, and subjectivityhas emerged unchallenged: We don’t have a clue.
In this inventive work, Noë suggests that rather than being something that happens inside us, consciousness is something we do. Debunking an outmoded philosophy that holds the scientific study of consciousness captive, Out of Our Heads is a fresh attempt at understanding our minds and how we interact with the world around us. "To be conscious, Alva Noë claims, is to be 'awake, aroused, alert,' and neuroscientists are wrong to imagine that they can reproduce consciousness in a petri dish. A philosopher-scientist, Noë aims to replace neuroscience's reductionism. He compares the development of consciousness to a trickle of water that carves a tiny path in the land; with time, the path draws more water to it, eventually making it impossible for other water not to flow down that path. Similarly, cognitive habits grow in response to our needs and interests. Noë is an alluring writer . . . One comes away from the book agreeing that an 'explanatory gap' separates conscious experience from the simple firing of neurons, that reductionism is indeed dead, yet wondering what accounts for our conscious engagement with the world. Noë's partial answer is summarized in the book's preface: 'Only one proposition about how the brain makes us conscious . . . has emerged unchallenged: we don't have a clue.'"Ruth Levy Guyer, The Washington Post "To be conscious, Alva Noë claims, is to be 'awake, aroused, alert,' and neuroscientists are wrong to imagine that they can reproduce consciousness in a petri dish. A philosopher-scientist, Noë aims to replace neuroscience's reductionism. He compares the development of consciousness to a trickle of water that carves a tiny path in the land; with time, the path draws more water to it, eventually making it impossible for other water not to flow down that path. Similarly, cognitive habits grow in response to our needs and interests. Noë is an alluring writer . . . One comes away from the book agreeing that an 'explanatory gap' separates conscious experience from the simple firing of neurons, that reductionism is indeed dead, yet wondering what accounts for our conscious engagement with the world. Noë's partial answer is summarized in the book's preface: 'Only one proposition about how the brain makes us conscious . . . has emerged unchallenged: we don't have a clue.'"Ruth Levy Guyer, The Washington Post
"Alva Noë, a philosopher at UC Berkeley, argues that consciousness remains a mystery because we've been looking in the wrong place. In his provocative and lucid new book, Noë writes that scientists have been so eager to locate the mind in the brain that they've neglected to consider the possibility that our mind might not be inside our head . . . Then where is it? Don't worry, Noë isn't an old-fashioned Cartesian dualist: He doesn't believe that our consciousness is some metaphysical gift from God. Instead, he suggests that who we are and what we know is inseparable from where we are and what we're doing: 'Consciousness is not something the brain achieves on its own,' Noë writes. 'Consciousness requires the joint operation of the brain, body and world . . . It is an achievement of the whole animal in its environmental context.' Noë sells this audacious idea with a series of effective metaphors. For instance, he begins the book by comparing consciousness to a dollar bill. He notes that it would be silly to search for the physical correlates of 'monetary value.' After all, the meaning of money isn't in the paper, or the green ink, or the picture of George Washington. Instead, it exists in the institutions and practices that give the paper meaning. Similarly, our awareness of reality doesn't depend entirely on what's happening inside the brain, but is a side effect of how we, as individuals, interact with the wider world. Although Noë is a philosopher, his argument is carefully built on scientific evidence, as he considers everything from studies of cells in the visual cortex to examples of neural plasticity. In each instance, he interprets the data in a startlingly original fashion, such as when he uses experiments showing that ferrets can learn to 'see' with cells in their auditory cortex as proof that 'there isn't anything special about the cells in the so-called visual cortex that makes them visual. Cells in the auditory cortex can be visual just as well. There is no necessary connection between the character of experience and the behavior of certain cells.' Certainly, many of the scientists cited by Noë would disagree with his interpretations, but that's part of what makes this book so important: It's an audacious retelling of the standard story, an exploration of the mind that questions some of our most cherished assumptions about what the mind is. In many respects, Noë's ideas mark a return to an earlier tradition of American philosophy, represented by people like William James and John Dewey. These thinkers insisted that the attempt to reduce the mind to its fleshy source was inherently flawed: The brain is part of an organism, and that organism is part of a culture. 'Man is more than a psychical machine,' Dewey wrote. 'His life is bound up with the life of society.' For the most part, modern scientists brushed aside such skepticism, as they embarked on an epic search for the cellular circuits that give rise to our conscious mind. Although much has been learned, little has been found. Perhaps, as Noë argues, that's because we're searching on our inside for something that doesn't exist."Jonah Lehrer, San Francsico Chronicle
"For a decade or so, brain studies have seemed on the brink of answering questions about the nature of consciousness, the self, thought and experience. But they never do, argues University of California at Berkeley philosopher Alva Noë, because these things are not found solely in the brain itself. In his new book, Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons From the Biology of Consciousness, Noë attacks the brave new world of neuroscience and its claims that brain mechanics can explain consciousness . . . Noe's conversational style is gentle, attentive and easygoing."Gordy Slack, Salon
"Alva Noë makes a powerful and persuasive case for the view that a several centuries old picture of the mind as an entity 'inside the head' has misled both lay and scientific thought about the nature of consciousness and, more broadly, the nature of the mind-world relation. Ranging over topics in philosophy, psychology, and neurology, the chapters of this book combine sophistication and availability to a general reader. His alternative to the misleading picture is non-trivial, and while his views are sure to be controversial, most of what he says is true and all of it is original and important to think about.”Hilary Putnam, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, Harvard University
As colorful and hard-hitting as its title suggests, this is an important and provocative work that challenges some of the deepest assumptions guiding the contemporary scientific study of conscious experience.”Andy Clark, Professor of Logic and Metaphysics, Edinburgh University<...
Publisher: Hill and Wang
Release Date: 2009-02-17
Customer Review: 3 out of 5
a decent read, felt lacking - This book is a rather quick read, one that I feel is worth consideration. The author challenges the notion that consciousness is generated by the brain, and wonders if such a view even makes sense. He argues that perception is an enactment (a realization, perhaps? My word, not his) of a given context - the organism as a whole and its relation to its environment. Consciousness, as such, cannot be located anywhere in the complex of neurons. He offers some hard evidences to support this inference. Nothing in the way of proof, but enough to aid and articulate his view.
All this obviously challenges the normal idea we have of what a self is. It is not an autonomous agent in a driver's seat somewhere in the brain (though I'm quite sure this image is outdated for most researchers, this is nothing new although the author seems to make it out to be). Rather the self is the whole context of being, the whole range of what the organism "has access" or is "open to".
However, I'm a bit disappointed that he never actually seems to clearly define what consciousness is according to his theory. Perhaps that was his point, and indeed he writes 'consciousness is not a thing at all'. Perhaps he is trying to argue that there really is no problem at all. Perhaps. And if I'm saying 'perhaps', it means I didn't find it clear either way. At any rate, the author's definition of consciousness as an 'enactment' of the whole organism seem unsatisfying, not fully baked. Perhaps it would go beyond the philosophy of mind and into pure metaphysics, but at certain points he seems to be doing just that, anyway. Why doesn't he just follow through with his reasoning and say that the world itself is experiential and that quality is in the very makeup of reality? At least it would have given me a clear understanding of where he is coming from, but he never seems to actually get at the matter, rather, he goes round about it the long way, with the first chapter devoted to the theorizing about other minds, and continues on with too many anecdotes and restatements of the same phrases. As brief as this book is, for the actual substance, it could have been shorter.
I agree that it makes no sense to speak of consciousness as something the brain just generates. Nobody has ever demonstrated in the slightest how an arrangement of neurons can magically generate qualia, experience, and consciousness. I think the problem is insurmountable in principle because we are speaking about something too close.
Customer Review: 5 out of 5
Individualism considered - Noe's ideas are a good start on breaking the peculiar Western need to locate consciousness in a particular physical place. If I understand correctly, he locates "mind" in the interactions of the brain with the world.
My own sense, and I don't have it well developed, is that we need to go further out, and begin to see mind as including what Durkheim called "social facts". I doubt it will happen soon, due to our delusions of atomism in the social world. We seem to be stuck with the idea that each of us is, say, a pool ball, complete with mind and brain, and that we bounce around, hitting the cushions or each other, and have no enduring connections with any. Noe makes a start toward working out the goofiness of that view.
Customer Review: 1 out of 5
Noe Pseudoscience - I should have stopped when the author tried to argue the lack of separation between science and humanities disciplines. The whole book uses irrelevant and erroneously interpreted scientific examples to support half-baked positions.
Customer Review: 1 out of 5
Analytically Fatuous; Synthetically Vacuous - The author's approach throughout is to set up straw man arguments supposedly representing modern neuroscientific orthodoxy and then purporting to knock them down. The problem is that author Noe either does not understand or misrepresents most of the arguments he pretends to counter, and then fails to refute them convincingly (or often even coherently) anyway. As for positive ideas of his own on cognitive neuroscience, the author remains frustratingly vague, where not downright confused, only achieving clarity when he states the obvious.
This seemed as though it could have been such an interesting book but, alas, the author basically has nothing. Nor does he help matters by his somewhat arrogant rhetorical style, a seeming substitute for applying more rigor to his own thinking.
Customer Review: 1 out of 5
Philosophy of consciousness - The book title says, "Lessos from the Biology of consciousness" which led me to belive this would relate to biology. Instead it is a philosophical refutation of biology. The author is Professor of Philosophy, rather than a scientist. He even finds it necessary to define what *he* means by "consciousness", saying on page 8: "In this book I use the term 'consciousness' to mean, roughly, experience. And I think of experience, boradly, as encompassing thinking, feeling, and the fact that a world 'shows up' for us in perception. Many writers have sought to define terms more narrowly than this. ... The contrast is between planning and carrying out an action, for example, and, say, experiencing the taste of licorice. ... I argue [that] computers can't think largely for the same reasons that brains can't. Meaningful thought arises only for the whole animal dynamically engaged with its environment, or so I contend. And indeed the same is true for the quality of our conscious episodes. The taste of licorice is not something that happens in our brains (although it is true that when we eat licorice, we do so by putting it in our mouths.)"
Good grief. This author maintains that "brains can't think". I suppose this is profound philosophical stuff, but it is complicated to try to follow all the specialized terminology. And the payoff, apparently, is to reject the idea that a brain has anything to do with consciousness. I skimmed the book, since this wasn't at all what I was interested in.
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