"Out of Our Heads" by Alva Noë

My wife, being very cool and supportive of my geekiness, bought me a couple of books for my birthday. One of which has been on my Must Read List for a couple years, now. That is, Alva Noë’s Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness . I’ve only made through the first chapter, but I already love it.

This isn’t a book by a spiritual teacher, so it doesn’t have anything to do with an immaterial view of consciousness or primordial awareness, or anything like that. Noë is a professor of philosophy at UC Berkeley, and is also a member of the Institute of Cognitive and Brain Sciences. One of the endorsements on the back of the book is by Daniel C. Dennett (Consciousness Explained), and we all know how he feels about all things spiritual. Dennett writes, “Those of us who disagree with some of its main conclusions have our work cut out for us.” Interesting, eh?

One of my favorite sections of the first chapter deals with the way brain imaging technology works, and why the results appear deceptive to the untrained eye:

“Given the huge personal and institutional investment in brain-scanning methods and technologies, it is understandable that there is so much hype about the power of functional imaging. It is hard to doubt that these technologies will add to our ability to move forward in our quest to understand the conscious mind. But this is all the more reason to pause and step back from the hype. In fact, functional imaging raises important and still unresolved methodological problems.

“PET and fMRI yield multicolored images. The colors are meant to correspond to levels of neural activity: the patterns of the colors indicates the brain areas where activity is believed to occur; brighter colors indicate higher levels of activity. It is easy to overlook the fact that images of this sort made by fMRI and PET are not actually pictures of the brain in action. The scanner and the scientist perform a task that is less like gathering a photographic or X-ray image than it is like the process whereby a police sketch artist produces a drawing of a suspect based on interviews with a number of different witnesses” (p. 20).

He goes on to explain why, but I’ll keep that part in the book.

I don’t have much more to say at this point, but I will include the conclusion to chapter one:

“Empirical research on consciousness and human nature takes for granted that the problem for science is to understand how consciousness arises in the brain. That consciousness arises in the brain goes unquestioned. In the meantime, guns blazing, engines roaring, we are going nowhere in our quest to understand what we are. In this chapter I ask whether our inability to explain consciousness and the workings of our minds stems precisely from our unquestioned assumptions. In the remainder of this book I seek to demonstrate that the brain is not the locus of consciousness inside us because consciousness has no locus inside us. Consciousness isn’t something that happens inside us: it is something that we do, actively, in our dynamic interaction with the world around us. The brain – that particular bodily organ – is certainly critical to understanding how we work. I would not wish to deny that. But if we want to understand how the brain contributes to consciousness, we need to look at the brain’s job in relation to the larger nonbrain body and the environment in which we find ourselves. I urge that it is a body- and world-involving conception of ourselves that the best new science as well as philosophy should lead us to endorse” (p. 24).

Like any good grad-student, I have to cite my source appropriately

Noë, A. (2009). Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness. New York: Hill and Wang.

I think I've kind of forgotten (until lately) the fact that western philosophers and by extension, scientists, have long grappled with all the same questions of identity, and consciousness and truth that are the core of dharma practice.

ergo cogito sum

"But if we want to understand how the brain contributes to consciousness, we need to look at the brain’s job in relation to the larger nonbrain body and the environment in which we find ourselves." -- Alva Noë

"...western philosophers and by extension, scientists, have long grappled with all the same questions of identity, and consciousness and truth that are the core of dharma practice." -- Michael Monson

These are fascinating questions, to be sure. I'm certainly in favor of every appropriate (i.e. ethical) effort to investigate these questions. However, I am equally certain that one does not need to have complete and final answers to these philosophical and scientific questions in order to engage a transformational dharma practice. It could hardly be otherwise. If we needed modern science before we could progress in Awakening, then neither the Buddha nor any other ancient Realizer could have done what they did.

I would not have commented on this except that online (and even offline) discussion of these questions has a tendency to overstimulate our rational, discursive mental processes while dampening our feeling-engagement with the world and everyone in it. In other words, we tend to become too "heady but heartless."

Best,
Mike "Gozen"