News and commentary on Religion, especially Southern religion.

Sunday, February 22, 2009

Out of (not just) our heads

Alva Noe in his book "Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness" argues:

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.

His complex, unparadoxical argument is [oversimplification warning] that consciousness is our acts as we perform, perceive and indeed merge into them with every sensible aspect of ourselves, unfolding through time.

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