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Organon F 18 (2011), No. 2, 254 – 260 © 2011 The Author. Journal compilation © 2011 Institute of Philosophy SAS
Reviews
Alva Noë: Out of our heads
Why you are not your brain, and other lessons
from the biology of consciousness
Hill and Young, New York, 2009, 214 pp.
Where is our consciousness? The immediate suggestion is that it is in everybody’s respective heads. But is it, really? Where exactly? If we could open up our head and dig inside, do we expect to discover an inner space full of elfin thoughts, images, feelings and wishes, all pushing each other around? Surely not; we are not so stupid to think that! The next suggestion is that, as consciousness is in fact some kind of brain activity, then it must be in the head because that is where the brain is. But is this suggestion any improvement? Is consciousness really an activity of the brain? Many people hold this view as so self-evident that they may fail to understand why anyone might want to question it; it would appear to go without saying. (For example, when you open Francis Crick’s clas- sic The astonishing hypothesis (Crick 1990), you see that no alternative would even cross the author’s mind.) However, the philosopher Andy Clark has already produced the thesis that mind , in fact, is not in the head; but Clark is not willing to say the same about consciousness. Yet now Alva Noë, in the present book, has taken the further step, and is keen to defend this mind-boggling thesis: according to him, con- sciousness cannot be seen, reasonably, as being in the head. To explain, let us start with the mind. What does Clark mean when he denies that it is in the head? Well, imagine that somebody asks you whether you can multiply. “Of course,” your answer would be. “But can you multiply also very long numbers?” “Sure, there is an algo- rithm which I know, and knowing it I can multiply numbers of any length.” “But can you do it with your head alone?” “Well, if the num- bers are long, I may need a pencil and a sheet of paper, or something like that.” “Hence is it so that multiplication ceases to be, as numbers get longer, a mental activity?” “Well, not really, it is the same algo- rithm all the time, only ... the mind needs some aids.”^1
(^1) In Dennett (1996) D. Dennett uses the following motto taken from a book by B. Dahlbom and L.-E. Janlert ( Computer Future ; but it seems that the
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Clark’s idea, which he developed especially in his books Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again (Clark 1997) and Supersizing the Mind (Clark 2008), is that looking at the mind as a bun- dle of dispositional properties, it is reasonable to see it as extending not only from the brain into the body, but even further, beyond the boundaries of the body into the environment. To be able to multiply is a mental capacity, but it requires, and essentially and constitutively so, not only the brain but also hands and some external aids. How- ever, Clark is not willing to extend this claim from the mind thus con- ceived to consciousness. His reason, as he writes in his recent article, is that
whereas EM [the hypothesis of ‘extended mind’] was concerned only with the vehicles of non-conscious mental states such as states of dis- positional believing, ECM [the hypothesis of ‘extended conscious mind’] makes the even more striking claim that the local material vehi- cles of some of our conscious experiences might include more than the whirrings and grindings of the brain/CNS (Clark 2009, 967). Alva Noë thinks otherwise, and the current book is his attempt to explain why he does so, in a way that is accessible not only to profes- sionals within cognitive science or philosophy of mind. The essence of his view is a kind of a ‘pragmatic’ theory of consciousness: being con- scious , according to it, is a kind of doing. This is less outlandish than it might at first seem. Cognitive scien- tists and philosophers of mind have been convincing us that the mind and consciousness are, first and foremost, a matter of manipulating representations.^2
book never appeared): “Just as you cannot do very much carpentry with your bare hands, there is not much thinking you can do with your bare brain.” (^2) Viz. especially the celebrated representation theory of mind of Fodor (Fo-
dor 1975; 1981; 2008); but the conviction that representations have a key role within mind is almost universal.
Noë denies that the mind is a dispatcher of represen- tations; indeed he claims that the idea of a mind being crowded with representations is little more than a chimera. What the mind does, ac- cording to Noë, is not producing and maintaining representations, but rather securing the availability of resources. Hence his idea is that my mind does not furnish me with, say, a picture of the park in which
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Noë’s notion of consciousness can perhaps best be illustrated by his exposition of vision (the discussion of which occupies a large part of the book). Here is why he rejects the picture of seeing (and perceiv- ing more generally) as something passive, something that more hap- pens to us than is done by us:
Traditional approaches to vision have tended to suppose that vision happens in us. It is a phenomenon of the retina and structures in the brain… I want to point out what ought to be entirely obvious anyway, namely, that seeing is, in many ways, a bodily activity. Seeing involves moving the eyes and head and body. More important, movements of your eyes or your head or your body actively produce changes in sen- sory stimulation to your eyes. Or, put differently, how things look de- pends, in subtle and fine-grained ways, on what you do. Approach an object and it looms in your visual field. Now turn away: it leaves your field of view. Now shut your eyes: it is gone. Walk around the object and its profile changes. In these and many other ways, there are pat- terns of dependence between simple sensory stimulation on the one hand and your own bodily movement on the other. It should be clear that a central task for any perceiving organism is to master these dy- namic patterns of sensory stimulation and movement. (pp. 59 – 60) Later in the book, this picture of seeing is fostered further by con- trasting it with what Noë sees as the received wisdom concerning the working of vision:
We have been considering the ways in which, it seems, the end prod- uct of the brain’s visual activity is a rich detailed image of the world. Scientists lay great emphasis on the richness of our seeing, on its detail and dazzle. The question of vision science boils down to explaining how we can enjoy uniformly detailed, high-resolution, brilliantly col- ored images of the world when really we see so very little. (p. 137)
Noë’s notion, in contrast to this is, leads him to the following conclu- sion (141 – 2):
[O]ur ability to sustain perceptual contact with the environment over time is not just a matter of there somehow being a picture of the scene in our brains; rather, it is a matter of access. And this, in turn, is a mat- ter of skill. For example, seeing requires a practical understanding of the ways that moving one’s eyes and one’s head and one’s body changes one’s relation to what is going on around one. ... The con- scious mind is not inside us; it is, it would be better to say, a kind of ac-
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tive attunement to the world, an achieved integration. It is the world itself, all around, that fixes the nature of conscious experience. Throughout the book Noë tries to be duly provocative; sometimes his enthusiasm for his novel and amazing view of consciousness per- haps sweeps him further than is reasonable. For example, discussing the enterprise of playing chess, he not only claims that an individual does not face the challenge of the computational complexity of the game in the way computers do, but he goes on to claim that there is no such challenge:
From the standpoint of the intellectualist conception of the mind, this is an impressive fact, for chess presents a daunting computational chal- lenge. The chess player must select, from among an astronomically large number of possible legal moves, the single move that most opti- mally serves to realize the goal of victory. To do this, the player must, in effect, form an accurate representation of the state of play and then work out or calculate the consequences of possible moves; he must then evaluate those consequences in light of their overall desirability, and he must do this under time pressure. Moreover, the problem arises in a more or less new form every move! To play chess, or at least to play it well, one would have to be a computer! … We human players of chess don’t need to select the good moves from among the nearly in- finite possible moves. For anyone who understands chess will know that very few moves are even relevant to the play at a given configura- tion. On top of that, much of the time the position on the board forces our moves. Even if there are alternative ways of responding to an op- ponent’s move, most of the time there will be, at most, only one or two moves worth considering.
Well, but how do we, who “understand chess”, know which moves are the relevant ones? I do not mean to claim that we test every possibility every time, as a standard chess computer program would, but this does not diminish the astounding challenge of choosing an optimal move “from among an astronomically large number of possi- ble legal moves”, which we face just as much as the computer. There is no quarrel about the fact that the more experienced we are as play- ers, the more moves we may disregard simply “as a matter of habit”, but this does not compromise the “daunting computational chal- lenge”. The difference – as far as I can see – is that we do not deal with the entire challenge always when contemplating a move, because
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and why some philosophers disagree with it. They are taken from Clark’s already quoted paper.^5
REFERENCES
Opponents of the view Noë puts forward stress that when there is something without which consciousness could not exist, we must still distinguish between “instrumental dependency” and “constitutional involvement”. The argument is that there might be something without which we could not be conscious, but nevertheless it would remain unreasonable to think about that something as constituting conscious- ness in the sense that it would ‘do’ consciousness, that is, to think of it as being its direct ‘vehicle’. It might be a mere instrument that makes the emergence of consciousness possible, without taking part in it. Opponents would thus argue that, though there is a sense in which we could not be conscious without some help from our bodies, it is merely a case of “instrumental dependency”. But this is a discussion that goes far beyond the boundaries of the present review. Anyway, Noë’s book is interesting and as duly provocative as a philosophical book ought to be. Despite some possible simplifica- tions, the arguments in favour of “embodied cognition” are worth considering.
Jaroslav Peregrin
CLARK, A. (1997): Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again. Cambridge (Mass.): MIT Press. CLARK, A. (2008): Supersizing the Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press. CLARK, A. (2009): Spreading the Joy? Why the Machinery of Consciousness is (Probably) Still in the Head. Mind 118. CRICK , F. (1990): The Astonishing Hypothesis. London: Simon & Schuster. DENNETT , D. (1996): Kinds of Minds. New York: Basic Books. FODOR, J. (1975): The Language of Thought. Scranton: Cromwell. FODOR, J. (1981): Representations. Cambridge: MIT Press (Mass.). FODOR, J. (2008): The Language of Thought Revisited. Oxford: Clarendon Press. P INKER, S. (1994): The Language Instinct. New York: W. Morrow. S EARLE, J. R. (1984): Minds, Brains and Science. Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Press.
(^5) Clark (2009).
