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.