scienceandnonduality
http://www.scienceandnonduality.com/
Clip from Alva Noë talk at SAND’12, California. For the complete talk please visit: http://fora.tv/conference/science_and_nonduality_sand_conference_2012
Getting Out of Our Heads, Alva Noë
The main obstacle to understanding our human nature is the persistent illusion that each of us is identical to something inside of us (the brain, on most contemporary approaches). In this lecture I explore the idea that we are dynamically distributed, boundary crossing, offloaded, and environmentally situated, by our very nature. What explains our inability until now to understand consciousness is that we’ve been searching for it in the wrong place. To better understand ourselves, we need to get out of our heads!
Alva Noë is a writer and philosopher at UC Berkeley, where he is also a member of the Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences and the Center for New Media. For the last decade or so his philosophical practice has concerned perception and consciousness. His current research focus is art and human nature.
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worth listening stuff 😀 thanks
Trying to understand consciousness from a non-experiential angle is futile.
This guy thinks too much. He's completely missing non-duality. Ego waffle.
Alva Noë is a great philosopher and yes, philosophers tend to think, he is not a teacher.
I see from the comments I am not alone in wondering what the hell he was going on about.
He has a rather dual view of human experience…
So is he saying we're conscious beings of energy with abide persistently to human nature because human nature is the only thing the brain is for, other than that we a beings of consciousness.
Some are wondering where he´s coming from? He approaches consciousness from the modern scientific point of view. The modern study of consciousness is trying to solve the puzzle of mind/body-problem, because it still hasn´t been explained scientifically.
This guy could lead a cult
This conversation may be for the future – when it will make the idea that he has come to life then………possiblity.
Consciousness is interaction of observer and that what is being observed. You can not have consciousness with just observer and not just with observed. They are 2 sides of consciousness equation.
Suppose the tomato has a blemish on the back, or even a hole made by a worm and actually it's been hollowed out. Suppose the hallway he refers to as 'having access to' was actually a temporary structure and unknown to him it's already been dismantled. Suppose the woman he's referring to was actually a transvestite, or the bag next to her is actually a photograph of a bag but Alva just hadn't looked at it closely enough to notice that.
We get surprised and shocked by things not being how we expect all the time because we have internal mental models of things based on our experience of similar things in our past. We know these models are purely internal precisely because we can be fooled or surprised when our expectations based on those models fail to match actual reality. So to what extent do we 'have access' to things we can't directly perceive? I don't know what that kind of access means, in terms of the actual thing itself because it seems to me that it's completely illusory.
I just watched this again and he also plays a clever trick at the beginning of the talk. First he talks about visual experience involving the eye and the brain, but then he refuted that by only talking about what is projects on the retina and saying there is no retinal correlate to a woman or a bag. But now he's excluding the role of the brain completely. In his actual account of visually experiencing the presence of a woman, his account stops at the retina, and then he says that account can't be correct. Well of course it's not correct, because it's a broken fragment of the neurological account of visual experience.