Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness

Noë sets out with great energy to convince us that, "Consciousness is not something that happens inside us. It is something we do or make," in fact, something we do actively in our dynamic interaction with the world around us. It is this fact that explains why it has proven so difficult to create an explanation of the neural basis of consciousness. In this he works on dismantling the view that is it the brain that produces images of our environment - the brain being the sole author of what is commonly thought a "grand illusion." We are treated to interesting, sometimes great discussions of the actual conclusions we can draw from PET scan and fMRI technology, remarkable studies on vision, e.g., seeing ferrets with eyes wired to the brain's hearing areas, Bach-y-Rita's sensory substitution approach to getting the blind to see, Noë's (and O'Regan's) own thoughts on the critical role of action in vision. There is a bold and rare take down or at least re-evaluation of the otherwise worshiped importance of Hubel and Wiesel's findings on various cell classes oriented to different "features" of the world - a foundation of the idea that the brain is constructing the world from elementary features. Add to this a great reval of the notion of special (FFA) cells for recognizing faces, a thought provoking set of considerations on the critical role of habit in learning, skill and thought, and a nice trashing of the concept that the brain is simply creating a virtual reality. All told, this is a very worthwhile read. Its prime weakness is yet in its main thesis. The character of our experience (visual, or auditory, or kinaesthetic...) it is argued (and strongly so), is not a function of the intrinsic character of the sensory stimulation (i.e., of the specific kinds of neurons stimulated) but in the way stimulation varies as a function of movement in relation to the environment. As I move around the table, the table transforms (in perspective) in a lawful way - the way an object in vision (not hearing) should. Implication 1: Connect up your neural net such that it responds lawfully to these transforms - you have vision of the external world. Note that in this conception there is nothing happening in the brain, obviously, that looks like the external world - the kitchen table, the coffee cup, the spoon stirring. Implication 2: We just need to be in relation to this external world, and miraculously, we get an image of it. One sees pretty much the same theme in expositors of Gibson (with whom Noë is aligned), e.g., Barret ( Beyond the Brain: How Body and Environment Shape Animal and Human Minds ), Chemero ( Radical Embodied Cognitive Science ). The first question which begs to be asked: why is this not a specification for a seeing robot? I doubt there is an answer against this. The fact is, the thesis cries for some mechanism, some physical principle which explains this: why, given this action relationship to the environment, is there now an image of the external world? To make this problem concretely clear quickly, I'm just going straight to this: Embed Noë (and Gibson for that matter) in Bergson. Bergson (Matter and Memory, 1896) presciently saw the universal field as a holographic field and the brain as effectively being a modulated reconstructive wave passing through (or resonating within) this field, and thus "specific to" a subset of the field, now, by this selective specification, an "image" of a (past) portion of the ever transforming field. This image is at a scale of time imposed by the brain's underlying dynamics - the fly in Noë's "environment" could be the "buzzing" being of normal scale, a being flapping its wings like a heron, or a crystalline ensemble of whirling particles. The selection principle for a subset out of the mass of holographic information is the relevance to the body's action, and to Bergson - deeply reflective of Noë's relation to action or Gibson's affordance concept - perception is "virtual action." In this holographic reconstructive wave model, where within the brain there are indeed no representations of the external world and no image being produced by or in the brain, we now have a concrete mechanism for explaining the origin of the image of the environment - not a mere abstraction about an "action relationship with the environment." Noë's notion of the proper relation of the external world to action (or Gibson's notion of the body/brain being directly "specific to" the environment) can only gain its needed coherence within some such framework. To make Bergson's model coherent, one needs at least this: a model of time and motion different from that of the current, classic metaphysic of space and time, a different concept of the relation of mind to time, a different notion of memory (where experience is not stored in the brain), consideration of possible scales of time in perception - subjects to which Noë gives virtually no consideration. With these, we would indeed understand why Noë's specification per se could not produce a seeing robot. So, all in all, a great book, but this "active relationship with the world" conception, of which Noë is one of several proponents, struggles with these crying-to-be-answered gaps. It could be so much more powerful would these theorists pay attention to a thinker who was way ahead of them in 1896.

I absolutely agree with the various positive reviews. Noe conclusively shows the impoverished thinking that underlies the ubiquitous conviction that our experience is our brain. This has come to be the underpinning of psychiatry and much of clinical psychology (my field), even though there it is masked by talk about "biosocial" aspects of being, and supplementing "real" therapy (drugs) with suspect talky therapy. Medication, imaging of the brain, neurochemical studies, and so on, are the fields' staples. The dogma is that all this kind of "scientific" work will "eventually" illuminate psychopathology, put it on a solid mechanistic (neurobiological) bases, lead to silver bullets that will eradicate depression, psychosis, character disorders, etc. (of course, careful examination of these kinds of concepts reveals them as questionable, unsupported reifications -- not "real" entities -- like appendicitis). Quantum mechanics and relativity theories ought to make the professionals in the mental health fields more modest, but they do not.Noe does not attempt to offer a real ontological alternative to the material ontology inherent in mechanistic naturalism, but that, probably, is as it should be. A very useful antidote to all sorts of neurobiological nonsense. As the old saying goes, "ignorance is knowing a lot of things that aren't so."Some of the reviewers miss the boar, though. The one that insists that computers do calculate and play chess (because they can beat experts) doesn't seem to understand that they don't! Do watches know anything about time? Does an abacus "calculate"? Computers "play chess" because of the covert homunculi involved: the programmers, and the operator. It is THESE people who compute, play chess, etc.Finally, if one insists on maintaining that the world consits (solely) of the inert, inanimate constituents of natural science-physics, then there is no way to "explain" consciousness. INANIMATE MATTER IS INANIMATE, PERIOD. "Emergence" to acount for the change to animate is sheer hand-waving. The best you can do is correlate, which may be useful in some contexts but highly misleading in others. I myself think an enlightened form of panpsychism points in the right dierction -- see Skrbina's  Panpsychism in the West (Bradford Books) .

Written by brilliant Berkley researcher addressing a basic, the last of Decorates Error in separating cognition from our bodies. Providing evidence of the brain isn't our thinking alone, deeper issues of acton perception, with what we see as bidirectional, basic consciousness is presented in scientific form without loosing his The charming, warm, and caring attitude.Alva Noe has been mentored by some finest intellects, & deals with scientific realities, still unrealized my most researchers. Despite its 2005 first publication, its been released at least twice, latest 2010. A book for all thinking people to bettered understand the mind-Body meld.

This is a wonderful little book. Noë has deliberately avoided 'the jargon and insider-speak, the styles of language and argumentation that already presuppose that one is a member of the cognitive science club' and he has been brilliantly successful in doing so. Having read this book, I was able to go on and read Evan Thompson's much more difficult and comprehensive 'Mind and Life'. Coming back to Noë again, I could see how much he'd synthesised in his easily accessible prose. It's a good compare and contrast too with Andy Clark's 'Supersizing the Mind'. Although apparently a very similar thesis, Clark retains the traditional view of understanding mind in terms of cognitive brain function; he doesn't 'get' the fundamental point that this treats human beings as cognitive devices rather than creatures at home in an environment they 'enact' through their engagement with it. Noë 's thinking is grounded in phenomenology - Merleau-Ponty in particular - and for readers like me who've heard of this kind of philosophy but don't know much about it, it makes a superb introduction. It is much more than a book about neuroscience or even the philosophy of consciousness. It is also a very HUMAN book that as he says tries to show 'that science and humanist styles of thinking must engage with each other'. So it includes telling and touching examples about his immigrant father's loss of his 'life-world' and the man on the train who couldn't understand his 6 year old son's question about the man's dog. Noë practises what he preaches - what reviewer Andrew Ross saw as `ad hominem' folksy rhetoric' appealed to me as a kind of passionate conviction that is too often edited out of the literature of philosophy and science

Alva Noe is a good philosopher, and the argument he presents in this book is worth taking seriously. As a philosopher too (who should disclose that he has traded words and shared parties with Alva), I'm not convinced entirely by his case, but I find the general drift quite persuasive. Essentially, the prevailing orthodoxy that minds are implemented by brains is conceptually lazy and possibly only half the truth, but we have our work cut out trying to go beyond it. Noe has made a brave start. Naturally, there's still an awful lot of mileage in the mind-brain orthodoxy, and much of the hard science in the area would be incomprehensible without it, in some form, but minds extend beyond brains and are sustained in being by more than brains. As an intuition pump here, imagine that minds are like money. Dollar bills and so on implement money, but money is a lot more, even if you exclude collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps and so on as beyond the pale. Minds are part of a huge public institution by which we build our organized and collective appreciation of nature and our place in it. Noe sees something like this (my gloss on the view is of course my own to live down) and gives the view a hearty helping hand. My reservation (hence four stars) is over the rather folksy rhetoric that decorates the book. This creditably personal style makes the hard core argument easier and smoother reading, and many will welcome it for that reason, but for me as a logical purist is was rather ad hominem. Anyway, that said, read this book in conjunction with Andy Clark's Supersizing the Mind. The basic message is the same. This is a message whose time is coming, I think. And Noe has done a great job in putting it out there for all interested readers to enjoy.

Like a good Buddhist challenging ego-centric Westerners to point to where their interior, individuated selves might be, Alva Noe challenges the neuroscientific orthodoxy which tries to nail consciouness to the brain. After all, has anybody ever been found to be in their head? Has any post-mortem revealed an interior self or homunculus? No, most of our lives is out of our heads. Our consciousness is in the world and moves around and has its effects out there, not in here. Being's being in the head is an experientially based presumption of scientists who don't realize how thorough-going their own intellectualism is - and go on to obliviously found whole scientific descriptions on this unexamined starting point; their personal experience of interiority. This book begins deconstructing those unfounded and philosophically [even scientifically] errant presuppositions.Drawing existentially on Maurice Merleau-Ponty and theoretically on contemporary work in the field of situated cognition [which he here makes popular and accessible], Alva Noe begins to establish a legitimately sustained place for consciouness in the processes of the world. Why should I claim information is being processed in my head [where no one has ever actually located information, in spite of trying] when I have a pen and notepad in my hand, on which I am working out an equation? Look, the writing miraculously appears, the very substrate of my thought - there, in the world! Why locate that information processing where it has never been found as such; doing so is a cartesian prejudice. Why say my neurons are the substrate of my memory when I, equally, have images on my laptop? We are outside our heads, or at least contiguous with a world in which divisions of interior and exterior can only ever be relative. To make a cut in the contiguity of cause and effect, as this information arises on the screen, is to lay down a political and experiential marker, delimiting a supposedly independent consciousness. Where are these words? Where is the 'meaning' of these words? In systems biology, there is no privileged level of causation, equally there is no location sustained without the world, that looks at the world and controls it.This brief publication is a good, popularizing punt, but Alva Noe has some way to go yet before he can describe an experience of consciouness, which is both fully fleshed out and established in the continuous material of the world, as well as the present paradigm forces many people, unfortunately, to live in the material inside their heads. However, if you are stuck inside your head - at least partially due to the tyranny of the dualistic divides of orthodox science - this book may help you, to some degree, get out of it.

This is a good book if you're interested in the various perspectives on the brain, the mind, consciousness, expanded consciousness, etc. Of interest to both casual readers and students of philosophy of mind. It's also a good addition to standard course texts for teachers on the philosophy of mind. Clearly written; an easy read accessible to most readers.

This book gives a concise outline of the idea that consciousness derives from the environment outside the brain. It revolves round the author's interpretation of experiments. A study with ferrets showed that if their eyes were connected to their auditory rather than their visual cortex, the animals were able to see. Another study with blind patients involved a device connecting a camera to vibrators attached to the body of the patient. Visual information entering the camera produced vibrations on the skin that were transmitted to the somatosensory cortex. From signals in this area of the brain normally producing tactile experience, the patient was able to judge the size, shape and number of nearby objects, and to pick up the objects.The real query is over the author's interpretation of these studies. His suggestion is that because areas of the brain can be persuaded to process a different modality from their normal one, then it is not the brain that produces the experience.It is hard to see why this should be the case. The author makes much of the fact that the different sensory cortices do not have types of neurons. This is supposed to indicate that the different modalities cannot arise in the brain, but all that looks justified is a statement that different modalities are not a function of types of neurons. The evidence of these studies would rather indicate that neurons can differentiate between varying types of electrical nerve impulses produced by visual, auditory and tactile data.An alternative explanation might be acceptable if there was an attempt here to explain a physical mechanism by which conscious could be generated by the environment outside the brain. It is further surprising that the evidence for correlaltes of consciousness in specific brain processing is not discussed.