For some time now, I've been skeptical about the neuroscience of consciousness. Not so much because I doubt that consciousness is affected by neural states and processes, but because of the persistent tendency on the part of some neuroscientists to think of consciousness itself as a neural phenomenon.
Nothing epitomizes this tendency better than Francis Crick's famous claim — he called it his "astonishing hypothesis" — that you are your brain. At an interdisciplinary conference at Brown not so long ago, I heard a prominent neuroscientist blandly assert, as if voicing well-established scientific fact, that thoughts, feelings and beliefs are specific constellations of matter that are located (as it happens) inside the head. My own view — I laid this out in a book I wrote a few years back called Out of Our Heads — is that the brain is only part of the story, and that we can only begin to understand how the brain makes us consciousness by realizing that brain functions only in the setting of our bodies and our broader environmental (including our social and cultural) situation. The skull is not a magical membrane, my late collaborator, friend and teacher Susan Hurley used to say. And there is no reason to think the processes supporting consciousness are confined to what happens only on one side (the inside) of that boundary.
There is a nice interview on the Oxford University Press website with Anil Seth, the editor of a new Oxford journal Neuroscience of Consciousness. It's an informative discussion and makes the valuable point that the study of consciousness is interdisciplinary. As he puts it:
He doesn't mention philosophy here, but he might have. As he notes, the new Oxford journal will be the official journal of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness. The ASSC, of which I am member (and a former member of the executive committee), is a society that was founded by philosophers and neuroscientists back in the 1990s with the goal of furthering the new science of consciousness.
Seth is correct that "it's tricky to come up with a rigorous scientific definition of consciousness which enjoys a broad consensus." He goes on to say: "Put simply, for a conscious organism, there is 'something it is like' to be that organism." It's worth noting that this characterization of what it is for an organism to be conscious — that there is something that it is like to be that organism — was first advanced in the 70s by the philosopher Thomas Nagel.
I don't intend this observation as a criticism. To the contrary, I applaud Seth for undertaking the project of leading this new research journal and for emphasizing, at the outset, that consciousness science isn't — and can't be — just neuroscience.
Alva Noë is a philosopher at the University of California, Berkeley, where he writes and teaches about perception, consciousness and art. He is the author of several books, including his latest, Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2015). You can keep up with more of what Alva is thinking on Facebook and on Twitter: @alvanoe
Alva Noë (B.Phil, University of Oxford; Ph.D., Harvard University; born 1964) is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. The focus of his work is the theory of perception and consciousness. In addition to these problems in cognitive science and the philosophy of mind, he is interested in phenomenology, the theory of art, Wittgenstein, and the origins of analytic philosophy.
Noë joined the UC Berkeley Department of Philosophy as an associate professor in 2003, where he was a member of the UC Berkeley Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences, serving as a core faculty member for the Program in Cognitive Science and the Center for New Media. During 2011-12, he was Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York Graduate Center. Before coming to Berkeley, Noë was an assistant professor of philosophy at UC Santa Cruz. He has been a Post-doctoral Research Associate of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University, a Visiting Scholar at the Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science at UC Irvine and at the Institut Jean-Nicod (CNRS/EN/EHESS) in Paris, a McDonnell-Pew Visiting Fellow at the Oxford Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, and a visiting scholar at the Center for Subjectivity Research at the University of Copenhagen. Noë has been a recipient of a UC President's Fellowship in the Humanities and an ACLS/Ryskamp Fellowship, and in 2007/2008 was a research fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.
Noë is the author of the books Varieties of Presence (2012),Out of Our Heads (2009) and Action In Perception(MIT Press, 2004). He is the co-editor of Vision and Mind: Selected Readings in the Philosophy of Perception (MIT Press, 2002) and the editor of Is the Visual World a Grand Illusion? (Imprint Academic, 2002). In Action In Perception, Noë puts forth the notion of the sensorimotor profile. Externalism about the mind and mental content is a pervasive theme in his work. His book Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature was released on September 22, 2015.
References[edit]
- ^ http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~noe/
- ^ Noë, Alva (2012). Varieties of Presence. Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0674062146.
- ^ Noë, Alva (2010). Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness. Hill and Wang. ISBN 978-0809016488.
- ^ http://www.amazon.com/dp/0262140888/
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