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

by Alva Noë

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.

Genres: Philosophy, Science, Nonfiction, Psychology, Neuroscience, Biology, Brain

230 pages, Hardcover

First published February 17, 2009

About the author

Alva Noë (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.

Reviews

[Jamie Smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Brains don’t think. The idea that a brain could represent the world on its own doesn’t make any more sense than the idea that mere marks on paper could signify all on their own (that is, independently of the larger social and practice of reading and writing.) The world shows up for us thanks to our interaction with it. It is not made in the brain or by the brain. It is there for us and we have access to it.” (p. 180-181)

Right up to the very end I wondered where the author was going with this premise. He spent a great deal of time telling us what consciousness is not, without making any statement of what it is beyond a fuzzy agglomeration of brain, body, and environment, and I considered the idea that he might sum it all up by pulling an angel out of his hat and saying: “So it must be Jesus!” He did not go that far, but his arguments remained more numinous than physiological.

This book is philosophy interpreting science, and the author is a professor of philosophy at Berkeley. His aim is to get the reader to see consciousness as a result of the interaction of the individual with his or her environment, rather than something that goes on entirely within the brain. However, humans aren’t the only animals with brains or the only ones which interact with their environments, so he is forced to abstract his argument into places most people would not go, such as “You can’t both acknowledge the existence of the organism and at the same time view it as just a locus of processes or physicochemical mechanisms. And once you see the organism as a unity, as more than just a process, you are, in effect, recognizing its primitive agency, its possession of interests, needs, and point of view. That is, you are recognizing its at least incipient mindfulness.” (p. 58) Agency is not consciousness, of course, but if you accept this premise you are forced to confront the question of whether there is a substantive difference between humans and other animals which also have agency, something special about us which results in our having a sense of self.

He adds a tenuous and debatable argument, saying “the fact that computers don’t think may be a good reason to hold that brains don’t think because they are computers.” (p. 180) He also makes a point about how we process the information we receive from our senses, “Meaning is not intrinsic, as the philosopher Daniel Dennett has rightly argued; it is not internal. Meaning is relational.” (p. 181)

He is essentially arguing the mind-body problem, which goes back at least to Descartes, his point being that modern science shows that what we mean when we say “I am” is more than just the electrochemical interactions of neurons, that I-ness is meaningless and incomprehensible without the the rest of the body as a physical presence interacting with its environment. This is a reasonable position to take, although he restates it over and over during the course of the book. Readers looking for him to take a definitive position, and say that consciousness is this, not that ,will be disappointed. The closest he comes is when he says that consciousness is something we do, an ongoing interaction with the world around us. This is a hypothesis, not a statement of scientific fact, because at the end of the day he is a philosopher not a scientist, and as the old joke goes, if you laid all the philosophers end to end you still wouldn’t reach a conclusion.

The book is interesting, and it did give me broader perspective with which to think about consciousness, but the arguments are nebulous and dance around the reality of brain science. If you are interested in the philosophy of mind, it is definitely worth reading, but if you are looking for a book on the neurochemistry of the mind you should look elsewhere.

[Jeannie · Rating 2 out of 5]

After coming across Mr. Noë's video on youtube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MoOHWH...), I was intrigued and decided to follow up on his position that consciousness is something that "happens outside the brain."

What a waste. To read this book is to observe an author attack a straw man with a piece of straw.

Mr. Noë argues against the "brain-centric" approach taken up by contemporary neuroscientists toward the understanding of consciousness. The funny thing is that modern neuroscience is not "brain-centric" as a field; it's an interdisciplinary field that has many overlapping topics, branches and sub-specialties.

Mr. Noë is a philosopher who is out of touch of the great diversity and ongoing developments (and promises) of neuroscience. It is disappointing to influence the general public to believe that contemporary neuroscientists pursue brain-centric / brain ONLY approach to understanding consciousness. Clearly the brain has been and will always be a responsive and dynamic part of the body that creates consciousness through its sensing, perception and engagement with the environment (through the body).

We can throw out the dualism of Descartes. We can stomp out dangerous wrong ideas about how to understand and learn from the field of neuroscience (i.e. that the brain doesn't change, that consciousness is separate from the body or that neuroscience is a brain-centric field). These are understandings through science that build toward the future. Not this book.

[David M · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn't necessarily learn a lot from this book, but I still found it valuable and would recommend it to anyone grappling with issues of consciousness and embodiment. Noë's project seems to be update Merleau-Ponty and apply the old boy's philosophy to the current state of scientific research on the mind/brain. In some respects not much has changed since Phenomenology of Perception was written. We still seem to be living through the twilight of cartesianism.

*
Consciousness as something always situated - a dynamic interaction or dialogue between myself and my environment. Yet consciousness - human consciousness anyway - also possesses an extraordinary capacity for abstraction. Noë seems to acknowledge as much in his discussion of locked-in syndrome. Even when the body is paralyzed and its environment extremely impoverished, consciousness can persist. This would seem to lend a certain plausibility to classical dualism. This then becomes the really difficult problem: how to reconcile the fact that we are finite, situated beings with our apparent ability to transcend our immediate surroundings through thought.

*

Good discussion of other minds. The stake through the heart of solipsism is not a really solid argument or convincing piece of evidence. No one actually believes solipsism. The problem is in thinking it even needs to be refuted in the first place. Contra certain theories of developmental psychological, it's not as if children reach a certain age and are then able to hypothesize the existence of other minds, or an inner substance called consciousness. From the start consciousness is experienced as properly basic and embodied

"Mommy's mind and baby's mind come to be in the coochy-cooing directedness that each sustains toward the other" - pp 33

(perhaps he could have found a less cutesy way to say this, but I think the point is valid)


Noë could perhaps have gone even further in emphasizing the extreme rarity, & possible non-existence, of solipsism as an actually occurring phenomenon. Even the most extreme acts of cruelty do not imply a theoretical commitment to solipsism. Sadism would actually seem to require a fairly advanced level of empathy; in order to enjoy another's pain obviously you have to believe that they're feeling it.

Noë seems to claim that the Nazis effectively denied that Jews (and other groups) possessed minds at all, but I don't think that's accurate. As far as I know, Nazis didn't justify their violence by claiming their victims were literally automata incapable of thinking or feeling pain. Rather, Nazi propaganda tended to use the rationale of revenge or self-defense, which suggests the other has some level of agency and therefore a mind.

*
Imagine someone in the 19th century saying: Steam engine technology is progressing so rapidly, in a few decades we may see a steam engine that's more intelligent than a human being

[Lakmus · Rating 1 out of 5]

Gah. Frustrating. 50 pages and a wasted evening. Although no, actually, not wasted. At least now I know that I don't blindly agree to any printed text and that my critical thinking is still up and running. Sometimes you read so many good books and spend so much time attempting to comprehend complex topics written in annoyingly long papers that you forget that you know anything at all.

While some of the argumentation regarding fMRI and PET being bad at showing the brain was valid in 2009, in 2017 there are EEG and MEG (not to say that they are good, but they are definitely better), which hints at the possibility of technical progress being able to resolve technical issues in the future.

Otherwise, it's just really badly written. The guy repeats himself, adds sentences that carry little new information or meaning - it's quite amazing, actually, that one could write so badly while still being employed in the academia (arguably, the most an academic does is read and write, you'd expect some skill there).

Also, never let philosophers mingle with science. They just start drowning in the same crap they've been drowning in for millennia - definitions and vaguely put questions.

[Blaine Snow · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mind Wars: Neuroscience -v Embodied Cognition – A Review of Alva Noe’s Out of Our Heads
Blaine A. Snow, July 2025

A fresh new picture of mind, consciousness, brain, and body is emerging in the sciences. It’s called embodied mind or embodied cognition and promises to upend everything you know and believe about the mind and the brain. Embodied mind cognitive science (EMCS) challenges long established ideas about what mind and consciousness are, where they exist, and how to view them. It changes how we understand our brains, our bodies, and our environment in relation to mind and consciousness. Spoiler alert: you are not IN YOUR HEAD.

Out of Our Heads is about these new sciences of the mind but also about views we’ve been fed for decades about the mind and the brain that are not only outdated, but seriously misguided and perpetuate wrongheaded views of mind and nature, mind and body, and the so-called mystery of consciousness. The book counters the endless neuroscience media hype about the brain and its abilities, the sensational research coming out of new brain imaging technologies, brain this, brain that, healthy-unhealthy brain stories, and the breathless proclamations of neuroscience about who we are. Writes Noe, “My purpose is… to convince you that the neuroscientific, and more broadly the cognitive scientific, approach to mind needs rethinking from the ground up” (Epilogue/p185).

A professor of philosophy at UC Berkeley, Noe helps us understand how embodied cognition in concert with biology and complexity theory are putting to rest neuroscience cranialism, the Mission Control, Creator Brain view of ourselves. Noe takes on the age-old representational paradigm and its computational model, and the dehumanizing ideas promoted by neuroscience that the world is a Grand Illusion constructed by our brains. It’s the BRAINBOUND view versus the 4E view of EMCS (embodied-embedded-extended-enacted). EMCS is also helping put to rest the age-old conundrum of mind and body, our collectively held network of bifurcated views about mind and nature, pointing a fresh new way to look at who we are in the world as subjects, as beings with interiority and conscious awareness.

Here's Noe making these points:

“All scientific theories rest on assumptions. It is important that these assumptions be true. In this book I will try to convince you that this starting assumption of consciousness research [that consciousness originates in brain neurons] is badly mistaken. Consciousness does not happen in the brain. That’s why [after over 100 years of trying] we’ve been unable to come up with a good explanation of its neural basis” (ch1/p5).

“Consciousness has no locus inside us. [It] isn’t something that happens inside us: it is something we do, actively, in our dynamic interaction with the world around us. If we want to understand how the brain contributes to consciousness, we need to look at the brain’s job in the larger nonbrain body and the environment in which we find ourselves” (1/24).

Here's the take-home message of the book: Mind and consciousness are outcomes of a brain-in-a body-in-a world. The mind is not exclusively IN or OF the brain.

Let it sink in a bit: the mind is not IN the brain. We have been led to believe in brainbound cranialism for so long, what could this mean? Where are our minds if they’re not in our brains? The new picture emerging in EMCS can be described as follows: the mind is the total “field” of dynamical relations and interactions a) within the brain, b) between the brain and the body, and c) between the organism and its environment or world – and this last point is crucial – d) as seen-felt from a first-person subjective perspective. The body is as much a part of the mind as the brain. Bodies make brains possible, and minds are only possible as organisms with nervous systems co-evolved with environments with populations of others. This means you, this center of experience that is your aware self, are not exclusively in your brain, but distributed across your brain-body-environment, as Noe says, “We are out of our heads. We are in the world and of the world. We are patterns of active engagement with fluid boundaries and changing components. We are distributed” (Epilogue/183). In no way is your you solely in your brain. At best, the brain is an integral part of a much larger whole that includes your body, its sense faculties, its sensorimotor abilities, the hands, the skin, the digestive and immune systems, all naturally coevolved with the surrounding environment. The world is as much your mind as your brain and your body.

One small criticism I have of the book is, I read a lot of difficult nonfiction and philosophical prose. We all have authors whose writing is too something to be clearly understood or enjoyed. In this book I find that Noe has a penchant for a kind of abstruse writing style that often detracts from the important points he’s making. He can be direct and clear but also sometimes makes his points in a perplexing way. In addition, his perspective shifts are at times unclear (4/70-71), and occasionally his choice of vocabulary and hesitation to make confident assertions is puzzling. I found at times that the book doesn’t read easily due not to the concepts themselves, but to how they’re worded. In many places Noe could have said things more clearly with just a bit of rewording. Also, the book sometimes feels like opinion offering rather than assertion making. Nonetheless, if the nature of consciousness and mind is your thing, it’s very worth your while digesting Noe’s presentation.

Now brief summaries of the main points…

Preface. There’s only one definitively true proposition about how the brain makes us conscious and that is, we don’t have a clue. Despite decades of concerted effort, thinking, research, experimentation, and technology, “we’re no closer now to grasping the neural basis of experience than we were one hundred years ago” (Preface/xi). The sheer fact that we’re so clueless, that consciousness is so apparent and immediate yet so elusive and mysterious, has led to new ways of conceptualizing what and where consciousness is. EMCS and the biological approach to the study of mind and human nature are reassessing, reframing, and rethinking all the basic starting-point assumptions about the nature of mind, consciousness, brain, body, and world. Out of Our Heads is a non-technical book written for lovers of science fascinated by the nature of mind and its relationship to the body.

1 – An Astonishing Hypothesis. Noe frames the new embodied mind view by criticizing Francis Crick’s “astonishing hypothesis,” one that claims you are no more than a molecular, biomechanical, neural-processing machine, the current view of mainstream neuroscience. Rather than astonishing, this is decidedly a dehumanizing, arrogant, myopic view. A truly astonishing hypothesis would be to learn that you are not your brain, that the brain is not what produces your consciousness, that there is nothing inside you that makes you conscious – it is to be told that the way we’ve been thinking about consciousness is all wrong. Rather, consciousness is the whole animal in an environment, it is living situated activity in which the brain plays a part. “The subject of experience is not a bit of your body. You are not your brain. The brain, rather, is part of what you are” (1/7).

2 – Conscious Life. The underlying idea of chapter 2 is, where there is life, there is mind. The questions considered this chapter are, where in nature do we find consciousness? What kinds of things exhibit mental characteristics? What kinds of mental characteristics? Rocks? Insects? Plants? Bacteria? Computers? Robots? To answer these questions, we must take a biological systems perspective and note how living system organization differs from other kinds of material organization (such as artifacts, aggregates, and heaps), particularly noting biological agency and autonomy (see Moreno-Mossio's 2015, Biological Autonomy: A Philosophical and Theoretical Enquiry).

Here Noe also discusses the paradox of mind science: mind is a feature of our nature that cannot be made an object for natural science. “From the detached standpoint, there is no mind; there is only behavior and physiology.” However, by taking the biological perspective we observe organic unity and agency, where the actions organisms take can be studied and questioned. From the perspective of biology, organisms have agency, interests, and can be understood as individual agents with needs and interests. “Once you see the organism as a unity, as more than just a process, you are, in effect, recognizing its primitive agency, its possession of interests, needs, and point of view” (2/41).

3 – The Dynamics of Consciousness. In chapter 3 Noe offers evidence that consciousness does not arise in the brain. Rather, brain neural activity is embedded in an animal’s larger action and interaction with the world around it. Neural activity alone does not fix consciousness – rather “the brain’s job is that of facilitating a dynamic pattern of interaction among brain, body, and world. Experience is enacted by conscious beings with the help of the world” (3/47). Paraphrasing Noe, the mind can no more be explained by neurons than dance can be explained by muscles. Noe makes these points in this chapter by describing examples from neural plasticity and experiments with sensory substitution, the upshot being: “we need to widen our conception of the machinery of consciousness beyond the brain to include not only the brain but also our active lives in the context of our worlds. This is what the biology of consciousness now teaches” (3/65). “…it is not the intrinsic character of sensory stimulation that fixes the character of experience; rather, it is the way sensory stimulation varies as a function of movement in relation to the environment that does the important work” (3/63).

4 – Wide Minds. The main point of chapter 4 is that a mind requires a world. All the non-body things surrounding us are as much part of what mind is as our bodies-nerves-brain-sense faculties are. The world is as much a part of your mind as your body is – the laptop, table, cup, rising steam, the window, trees, cars, sunshine, distant horizon, the sun, moon, and stars – all that, is as much your mind as your hands, skin, eyes, ears, nervous system and brain. There is no mind without a body in a world. To a great degree the world is your mind. To say we are embedded in a world is not quite accurate – rather, we enact or bring forth a world so rather than being IN it, we are OF it.

The enactive approach in embodied mind cognitive science is best presented in Evan Thompson’s landmark 2007 book Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind. It aims to unify several related ideas in cognitive science, biology, systems theory, phenomenology, and philosophy. He writes, “a cognitive being’s world is not a prespecified, external realm, represented internally by its brain, but a relational domain enacted or brought forth by that being’s autonomous agency and mode of coupling with the environment” (13).

5 – Habits. The intellectualist view in cognitive science (reaching back to Descartes and Plato) would have us believe that what makes us uniquely human is that we’re thinkers, that our faculties of deliberative reason – evaluation, planning, judgment, choosing, acting – are how we operate in the world. Noe points out that to see this rational deliberation view as our primary way of interacting with the world overlooks the more fundamental substrate of nondeliberative, habit-based, world-embedded activities, natural engagement that precedes and is the basis for higher faculties of reason. Here “habits” designate the many deeply intertwined interdependencies and evolutionary couplings of organisms and environments that necessarily preexist deliberative thought. Using the metaphor of pathways, trails, grooves, pre-established ways or methods of interacting with the world, the idea of natural habits and preexisting survival strategies is another argument for why mind must be understood as expanded and extended into the environment.

From pages 121-127: “We are creatures of habit and habit is world-involving. We travel along grooves that our own repeated action has made for us. The riverbed of habit makes travel along certain lines safe and reliable, efficient and easy. The mutual interdependence of organism and environment is exemplified in the existence of a path or a trail. The natural world is one that is sculpted by the life processes that occur within it. Living beings alter their environment and so alter their landscape of possible actions; that they do this is no less inevitable than that they create waste.”

6 – The Grand Illusion. In possibly the most enlightening chapter of the book, Noe takes on the Creator Brain idea in neuroscience, that our perceptual world is a Grand Illusion created in the brain. The quote he gives from a neuroscience textbook deserves repeating:

“The brain does not simply record the external world like a three-dimensional photograph. Rather, the brain constructs an internal representation of external physical events after first analyzing them into component parts. In scanning the visual field the brain simultaneously but separately analyzes the form of objects, their movement, and their color, all before putting together an image according to the brain’s own rules… [Therefore] the appearance of our perceptions as direct and precise images of the world is an illusion.”

Noe deconstructs this neuroscience view of vision and shows how there’s no empirical evidence to support such Creator Brain views. He writes, “The main task of vision science, as it has been practiced since Kepler’s day, is to explain the mechanisms whereby the brain enables us to see much more than is present in the retinal image. …You will notice that as this story is told, the world itself – the way things are beyond the scope of our awareness of them – just doesn’t get into the act” (6/136).

He goes on to serve up examples from change blindness and inattentional blindness that further expose these neuroscience views stating, “The World is its own model; [It] is not a construction of the brain, nor is it a product of our own conscious efforts. It is there for us; we are here in it” (6/142). It’s high time we abandon these representationalist views and embrace our immersion in the world itself. “Once we give up this assumption, it becomes clear that the supposedly dazzling demonstrations of the brain’s constructive workings fail to give any support whatsoever to the Creator Brain picture” (6/143).

7 – Voyages of Discovery. To continue his deconstruction of the Creator Brain paradigm, Noe takes aim at Hubel and Weisel’s 1981 Nobel Prize-winning research into mammalian vision and David Marr’s 1982 influential work on vision by debunking another pillar of the neuroscience perspective, the information-processing, computational model of consciousness. This model of course originates in computer science which is another primary source of misguided views of what consciousness is and how it works. Minds are part of living systems which have no purpose; computers are artifacts designed for human purposes and only simulate what minds do naturally. Machines are not organisms. Simulation is not actuality. Today’s computer-generated AI adds nothing to our understanding of consciousness; AI no more thinks on its own than a piano plays itself.

8 – A Nothing Reserved for Everything. In the final chapter, Noe addresses “the Foundational Argument,” the claim in mainstream neuroscience that the brain alone makes us conscious. This argument, which has zero empirical support, is instead based in the philosophical argument that a) because we dream and b) because we can produce events in consciousness by directly stimulating the brain, show that the brain alone is sufficient for consciousness. Noe gives three reasons why the latter argument fails to hold water (8/173-177). As for dreaming, anyone who remembers dreams knows that dreams are nothing like waking consciousness. Dreams are inherently unstable, fluid and changing, do not adhere to the limitations of gross waking reality (no one can fly or walk through walls) – dream seeing is not real seeing at all. “The appeal to dreams, like the appeal to neuroscientific interventions, leaves us more or less where it starts: with unspecific Cartesian intuitions about the interiority of our experience” (8/180).

It's worth noting that Noe overlooks the historical influence of ancient mythological-spiritual lore on our ideas of dreaming and the brain, a tradition which maintains that humans are actually “asleep” and that we “dream our world,” and thus are in need of spiritual awakening to the “true reality.”

Epilogue – Home Sweet Home. Neuroscience seems to represent us as if we were strangers in a strange land, detached from the world by our brains which figure it all out. Before we are able to interpret our world, a thoroughgoing biological substrate of in hand world habits has to exist. We are not creators; we are not solely interpreters. The world is not computed information. The world is not a representation. The world is not a Grand Illusion. The book attempts to disavow us of such false assumptions and show us there’s little to no evidence supporting them. “The last [thirty-five] years have witnessed the gradual shaping of an embodied, situated approach to the mind” (186). Noe’s book is an excellent introduction to these ideas.

To explore the growing literature on the enactive-4E approach to cognitive science as well as general embodied consciousness perspectives, please consult my reading list on Goodreads.com entitled “Embodied Cognition.” Here are few of my favorites:

1. Mind in Life, by Evan Thompson
2. Philosophy in the Flesh, by Lakoff and Johnson
3. The Hand: An Organ of the Mind, ed. by Zdravko Radman
4. The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition, ed. Newen, DeBruin, Gallagher
5. The Embodied Mind, Varela-Thompson-Rosch
6. Radical Embodied Mind Cognitive Science, Anthony Chemero

End of Review

[Patrick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazon Review:

Noë turns Descartes's famous statement on its head: I am, therefore I think, says Noë. The author, a philosopher at UC-Berkeley, challenges the assumptions underlying neuroscientific studies of consciousness, rejecting popular mechanistic theories that our experience of the world stems from the firing of the neurons in our brains. Noë (Action in Perception) argues that we are not our brains, that consciousness arises from interactions with our surroundings: Consciousness is not something that happens inside us. It is something we do or make. Noë points out that many of our habits, like language, are foundational aspects of our mental experience, but at the same time many, if not most, habits are environmental in nature—we behave a particular way in a particular situation. He goes on to challenge popular theories of perception, in particular the claim that the world is just a grand illusion conjured up by the brain. Readers interested in how science can intersect with and profit from philosophy will find much food for thought in Noë's groundbreaking study.

[Benjamin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Alva Noë’s thesis is simple: consciousness is an active procedure, something we do rather than something that happens to or within us. Noë argues that consciousness is a kind of skill, not something we passively experience and must then interpret. It is therefore incorrect to suppose that the mysteries of consciousness can be answered by appealing solely to the physical brain, and any science that proceeds on the assumption that the brain is the be-all and end-all of consciousness is egregiously misguided. The mind is more than the brain, and consciousness consists of an active relationship between one’s body and mind and the world. The brain is merely an ingredient of consciousness.

Out of Our Heads is a philosophy book written for a general (i.e. non-philosophizing) audience. This has its merits, of course. The book is fairly approachable, though those who find scientific discussion of any extent either arduous or boring are better served elsewhere. The non-rigorous treatment also has its shortcomings—some conclusions just seem too hastily reached. Philosophically inclined readers are bound to ask a lot of, “OK, but…”-type questions on behalf of Noë’s opponents, but this is to demand more of the author than he has set out to give. A more philosophically robust treatment of these issues is purportedly given in Noë’s previous work, Action in Perception (which, in the spirit of full disclosure, I will admit I have not read).

My main criticism of the book is that the first fifty pages or so feel repetitious. Noë spends a good deal of time on his one-note soapbox (consciousness is not something that happens in us, you understand?) before treading more interesting terrain. Fortunately, the latter half of the book examines a great deal of fascinating scientific research, replete with tales of “rewired” ferrets who experience vision with their “auditory brains,” cameras that translate visual information into vibrations and enable blind people to successfully hit oncoming Ping-Pong balls, and visually unimpaired people who fail to notice when a woman in a gorilla suit beats her chest right before their eyes. Noë deftly uses these data in support of his own admonition that scientific investigations of consciousness need to be re-examined and, in many cases, restructured completely.

For the most part, Noë’s project is successful. His approach to the issues at hand is imbued with a healthy respect for common sense, which is both appealing and refreshing. Admittedly, I remain leery of thinking that Noë has shown consciousness of a most primitive sort to be irreducible to neuronal activity in the brain; at best, he has demonstrated that consciousness may require external stimulation, which seems a much more modest (and, I would think, much less controversial) claim. Even still, Noë has certainly contributed to an important and engrossing discussion, and much of what he argues seems applicable to consciousness more broadly construed—that is, as the faculty which comprehends and engages with the world, which seems to be Noë’s primary focus of concern. In the end, then, those who have never questioned the notion that the brain is all there is to consciousness will benefit from an open-minded reading of Noë’s text, while those who are already wary of such claims will find their suspicions validated and empirically reinforced.

[Andrew]

Alva Noë takes an argument that-- while a bit of a straw man-- certainly seems to be predominantly true among cognitive scientists: that consciousness arises from the physical brain and can be studied through the same approaches that we use on any other organ of the body. Similar claims were attacked by Hubert Dreyfus decades ago, and like Dreyfus, Noë is heavily influenced by continental thought-- if we are going to truly study the mind with scientific rigor, we need to at least acknowledge some of the ideas brought up by Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty.

And one thing makes Noë's book so compelling-- especially when compared to Heidegger's arabesques-- is what a simple, lucid, and almost chatty account of the argument that consciousness exists as an interface between neurology and the external world. A gateway drug to the continentals for dyed-in-the-wool positivists, perhaps?

[Cherif Jazra · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was expecting more getting into this book. I was disappointed by the general argumentative style and in general the lack of precision and depth in Noe's arguments for the holistic view of consciousness. Too much ink is spent on condemning the orthodox "Cartesian" neuroscience but not enough developing their arguments, and not enough developing his own critique. Nothing mentioned about the frame problem for example (read Dreyfus). Nothing about the Turing test and the Chinese room argument (Read Seare). Nothing about Heideggarian AI. Not enough about the problem with Symbolic Representation or what it means that the world "shows up". Sprained all around are expressions like if you believe this then you made a mistake. Noe should have used the information inside his note in the text itself. I am already familiar with Heidegger's ideas as well as Searle's and Dreyfus's critique, none of which really featured in this book. I'm therefore not really sure what insights readers will take out from it, unless it be someone really not knowledgeable about consciousness. In his preface, Noe says: "I have written this book with a particular audience in mind. I imagine that my reader is a lover of science and that he or she is fascinated by the problem of mind, by the fact of consciousness, and by how daunting it is to understand or explain these phenomena". This is not a description of a novice reader. If you are such a person, consider then looking at the references and picking a book from there.

[Bonnie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I thought this book had great insights about the nature of consciousness as inherently an interaction between an individual and the world. I loved his description of consciousness as being more like dancing than digestion. The book is very phenomenological and Heideggerian in that respect. It's less good on how to understand how what's going on in the brain is related to mind and consciousness. What would a sophisticated neuroscience, that was not in thrall to Cartesian misconceptions about the mind and the world, have to say about this?

[Chrissy · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful philosophical exploration of how embodied cognition must naturally extend to the question of consciousness. It veered a bit too polemic at times, as philosophers are wont to do I guess. For example, whereas I'm fully on board with the notion that cognitive science should reevaluate its stance on computational cognition, given various mismatches between its underlying assumptions and neuroscience, I don't think computational modelling should be thrown out entirely. The perspective pushed by Noe is in some ways an idealistic one; as important as it is to get the science to that bright shining point, we won't get there without trudging through the messy, non-ideal approaches as well. As it stands, current technologies and scientific understanding simply aren't far enough along to fully prove Noe's point, even if it ultimately may be correct. Philosophical over-idealizing notwithstanding, Noe does provide some valuable food for thought and some pause to reconsider the broader extensions of one's scientific viewpoints.

[Bruce · Rating 4 out of 5]

A letter to my friend who gave me the book:

Hi Irwin,

I had to stop reading Out of Our Heads when school began, but have now finished--a very interesting read! Thanks very much for sending it to me. Alva Noë is obviously right that consciousness couldn’t have come about except through our purposeful interaction with the environment.

I especially appreciate his refutation of the “grand illusion” theory that reality is created by the mind. I didn’t realize so many neuroscientists (at least in 2009) based their work on the premise that the brain creates ‘pictures’ of reality based on sensory input--just like many 17th and 18th century philosophers. Immanuel Kant carried it to its logical dead-end by severing consciousness from knowledge of reality altogether. Ayn Rand contended that this theory of mind is responsible for today’s rampant subjectivism and the widespread estrangement of practicality from any theoretical base.

Noë certainly comes closer to understanding mind from a biological perspective by insisting that the mind and body are a unity that responds to the needs and interests of living beings. But doesn’t that make consciousness stand out even more starkly as a conundrum? Noë himself recognizes the inevitability of positing a “nonmechanical, nonphysical conception” (p. 39) to explain even the needs and interests of a bacterium! How much more is a nonmechanical, nonphysical conception needed for human beings who have a need to listen to Brahms and Mozart (or whomever). Can that need be explained biologically?

It is such needs that constitute what Noë refers to as “[t]he substrate of our lives [which is] the meaningful world in which we find ourselves.” (p. 184). Profound beauty is experienced as more than simply a stimulus to pleasure, and love more than a means to propagate one’s own kind and ensure stable communities. (I’m sure you’ll recognize, by now, my standard argument for the existence of God.)

I take Noë’s claim that we must go beyond the brain to explain meaning to heart--and mustn’t we also go beyond “our dynamic transactions with the world”? (p. 185). After all, bacteria have dynamic transactions, too!

Noë claims “[o]ur relation to the world is not that of an interpreter.” (p. 184). By interpretation he seems to mean seeing the world through the lens of unsupported presuppositions, like the picture theory of the mind. Presuppositions are also equated with first principles:

We are not in the predicament that has been supposed traditionally by cognitive science, namely, that of having to figure everything out from first principles. (p. 128)

He says instead, “[o]ur lives depend on . . . cognitive trails and other modes of cognitive habits . . .”. But presuppositions and first principles like the law of contradiction are also derived from involvement with the world, and needed to guide all our actions.

The validity of first principles derived from experiences of love and beauty may not be as evident as the law of contradiction, but once apprehended (e.g., once one has really heard> Brahms) are undeniable.

In any case, Noë is still at the beginning of his quest to explain consciousness biologically; Out of Our Heads has mostly just cleared the way of certain misconceptions. The great question of what exactly makes a human being’s reflection on his own cogitation possible remains unanswered.

Now you'll have to let me know what you think of the book.
Bruce

[Arno Klein · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful read! The author’s main premise is that thinking and consciousness require more than just a brain -- they require an embodied brain dynamically engaged with its environment:

“Maybe consciousness is like money. Here's a possibility: my consciousness now - with all its particular quality for me now - depends not only on what is happening in my brain but also on my history and my current position in and interaction with the wider world. It is striking that the majority of scientists working on consciousness don't even notice there is an overlooked theoretical possibility here. They tend to think that consciousness, whatever its ultimate explanation, must be something that happens somewhere and sometime in the human brain, just as digestion must take place in the stomach.” (page 4)

“In this book I use the term “consciousness” to mean, roughly, experience. And I think of experience, broadly, as encompassing thinking, feeling, and the fact that a world “shows up” for us in perception.” (page 8)

He expresses this engagement with words such as “skillful adjustment”, “active attunement”, “coupling”, and “entanglement”:

“Perceptual consciousness, at least, is a kind of skillful adjustment to objects (and the environment).” (page 65)
“The conscious mind is not inside us; it is, it would be better to say, a kind of active attunement to the world.” (page 142)
“Seeing is a kind of coupling with the environment, one that requires attention, energy, and, most of the time, movement.” (page 145)
“Perceptual consciousness arises from our entanglement with it.” (page 146)

The author talks about “external correlates of consciousness” and considers consciousness as a function of an animal’s engagement with its environment, and not all or none:

“Only creatures with the right kinds of brains can have certain kinds of experiences, and to events in consciousness there doubtless correspond neural events. But there are external correlates of consciousness too. Conscious beings have worlds precisely in the sense that the world shows up for them as latent with value: sugar! light! sex! kin! The mind of the bacterium, such as it is, consists in its form of engagement with and gearing into the world around it. Its mind is its life.”
…
“Mind is life. If we want to understand the mind of an animal, we should look not only inward, to its physical, neurological constitution; we also need to pay attention to the animal’s manner of living, to the way it is wrapped up in its place.” (page 42)

To advance his case, he brings up experiments where ferret cortices were remapped to sensory organs, and sensory substitution in humans as examples of perceptual plasticity:

“The fact that it is possible in this way to vary consciousness in relation to its neural underpinnings teaches that there isn't anything special about the cells in the so-called visual cortex that makes them visual. Cells in the auditory cortex can be visual just as well. There is no necessary connection between the character of experience and the behavior of certain cells.”
“...It follows, then, that what determines and controls the character of conscious experience is not the associated neural activity.” (page 54)

“Bach-y-Rita's sensory substitution system is perceptual plasticity without neuroplasticity.”
…
“This is the key to our puzzle. What governs the character of our experience - what makes experience the kind of experience it is - is not the neural activity in our brains on its own; it is, rather, our ongoing dynamic relation to objects, a relation that, as in this case, clearly depends on our neural responsiveness to changes in our relation to things.”
…
“What makes vision visual is that it is an activity of exploring the environment making use of an understanding of the specific family of ways in which movement produces sensory change, namely, those ways that depend, centrally, on the eye. Blinking, turning the eye or head, and moving in relation to objects bring about characteristically eye-based sensory events.” (pages 58-60)

Later, the author tries to debunk the “grand illusion” hypothesis (the world exists in our minds), by flipping the usual evidence of change blindness and inattentional blindness on its head and arguing that we don’t need to build a model of the world in our heads when the world is right there:

“What do these phenomena - change blindness and inattentional blindness - tell us about ourselves? A number of thinkers have suggested that these studies provide a novel kind of evidence that the visual world is a grand illusion. Traditional defenders of this idea emphasize the claim that the brain builds up our internal picture of the world: what we experience is an internal picture confabulated by the brain, not the world itself. The line of argument I now have in mind suggests an even more disturbing, and more radical, skeptical thesis. According to this new skepticism, it isn't really true that the brain builds up an internal model of the world; the fact that it seems to us as if the brain builds up an internal model shows that we are even more profoundly deluded about the nature of our own experience. We think we experience all the world in sharp focus and uniform detail in our visual experience. In fact, we do not. If the old skepticism argued that we see much more than is given to us, the new skepticism presses instead the idea that we don't see more than is given to us, but we misguidedly think we do.” (pages 139-140)

“Rather - and this is the key - the world seems available to me. What guarantees its availability is, first of all, its actually being there, and second, my possessing the skills needed to gain access to it.” (page 140)
…
“Our perceptual consciousness of the world as a causally, spatially, temporarily well-ordered, regular, and predictable place depends on the world's actually being that way.” (pages 141-142)

“Once we appreciate that the retinal image isn't something that we see, we lose a grip even on what it means to say that it is upside-down.” (page 143)

[Carlo · Rating 2 out of 5]

Come esplicitato nel titolo, questo libro si propone di dimostrare che la coscienza non ha luogo nella nostra testa, bensì all'infuori di essa, in una relazione dinamica tra il cervello , il corpo e il mondo. La tesi è in aperta polemica con l'opinione largamente maggioritaria nelle neuroscienze (Noë è invece un filosofo).
Avendo già letto qualcosa di molto bello e convincente in materia (Damasio) ho fatto fatica a prendere sul serio le argomentazioni di Noë che mi sono sembrate superficiali , bagattellari e per lo più basate su ambiguità semantiche: basti pensare che in tutto il libro non fornisce una definizione di "coscienza" e pare piuttosto riferirsi al modo di percepire il mondo (e non il sé).
Per quanto ci siano spunti interessanti, sistematicamente la vis polemica sfugge di mano all'autore spezzando l'incantesimo.
Ho odiato ogni pagina.

[Kelly Kemp]

for school :/

[V · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book is written well, and quite enjoyable if one were to exclude the feeling of it building up towards an actually coherent argument that ties everything together. It's a disjointed series of arguments as to why we are not our 'heads'. I agree with the premise, but do not feel like it was argued to a satisfactory level here. I think Mr. Noë had a good opportunity to be braver in his assertion(s) but missed it. Would still recommend this book though.

[Sushil · Rating 3 out of 5]

Alva's ideas on consciousness fall somewhere between pan-psychism and those of Searle, with Dennett being even further right of Searle. While Dennett essentially argues that consciousness is more or less an illusion, likely to emerge in any brain-like system sufficiently complex, independent of its implementation - biological or electro-mechanical, Searle tones down Dennett's hard rhetoric and while agreeing that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon and more or less unnecessary to explain our actions and behaviors, insists that consciousness can only emerge in particular type of biological implementations like our brains. Pan-psychism on the other extreme adds an additional element to the ingredients of the universe - a spirit of sorts that observes, perhaps even participates. It imbues everything - animate or inanimate. One's consciousness is a snippet of that psychic dimension.

What I like the best about this book is how Alva starts with stating what a lot of us feel in our heart - none of the leading theories come even close to explaining consciousness. And then he builds very strong arguments for why he believes that. He does not dismiss the work done in neuroscience, instead uses it deftly to argue that while it has been very successful in explaining how the brain, the machine, works, the research is also making it clearer by the day that our dear brain is largely nothing but a computer.

The next step in his argument is almost Sherlock Holmesque - well, if the brain is more or less a computer, and we all swear that consciousness not only exists, it's the most real thing in the world, and there's no way a mere computer can be conscious, the consciousness must exist somewhere other than inside our brain. The big problem with the book is that besides stating this conclusion a myriad number of times in slightly different ways, Alva is unable to give any body to this hypothesis. He steers clear of pan-psychism because of its non-scientific connotations, but doesn't offer any alternative mechanism of how consciousness can exist outside of brain. All he manages to say is that consciousness arises out of a complex system's dynamic interaction with its environment - with a lot of emphasis on the dynamic interaction part. I don't want to sound overly critical since sometimes the biggest breakthroughs start with only an idea. But I hoped for more in the book anyway.

[Jessica Cebra · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was easy to read for someone that is not a well-read philosopher. I understand the mixed reviews. The book was exploratory and I don't think it was trying to be definitive, analytical or final. Most of us are "card-carrying Cartesians" and I think the ideas represented in the book could seem strange and hard to grasp for someone not attuned to Heideggar's phenomenonology and other schools of thought dealing with embodied/embedded/enactive/extended cognition and consciousness; and even offensive to those in scientific fields. But, perhaps we can relax and appreciate the exploration of ideas, existence, experience, perception? Philosophy and practical sciences will never meet eye to eye and be on top of each others' research, but there is a rising importance to converse and exchange in these ideas. These aren't new claims either, Noe is following a whole tradition of thought and it shouldn't be read as so black and white. This was the last book I read for a philosophy class about Artificial Intelligence and I thought it was a great conclusion for the spectrum of ideas we were exploring in the class-- beginning with Descartes and moving from the classic computational model of cognition, through La Mettrie, Turing, then Searle, Heideggar/Merleau-Ponty, then Dreyfus, and moving to (paradigm shift) the enactivist paradigm where consciousness's realm is not just in the mind and based on representations/models of the world, but is continuously enacted and updated in the inseparable interaction of body-brain-world (refer to Ponty's "intentional arc"); and is offered as a new model for the AGI research project (not AI like machine learning). These theories are not attempting to solve all the problems of understanding cognition, and I could see people being frustrated by books like this that don't offer fleshed-out examples and answers about why these theories are an improvement over older paradigms. Researchers in this field haven't reached any consensus about what their scientific domain of investigation is or what the central concepts are, but I enjoyed the reading. I think Noe made the ideas accessible in a not-too-intellectual format.

[Jonathan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Let me start by being perfectly honest. I'm a Christian, and I also like books about the brain and physics. This can be challenging, because from a scientific standpoint it sort of looks like there is nothing that suggests that our consciousness is anything besides an accidental side-effect of evolution, a sort of humming generated by the chemical impulses swirling around our forebrains. I was hoping to find out (yes: I can hear it now, the whole chorus of you, frowning upon me for seeking out evidence for an already arrived-upon conclusion) that scientific evidence itself suggests that there is something more to what makes us us than mere brain activity.

Alva's arguments, however, have nothing to do with metaphysics and everything to do with the definition of consciousness itself. This was why, while the book was fascinating, I also found it ultimately unfulfilling. He succeeds in demonstrating that a solid definition of consciousness (as he puts it: that the world shows up for us) must not limit itself to brain activity. But he does so with arguments that sometimes don't seem to follow logically until you read them two or three times, and even then seem questionable. One is left with the feeling that he has redefined what is meant by consciousness to encompass a larger picture of our experience in the world, and then triumphantly shown that according to this definition consciousness requires a world and our interaction with it.

It's a good book if you're interested in the definition of consciousness, and also a good book if you like to read interesting studies of sensory substitution and other such tricks that try to tease out its essence. But I can't wholeheartedly recommend it on the merit of its premise.

[Elvira Lupsa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Another stone added to Descartes dreaming argument:
..."our perceptual consciousness is a biologically evolved capacity, and evolution takes place in a given environmental niche. Our perceptual skills have evolved for life on earth, not life in an environment in which objects materialize and vanish at the whim of supernatural deceivers (or engineers). So the fact that we are vulnerable to deception - in the psychology lab or at the movies - just reveals the context-bound performance limitations of our cognitive powers. It does not show that our cognitive powers are radically deluded!"

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not qualified to fully judge all the merits of his arguments, but it all seems to make sense. That there is no part of the brain that creates consciousness or that the brain itself is consciousness, but instead consciousness is how the brain interacts with the world. It would be good to read a couple times, and also some long reviews and some books he cites. The book is well-written and easy to understand.

[Pelagia · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fast-paced, engaging, & mostly convincing Heideggerian critique of the argument, popular in mainstream neuroscience and cognitive science, that consciousness happens in or is somehow a product of the brain. Instead of thinking of consciousness as "something that happens inside us," Noe argues, we should think of it as "something we do or make...something we achieve," as something "more like dancing than...digestion."

[Silenzio Esistenza · Rating 3 out of 5]

he never actually goes to proove his claims. in fact, by sharing the experiments, and giving weak counter arguments he is spreading more of that idea that the brain simulates its reality.

i believe the greatest confusion in this book, is that he seems to contradict the notion that all is in the brain. which sounds kind of stupid. certainly something dawkins, a mediocre philosopher/religiously skeptic (whose only good thing ever written is about memes) himself could come up with.
obviously our brain does not create reality (in the sense of: existence). it is most likely though, our brains simulate its reality in a similar way, due to them being similar, with similar functionalities, and similar size in regions.. which could cause us to create similar worldviews which are way more specific to our brains then we could realise. these worldviews can than be changed through culture, through 'memes'. where people can come to similar understandings even without doing any experiment or mental gymnastics themselves.. Because our brains allow for this, because of their similarities. That worldview on its turn can become outdated, and we likely will have a completely different science in a thousand years or so, with that of today seeming naïve and backwards.

There are many signs that our brains do not simulate reality itself. that each brain responds to impulses. translating all kinds of impulses into electrical current, into neurological activity, into brainprocesses influencing physiology, as physiology influences those brainprocesses. a whole web of interactions within the larger space of a cosmos unknown to us, but partially revealed through our individual and collective perceptions.

those signs which point to reality not being in the brain, are the development and evolution of science itself. and paradigm shifts, that change our common view on life and reality. without the scientific exploration of the last 200 years, our common worldview would be vastly different. At the most our brains limit what can be known and internally simulated as knowledge as reason as experience, as induction, as science.. but they do not exist independent from the great mystery of existence.

so neither does reality exists out of the brain uniquely, nor in it.

i would argue we as humans within the world, all exist out in the world. parts of our brains observe parts of our brains. we don't really experience our inner world as an inner fenomenon, the observer is allways out of it, as something that looks outward to the mental or physical phenomena. experiencing all kinds of things like senses, memory, emotion, movement, sense of body, etc....

so who is experiencing all these mental physical phenomena and processes?
and who is there when there is no experience, in coma or otherwise?
while lucid dreaming, who is dreaming, and while in deep sleep, who is sleeping??

There is some sign, either

that all is out, all is outside, and the observer is out as well, but temporarily acting as observer as a function of the brain, playing the role of the self, the thing that acts as a center of experience where all phenomena of the brain are centered towards.

or that all is in, including whatever we experience, but we can never experience it all, because of the speed of light, and the relative distance of inertial masses..
that all existence is inside, but the observer, that part of our brain is incapable of covering it all.

except maybe there is a loophole, through quantum mechanics, as all influences all through the zero point field through probability amplitudes, and the particles we are made up of, are non local, non static.

so it appears, In a way we are all that is, and all is in. or all is out. it doesn't matter what distinction because there is no boundary line.

but in that case, when you cut away the observed, and the observer, what is left? who is left?

who is left, when you have died, as a human, as one who self identifies as distinct and seperate from existence, when you identify as a thing, which is mortal?

[Christina Carr · Rating 1 out of 5]

A pretentious mess of metaphor with no concrete or empirical evidence. He argues that neural correlates of consciousness can’t exist, because a brain in a Petri dish couldn’t gain consciousness. He supports this with a number of metaphorical arguments, but primarily argues that because consciousness relies on our interacting with our environment, it can’t exist purely as a process of neurons.

While I agree that a brain in a vat wouldn’t have evolved to have consciousness (and wouldn’t have evolved to exist, period), I do believe that, now that our brains have evolved consciousness as a tool to interact with our environment, our sense of selves, emotions, and awareness can definitely exist without interacting with any environment. He claims that the fact that we can stimulate the brain in certain ways to give rise to specific experiences is not evidence of the brain being the foundation of consciousness, since all that proves is that the brain interacts with and responds to environmental stimuli, and it is this interaction, rather than the brain itself, that results in consciousness (chapter 8). He makes a similar argument about dreams, also claiming that since the environment in dreams is not reality, it doesn’t count as consciousness. All these arguments follow if you limit consciousness to the narrow definition of “being aware of environmental stimuli”. I don’t think that’s how consciousness should be defined, though- I think our sense of selves, emotions, and thoughts can all exist independent of an environment. Our environment shapes our behaviors, thoughts, and reactions, but I believe you would still develop a sense of self if you grew up without any external interaction.

I think that consciousness is a tool that we evolved to have that helped us interact with our environment and each other. Yes, we wouldn’t have evolved to have consciousness or awareness without there being a world to be conscious/aware of, but I don’t think that negates the possibility of neural correlates of consciousness. Of course the environment provides the setting of which we are conscious, but I don’t see how it then follows that consciousness can’t be an emergent property of neural processes, and that we couldn’t pinpoint how that emergence happens in the brain.

Maybe I’m just jaded at this guy because when I took his class he wouldn’t round my 89.5% up to an A. But his pretentiousness in saying that Nobel Prize winning research should be reconsidered based on his own metaphorical analysis and complete lack of empirical evidence or measurable alternatives to back up his opinion is laughable.

[Max · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book doesn't work for me as science, philosophy, or even poetry. I read it years ago and still remember it as the emptiest I've ever read. I kept waiting for him to explain his thesis but he never did. I guess I kind of respect the chutzpah.

He says his thesis is that consciousness is based on the whole organism's relations with its environment. Most of the book is shallowly rephrasing this over and over, but what could it mean in depth or detail?

Could he mean that, when I'm conscious of an apple on a desk, my consciousness isn't in my brain, but somehow between myself and the apple, like ectoplasm? That's obviously unreasonable but at least it's clear.

I don't see how you can get consciousness out of the head by saying it's interactive. I may interact with kleenexes to blow my nose, but the phlegm doesn't materialize out of the friction between the two objects, it's generated by my sinuses. Even the prior interaction with ragweed didn't produce phlegm in some ghostly interface zone between me and the ragweed, it just stimulated my body to produce something.

Also, I can blank my mind with my eyes shut and still be conscious. I'm not interacting with anything outside my head any more than a mannequin would, but I'm still more conscious than one.

The above kind of engagement with what his thesis might actually mean is nowhere to be found in his book: it's all airy, handwavy rephrasings. So long as everything is vague and gauzy he can bring in facts to support his "case", but, well ... if he's going to do that, then he could also write a good pop-sci book about the quintessential nonsensical statement "colourless green ideas sleep furiously." He could have a section on colour perception, maybe something about possible spectrum inversion, and so you see a colour can really be two things at once, without contradiction; a section on what an idea is really, and didn't Plato say they were somewhere in some other realm -- might they not be asleep there?; a section on what it means for abstractions to sleep, like "the idea of democracy slumbered from Athens till the guillotine"; and a section on anger and how inanimate things like rashes can be said to be "angry". Maybe toss in a chapter on paradoxes and Godelian incompleteness. Throughout, he could mock mainstream science for not making any progress understanding the sentence, and say they should give his interpretation a try, that "the meaning of the sentence isn't in any one simplistic fixed interpretation, but the collection of all of them together, along with all their allusions."

[Hazel Thayer · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think the thesis goes like this: "consciousness is not produced in the computer we call a brain but in the interaction between our sense organs and the outside world." It was a very interesting book but I just kept saying: so? I don't see how any scientist would argue that a human brain in a vat deprived of any input its whole life would be conscious. It's giving "if a tree falls in the forest:" maybe, "If a tree falls in the forest, it makes sound waves, but not a sound until it hits eardrums which convert it from wave to the conscious experience of 'sound'." Sometimes it feels like a semantic argument: "umm actually your BRAIn itself DOESNT think, it produces thought." for sure man, yeah, pass the bong, etc.

It brings up big questions that it doesn't answer: OK, an amoeba is conscious because it senses sugar and manuevers itself to eat it. But computers are not, because they only follow deterministic algorithms and there is nobody there to perceive the environment. What is the difference here? OK, there's no little guy that I call a "self" in my brain piloting the ship, seeing what I see, hearing what I hear -- but was neuroscience ever really looking for that guy? Some of it is interesting, some feels like semantics.

Once again: so? How should this radically change how we think about consciousness? I'd say that the answer to the "so" question can actually be found in another book I'm reading: "the extended mind." I must ponder... ah shit, I mean, my brain must, wait, no, my consciousness must go through my brain to interact with my environment to produce thoughts, ah whatever, you know what I mean Alva

[Abby · Rating 5 out of 5]

Noë argues that the mind cannot take place just inside of the brain—it must arise somewhere amidst the dynamical interactions among the brain, the body, and the world. Beyond good reasoning, this was very well written. For a “pop science” book, it was remarkably grounded in real science. It also goes against what many of my professors and the grad students in my labs take for granted when it comes to studying human intelligence.

The brain is not an information processor, for what are the inputs and outputs? It is also not an algorithm. Noë pokes holes in the reductionistic materialistic assumptions of mainstream science, and offers a more realistic, holistic germ of an idea for what is really going on. His idea, however, is vague and hand wavy; he spends most of the time critiquing the establishment rather than developing his theory, which is fine.

I need to sit and muse some more on the ramifications of this critical take on the orthodoxy of the science of consciousness. How does this fit into idealism? How does this fit into language and cognition? I want to be able to formulate this in a way that I can discuss it with the people who disagree, and see where the holes in his argument lie. He says what the brain is not, what the mind is not, but doesn’t offer a strong alternative.

[KC · Rating 3 out of 5]

Action in Perception is one of my favorite books on the mind - it completely changed the way I think about what it means to be a person/organism/system that interacts with the world. In contrast, I thought there were some interesting points in Out of Our Heads, but didn't find the arguments presented here to be as thorough or as persuasive as Action in Perception. Furthermore, while Noë convincingly argues that there is an "explanatory gap" between our neuroscientific understanding of the brain and how conscious experience can be possible, and that the physical structure of the brain alone is probably insufficient to explain consciousness, I never felt like these two lines of argument were brought together to show that the core "you are not your brain" hypothesis helps close the explanatory gap to consciousness.

Out of Our Heads is definitely more accessible than Action in Perception, however. I would highly recommend this book to someone who is curious about philosophy of mind and/or cognitive science, but doesn't have much background in this area and wants to test the waters with a shorter, not-too-dense, but still thought-provoking book.

[Alejandro Carballosa · Rating 3 out of 5]

A nice introduction to the mind-body problem that ends up in a dissapointing lack of substance. He presents the idea that consciousness is not achieved by the brain on its own but of an interplay between brain, body and it´s surrounding world. So far so good, but I don´t think that this idea was so disruptive and new at that time and I feel that in the way of trying to convince you of it, he diminishes a lot of scientific effort as 'close-minded' because it aimed to understand how the brain computes stuff in a straight-forward way.

The narrative is engaging and the medical cases are mind-blowing. It is ironic though that the theory of predictive coding - the idea that the brain weights actual perception with its own internal model of the world - is able to explain many of the same phenomena presented here and without beating around the bush. Sadly, he doesn´t even acknowledge this framework by it´s name and again he both denies and labels it as absurd in just two sentences.

There are a few moments of bliss and cute ideas such as a metaphor of the brain as a musical instrument, with consciousness being a result of our playing with it; or a short discussion of how language shapes the mind and expands our view and interaction with the world.

[Miguel Palhas · Rating 2 out of 5]

The main premise is in the title. The book claims that the brain alone is not responsible for consciousness, or for making me, me.
To me that seems a bit obvious (as the book suggests in the beginning, if you could isolate a brain in a jar, would it still be a conscious human being? would it learn the same skills / emotions / etc? probably not), but still an interesting subject.
However, it feels more like a repetitive message spread around hundreds of pages, sometimes looking more like wordplay rather than actual arguments.

I took particular issue with a section where chess is used as an example. As a chess player, I was a bit schocked to see how poorly he characterized the thinking of a good chess player, or a good chess computer engine.
I found myself raising my eyebrow at other points as well, but chess is the I know how to judge best. If that one falls flat to me, how can I trust his thinking about the oters? not sure if things are being mischaracterized, or just explained poorly due to the excessively complicated language, but either way isn't great