Alva Noë Livres

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.

"What is art? Why does it matter to us? What does it tell us about ourselves? Normally, we look to works of art in order to answer these fundamental questions. But what if the objects themselves are not what matter? in 'Strange Tools: Art and Human nature, ' the philosopher and cognitive scientist Alva Noë, art argues that our obsession with works of art has gotten in the way of understanding how art works on us. For Noë, art isn't a phenomenon in need of an explanation but a mode of research, a method of investigating what makes us human - a strange tool. Art isn't just something to look at or listen to - it is a challenge, a dare to try to make sense of what it is all about. Art aims not for satisfaction but for confrontation, intervention, and subversion. Through diverse and provocative examples from the history of art-making, Noë reveals the transformative power of artistic production. By staging a dance, choreographers cast light on the way bodily movement organizes us. Painting goes beyond depiction and representation to call into question the role of pictures in our lives. Accordingly, we cannot reduce art to some natural aesthetic sense or trigger; recent efforts to frame questions of art in terms of neurobiology and evolutionary theory alone are doomed to fail. By engaging with art, we are able to study ourselves in profoundly novel ways. In fact, art and philosophy have much more in common than you might think. Reframing the conversation around artists and their craft, 'Strange Tools' is a daring and stimulating intervention in contemporary thought"--Jacket

An argument that perception is something we do, not something that happens to us: not a process in the brain, but a skillful bodily activity.

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.

"In The Entanglement, philosopher Alva Noë explores the inseparability of life, art, and philosophy, and argues that we have radically underestimated the significance of this long recognized but underappreciated reality, what he refers to as the "entanglement." The core of The Entanglement is the idea that human existence is inextricably aesthetic and philosophical. In the first half of the book, Noë offers a detailed examination of pictures and seeing, writing and speech, and choreography and dancing, which serve as case studies and the base in which the phenomenon of entanglement is set. In later chapters, Noë deepens this analysis by exploring the nature of the aesthetic itself, and its place in our lives, examining what the entanglement can teach us about science, and, in particular, the project of applying science in the domain of the human. In these later chapters he covers a range of topics, including sex, gender, and the body, psychology and AI, the problem of style, and the nature of 'nature.' Drawing on his work in perception, consciousness, and the philosophy of art, Noë offers a new model for thinking about the nature of the human, the limits to what a natural science of the human can do on its own, and the irreplaceable importance of art and philosophy for the larger project of studying and understanding ourselves"--

Die Hirnforschung verkündet sensationelle Forschungsergebnisse – und kann dennoch nicht erklären, wie Bewusstsein oder Wahrnehmung entstehen. Mehr Hirnforschung bringt nur mehr Klarheit darüber, dass die Antworten nicht einfach und nicht einfach zu haben sind. Wir brauchen also weiterhin und mehr denn je die Philosophie, um zu verstehen, was das 'Ich' eigentlich ausmacht. Alva Noë zeigt, wo die Ergebnisse der Hirnforschung zu kurz greifen, und erteilt den Forschern eine klare Absage, die meinen, man könne menschliches Bewusstsein demnächst in der Petrischale erzeugen. Denn der Mensch ist weit mehr als sein Gehirn. Wir sind keine Computer: Die Seele wird uns nicht aufgezwungen. Wir erschaffen sie selbst.