“Out of Our Heads” by Alva Noë

20 thoughts on ““Out of Our Heads” by Alva Noë”

1. There are a few interviews with Alva Noe on the "Closer to Truth" website I linked to earlier that you might be interested in watching. If you go there and search for his name they should show up.

2. That excerpt could of been written by you. Good stuff.

3. Talking about Loren Eiseley Michael Lind said: "Before the rise of a self-conscious intelligentsia, most educated people as well as the unlettered majority spent most of their time in the countryside or, if they lived in cities, were a few blocks away from farmland or wilderness… At the risk of sounding countercultural, I suspect that thinkers who live in sealed, air-conditioned boxes and work by artificial light (I am one) are as unnatural as apes in cages at zoos…

4. …Naturalists like Eiseley in that sense are the most normal human beings to be found among intellectuals, because they spend a lot of time outdoors and know the names of the plants and animals they see…For all of his scientific erudition, Eiseley has a poetic, even cinematic, imagination.'

5. Thank you for reading that. This reminds me a bit of something isforbliss talking about abortion and the consiousness they possess.

6. Lots of food for thought–and if consciousness would be a combination of the brain in relationship to its inputs (or the world) then how much do they influence each other? Many of us have experiential evidence of what gets referred to as "The Law of Attraction" that our desires and expectations can control our environment Equally I doubt anyone can argue that our environment can alter our perceptions.

7. Noe is not suggesting consciousness is a combination of brain and "brain inputs." He is saying the world itself (not merely inputs) is involved in bringing forth conscious experience.

   I think the "law of attraction" is mostly self-fulfilling prophecy. What truth there is in it is simply common sense: greet the world with a smile and you'll probably turn out happier.

8. I see now, was referring to the quote by Noe about the conscious mind being an active tuning to the world, saying inputs was a poor choice of words at best.

9. As far as the law of attraction being a self-fulfilling prophecy, I couldn't agree more tho I believe that term may have quite a different meaning depending on whose reality tunnel it gets filtered through. 😉

10. The intra-cranial neuro-chemical process supposition of the computational theory is flawed by assumption of locality in the nature of the underlying physics. The electron and it's entangled and super-symmetric underlying agencies demonstrate the absurdity of disregarding non-local resonance. The computational views are popular because, if the the brain's radio nature is admitted, then you might ask, where's the transmitter? The answer being everywhere and every-when. Good stuff Matt.

11. This sounds very interesting. I'll have to get it, and hope to understand it. Does he bring in Godel's work like Roger Penrose does? I like Penrose and Chalmer's approach much more than Dennetts' reductionist one, but would like it more if they didn't think that there had to be a scientific model of consciousness. I don't like the 'mysterian' approach either, which says that consciousness is a mysterious 'thing' that's beyond us. I personally don't think it's a 'thing' at all.

12. I've never had the pleasure of speaking with Dennett myself, though I've read much of his work (including a text book on Mental Representation where some discussions between he and Clark are recorded). If you watch the video that LennyBound posted which I am here responding to, you'll hear Dennett say where he thinks consciousness and cognition are at about 1:54. Don't mean to straw man, I just call 'em like I hears 'em.

13. In a very real physical sense, the inside and outside of the head are connected. And in that sense there are two views which present a more interesting philosophical issue. We cannot ignore that the apparent separation is real, nor can what the brain does be divorced from it's appearances. How to integrate the treatments of the discrete and unified views becomes the new problem.

    Wonder if Dennett would reject the unified view…?

14. Where does this come from? Dennett is not a reductivist! To call him a computationalist is also grossly oversimplified. He believes there are computational processes that go on in the brain, but the content of those processes does not map straightforwardly onto the content of conscious experience. Keep in mind that Dennett has always been a chief critic of Fodor (who is a computationalist through and through).

15. And we appreciate your work….great videos, thanks….especially when you can't find a conversationalist on topics like these around….

16. Maybe daniel dennet and alvin noe are both right. I tend to think all capable ideas have some truth to them. They all come from one creature after all.

17. How does Noe explain Dreams and Memories which can't be explained by immediate perception and must be "in the head" (loosely defined)?

18. I'm not sure what Noe would say, but he comes out of a tradition including William James and Henri Bergson. Bergson would certainly not locate memory or unconscious experience (dreams) in the brain; this would be a category error, a confusion of subjectivity with objectivity. The paradigm that Noe wants to open up for us begins to suggest what more and more neuroscientists are suggesting (including C. Koch and Alexander (see the video of his recent NDE), that experience is non-local.

19. Noe seems to be taking an all or nothing stance. Why cant some things be Pure mental images and others be direct perceptions reflecting a genuine external world?

    Is there not a qualitative phenomenological and functional difference between different mental states and different perceptual states in which one rarely truly mistakes a dream for a waking moment. And psychology relies on distinguishing between diverse mental states.

20. The location of the self having experiences is the deepest problem of consciousness for me. It is the classic homunculi problem.

    I can easily imagine how a machine like brain dissects input from the external world in distinct ways and even turns it into a dream or concept et al. but where is the "I" the observer which I am well aware of. I feel like denying the self perspective is akin to denying qualia.

    So for me consciousness is less about experience and more about the subject.

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