News and commentary on Religion, especially Southern religion.

Showing posts with label perception. Show all posts
Showing posts with label perception. Show all posts

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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