
bigthink.com "Contemporary research on consciousness in neuroscience rests on unquestioned but highly questionable foundations. Human nature is no less mysterious now than it was a hundred years ago," writes philosopher Alva Noë in his book "Out of Our Heads." It's a bold assertion in an age when fMRI has enabled us to see images of the brain functioning in real time, and when many prominent public intellectuals (Stephen Hawking, Eric Kandel) have argued, either implicitly or vociferously, in favor of reductionism. The "brain-as-calculating machine" analogy assumes that human thought, personality, memory, and emotion are located somewhere in the gray matter protected by the skull. In other words, you -- at least, the waking you who gets out of bed in the morning -- are your brain. But you're not, says Noë. Just as love does not live inside the heart, consciousness is not contained in a finite space -- it's something that arises, something that occurs: a verb rather than a noun. And since the publication of Francis Crick's influential "The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul," scientists have been looking for it in all the wrong places. Directed / Produced by Jonathan Fowler and Elizabeth Rodd
Big Think
bigthink
bigthink.com
Neuroscience
Philosophy
Brain (Literature Subject)
Mind
You
Body
Control
Consciousness
Alva Noë
Science
Reductionism
Soul
Reality
Behavior
Psychology
Cognition
Personality
Technology
Neuron
Francis Crick
The Astonishing Hypothesis
Thinking
Memory
Experience
Qualia
Grey Matter
Homunculus
Descartes
Vision
Meme
Going Mental
Extreme Biology
21st Century Living