Customer Reviews

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

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The mind is more than what the brain is doing. The idea isn't new, but it often gets too little respect. Perhaps because people think it implies something supernatural, or perhaps because it just seems weird, but it is a very respectable argument and in Alva Noe's hands, a powerful one.

We often take for granted in brain science that the mind is implemented by things happening inside the skull. That goes against the growing findings that perception is an active process of exploration that depends on our contact with the real world and the skills we possess for navigating its structure. This book takes on the significant challenge of bringing that difficult idea accessibly and non-technically into the popular mind and I think he does an excellent job.

Although Noe doesn't talk about it specifically, Ruth Millikan makes a good related argument that substance categories are really skills. We know substances by our skills for finding and identifying them over and over, not through their intrinsic properties. Noe approaches perception in much the same way. We know the world by interacting with it, not by (or in addition to?) simulating it with detailed models inside our head.

Noe goes a step further and points out how some concepts just don't make from a detached viewpoint, so we are often forced to destroy the phenomena of consciousness, reducing them to something else, in order to study them dispassionately. This is a tough sell, I think, to habitual materialists, but he doesn't rely too heavily on it.

The implication Noe emphasizes is that consciousness is a process involving interaction of the nervous system with the world, not (just) something that is lighting up inside our neural nets. The distinction is sometimes more subtle that Noe acknowledges. He approves of Gibson's ecological theory of perception, but doesn't address the equally important work on expectancy and hypothesis testing approaches to perception, such as Richard Gregory's ideas and the experimental work done around them.

He is probably right that much of our basic perception relies heavily on active engagement with the world, but then some of it, to me, clearly doesn't. He does a good job showing limits to the feature detection approach to vision (doesn't it beg the question to say that features are "built up" toward pictures in the brain?), but doesn't have an alternate explanation for the elaborate architecture of columns and receptor fields and their activity in dreaming and imagination that seem to support at least some version of the mental representation concept in some kinds of mental activity. It seems in places that Noe acknowledges this sort of work but considers it an impoverished-perceptual or non-perceptual kind of mental activity.

Other than the excellent writing and clear arguments, the best part of this book is the skillful use of various findings regarding phantom limbs, sensory illusions, and inattention phenomena to illustrate the empirical implications of a mind extended beyond the brain case. Even if you don't buy the full externalist argument in all its details, it's hard to read those examples and not have a little light go off in your head and think "oh, so that's what he means by the mind being outside the brain!" That's a mark of good writing.

Noe mentions but does not dwell on the role played by philosopher J Merleau-Ponty in many of these ideas, and his work is worth exploring as well. A good non-technical intro in keeping with the spirit of Noe's book is: Merleau-ponty: A Guide for the Perplexed (Guides for the Perplexed).

This book is a good read, a relatively quick read, and very thought provoking.

Or, to use another of philosopher Alva Noë's metaphors, "consciousness is more like dancing than it is digestion." Consciousness is something we do, not something we have. Our awareness of ourselves isn't inside our brains, but in the interaction of our brains with the world around us.

One of the ideas that Noë insists on is that our "theory of mind" (the awareness that other people, like us, are conscious) is practical, not theoretical.

Noë says, "I cannot both trust and love you and also wonder whether, in fact, you are alive in thought and feeling." To put it another way, Noë quotes Louis Armstrong on how to define jazz: "If you gotta ask, you ain't never gonna know."

To see something's mind, "we need to turn our attention to the way brain, body, and world together maintain living consciousness."

Using language as an indicator of consciousness, Noë may just be reaching for effect when he says that "talking is more like barking than it is anything like what the linguists have in mind." He compares using language to chimpanzee grooming behavior or sheepdogs barking while herding sheep. But linguists often talk about speech's "phatic" or social function (see How Language Works by David Crystal), and one of the first language teachers I had (a Hungarian who taught Russian and Swahili) said one of the main purposes of language was to acknowledge other people's existence. I was too naïve to realize I was getting a lesson in linguistics.

Noë has two "political" goals in this book. One is to "shake up the cognitive science establishment" and the other is to show "that science and humanistic styles of thinking must engage each other."

I don't know if Noë will be successful with the first goal, but he succeeded with the second. Out of Our Heads is clear and entertaining, and shows how philosophy and biology can work together to explain human behavior, as well as why they should.

I appreciate Noe's expansive view of the conditions of human experience, and his battle against simplistic reductionism. Materialist-minded neuroscientists, like many specialists, overstate the significance of their own research, and in a psychiatric context can do more harm than good.

But Noe's single-minded focus on the role of active engagement in everyday-life phenomenology leads him to overstate his own case.

It isn't clear, for example, why an organism's active engagement with its environment, a precondition for normal perception, should count toward a definitive account of "consciousness", while model-building neural activity in the brain shouldn't, unless you're simply assuming about consciousness what you wish to prove, i.e., that it isn't in any way its neurological correlates.

Noe also goes too far in his insistence on environmental engagement as a necessary precondition for consciousness. One of his own examples - patients with locked-in syndrome - brings this out. While Noe uses such cases of radical immobility to argue for the unreliability of brain scans, such cases also clearly illustrate consciousness can exist in a state approaching that of a brain in a vat. (It's not much of stretch to imagine the body functions that support the brain in such tragic cases being replaced with artificial supports, presumably with the patient continuing to remain aware despite no outward sign of consciousness.)

The brain is far from the whole story of consciousness, which can be studied from multiple historical, biological and humanist perspectives, all of which shed light on its development and nature. But Noe's insistence that consciousness requires present active engagement with the world is either an overstatement or a re-definition by fiat.

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.

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. 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, says Noe, 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.

Alva Noë shows convincingly that up to now neurophysiologists in their quest for the location of consciousness have been trying to step through the wall facing them.
He turns us around to show that there is a door right behind us through which we can walk into the world where 'location' is a misunderstanding when it comes to consciousness.
His comments on Hubel and Wiesel's Nobel prize winning research on the anatomy of the visual cortex is so devastating, it almost makes you laugh.
On top of all this, Noë writes in a perfectly clear and precise style, never wavering a second, possessed by great determination and not afraid of anything or anyone.
To sum up: THIS is neurophilosophy.

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.

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.

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).

The nature of consciousness is a very interesting topic, and I had hoped to gain some new insights from an author who is both a neuro-scientist and a philosopher. Unfortunately, the writing is frustratingly repetitious, and I had difficulty discerning any kind of complete theory of consciousness being put forward. Instead, the author seems much more intent on criticizing other researchers (especially Nobel prize winners!). Some interesting experiments on perception (especially vision) are described, but I was looking for a lot more than I got.