Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness by Alva Noe - 9780809074655 - Compare Prices on New & Used Textbooks, Cheap Textbooks

		Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness by Alva Noe ISBN-10: 9780809074655 ISBN-10: 0-8090-7465-6 ISBN-13: 9780809074655 ISBN-13: 978-0-8090-7465-5 Hardcover 2009-02-17 Hill and Wang Find Lowest Price
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Product Description Alva Noë is one of a new breed—part philosopher, part cognitive scientist, part neuroscientist—who 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 brain—how 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 conscious—how it gives rise to sensation, feeling, and subjectivity—has 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 breed—part philosopher, part cognitive scientist, part neuroscientist—who 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 brain—how 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 conscious—how it gives rise to sensation, feeling, and subjectivity—has 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: T
Reviews

Out of His Mind: Not for the Serious Layperson If you know nothing about anything in brain/consciousness/whatever studies, this book may be for you. It presents some sometimes rather idiosyncratic conclusions about well-known (to even the casual student) research and research fields, but lacks a coherence except for the general idea of "you are not your brain." One keeps hoping for a kernel of insight, and detail, but the illustrations provided seem anecdotal and superficial (in its literal sense of "on the surface" only). I wondered who the book was addressed to, but was forced to conclude that it was more an exercise of "getting steam off (the author's) chest" than anything else. For me, a disappointment.
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.
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.
Interesting, but ultimately disappointing and unconvincing. Noe avoids mystical explanations and the supernatural. He doesn't put forth souls or the vague appeals to quantum mechanics that are the hallmarks of new age quackery. And while he skates close, he doesn't present consciousness as just merely a postmodern social construction. "Out of Our Heads" is grounded in this sense. Consciousness, Noe states, is not a something that takes place in the brain like digestion takes place in the stomach. And it is more than just the sum of its parts, just as a performing dancer is more than just muscles. But as poetic as Noe gets, his arguments are full of discrepancies and far from compelling. His biggest mistake is that you can easily replace his use of the words "environment" or "body" with "the brain's sensory input" and all his anecdotes and scientific appeals are just as valid and consistent. Noe's job to put forth a new approach to consciousness is made simple because neither science nor philosophy has an answer as to what consciousness and self-awareness are or where they come from. And because science doesn't have a conclusive answer as to how the brain creates consciousness, Noe is free to exclaim that science cannot guarantee that the brain alone is where what we experience as consciousness takes place. But Noe's own assertions are even more uncompelling, and it shows in how he attempts to refute the "consciousness is the brain" position. And at times, Noe goes too far with this rhetoric. In chapter five he states that computers do not "play chess", because the computer does not understand chess as a game. The computer's mechanistic churning out of moves based on algorithms (however sophisticated) does not make the computer comprehend the environment and culture that make up "chess". And while I'm personally tired of the "brain-is-a-computer" metaphor as anyone, Noe goes too far in the opposite direction when he says that computers are somehow not authentically playing the game. This romantic view ignores the fact that most computer chess programs can beat most people most of the time. The same reasoning Noe uses could just as easily say computers don't truly "play mp3s" or "add numbers" since they don't have an emotional connection with the world of music or mathematics. This goalpost-moving of definitions is a tune that the author plays again and again. One might think that dreams are an example of conscious experience that don't make use of a physical body that interacts with the real world or a. Noe dismisses dreams as not "bona fide perceptual experiences". Perhaps a hypothetical "The Matrix"-like experience would be an example of a brain-only existence for the mind? No, this would be a virtual existence for a virtual mind. Semantics. Meanwhile, he presents conventional neuroscientists as myopic and misguided. The caricature includes a cold, detached, lifeless method of examining consciousness that is fanatically committed to a materialist view to a fault. He criticizes this approach because, despite it making continued progress for the last several decades, it has failed to come up with a conclusive answer even after several decades. The ideas in the book are his (at times very interesting) interpretations, but they aren't concrete conclusions. Noe does not go so far as to claim that consciousness is completely detached from the brain. But he includes the world and body in his definition of consciousness in an exaggerated stance that is as ostentatious as saying a souped-up hot rod is literally an extension of the driver's body. Nonsense. I don't even disagree with all of Noe's points or put his idea as impossible. But the tone of the book is more new paradigms, scientific revolution, and sensationalism than sober and serious. Two stars out of five.
Noe the obscure I found the summary of neuroscience simplistic and the "new" ideas about consciousness obscure. First, I'm a neuroscientist and I know no neuroscientist who think that the current state of fMRI and PET scans are the holy grail. These are important tools with important limitations. Second, I don't see how a sensori-motor conception of behavior eliminates the brain. This seems like a retread of reductionist behaviorism. While I agree with the general thrust of embodied consciousness -- observing how an organism interacts with the environment, rather than passively receives information from the environment -- is generally correct, this does not eliminate the brain, nor the wide variety of approaches that brain scientist use. It makes the project more challenging and interesting. Finally, try as I might, I don't understand how Noe defines consciousness. It seems like hand-waving. And, like virtually every other attempt to explain first-person consciousness, it either denies its existence (unlikely) or performs magic.