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

[Henry Musikar]

Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness 
by Alva Noë. Hill and Wang, 2009 

Alva No, a University of California, Berkeley, philosopher and cognitive scientist, argues that after decades of concerted effort on the part of neuroscientists, psychologists and philosophers "only one proposition about how the brain makes us conscious ... has emerged unchallenged: we don't have a clue." The reason we have been unable to explain the neural basis of consciousness, he says, is that it does not take place in the brain. Consciousness is not something that happens inside us but something we achieve it is more like dancing than it is like the digestive process. To understand consciousness the fact that we think and feel and that a world shows up for us we need to look at a larger system of which the brain is only one element. Consciousness requires the joint operation of brain, body and world. "You are not your brain. The brain, rather, is part of what you are."
http://tinyurl.com/out-of-our-heads 

Henry Mu 

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