Alva Noe say things that at first disturb me until I try to see them in my own life or as a reflection of my own beliefs. So among many of his opinions like on pg 83-84, at first I was a little disturbed by his statement following his discussion about Japanese children constantly pinging each other with their phones, and then extending this phenomena by saying, “siting at a computer, reading and typing could be a genuinely, active outgoing socially engaged mode of being. But after doing a little research I discovered that Noe is considered by some in his field to be of an ‘enactive’ mind set ( knowledge obtained through enacting with the environment is the best I can come up with). So the belief of a “presence in absence” would possibly be consistent with his beliefs. The question that comes to my mind was, “So Jeff, do you believe the possibility of something being present in your mind even though it is physically absent from your sight. All the time! As I write this my wife is out and about. Yet she exist in my mind because I am now distracted enough to think about her moving in space even though she is not physically present for me to see. But then I get confused, sciences such as quantum physics believe in things they have never seen, as does religion, when we get statements such as “faith is hope in that which we cannot see.” Are the validity of our mind’s thoughts just to be limited to what biology can produce, or knowledge that comes from interaction with our environment?

On Page 90 Noe says “words are meaningful…thanks to the existence of a social practice in which I’m allowed to participate.” I think he is only partially right here. I’d rather say , “Consciousness allows me to use words to participate in a social practice because I have a brain similar to others of my species. In this statement I have externalized consciousness both from the brain and the social practice. Is this possible? I like it because it avoids the duality…the either/ or arguments of Damasio and Noe regarding consciousness , by saying consciousness is a field like gravity or the strong force. It allows ‘ like things’ to come together in complex unions. Sometimes temporary, more often than not imperfect unions, but unions of like to like none the less. In the case of language, words are like (the yet to be discovered) Gravitons of gravity, that allow for the temporary attraction, coming together, working together, of a person to a person.

I remember reading somewhere in Out of Our Heads about our interaction with animals. We even sometimes think that words allows us to have a connection to our animals, along with our facial expressions and body posturing. Interestingly we cannot and do not just count on words…words are our conscious expression of a thought, the body posturing and facial expressions are our unconscious expression of a conscious thought. Some people cannot talk without using their hands…have you ever noticed how uncomfortable you feel about convey important information, especially of an emotional nature over the phone, or worse yet in an email.
For some reason writing about this made me wonder what it must have been like for young Western Union telegram delivery boys who had to deliver messages from the War Office during the two World Wars. Knowing that they were, more often than not, messages to a family about a son, or husband or father missing in action?
I think Noe sums up what his book is about on page 65. “…careful examination of the way experience and the brain’s activity depend on each other make plausible the idea that the brains job is, in effect, to coordinate our dealings with the environment. I’m not sure that my interaction with just the environment is enough to generate consciousness. Regretfully this statement, easy to read linguistically as the book is (vs. Damasio) , does not tells us how it happens. The focus seems to be on how things should not be thought about. Like Damasio’s work there is an explanation gap. Noe seems to touch around the edges, with stimulating questions implied in his statements which we still have to answer for ourselves or maybe with the next book on our reading list.

While reading Damasio and Noë, I noticed in passing a couple of details that might not, in the end, have any relevance for their work at large, but that were striking enough to make me wonder.

In his TED talk and again in Self Comes to Mind, Damasio attributes a statement to F. Scott Fitzgerald: “His was a great sin who first invented consciousness.” In Self Comes to Mind, Damasio comments: “I can understand why he [i.e., Fitzgerald] said so, but his condemnation is only half the story, appropriate for moments of discouragement with the imperfections of nature that conscious minds expose so nakedly.” (p. 20) At the time I watched the TED talk, this struck me as a rather odd thing for Fitzgerald to have said: while Fitzgerald was an alcoholic who no doubt had his share of moments of discouragement with the imperfections of nature, he would also have been perfectly aware that human literature and his own career were entirely dependent on consciousness for their existence. I wondered in what context Fitzgerald might have made such a statement. As it turns out, he didn’t: those words were spoken by a character in Fitzgerald’s short story “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” as Damasio’s own citation makes clear. Statements made by an author’s character are entirely distinct from statements made by the author himself, and it struck me as sloppy, to say the least, for Damasio to conflate the two – particularly given his insistence that readers respect fine distinctions of role in his own work: distinctions between the proto and core selves, say, or the self-as-subject vs. the self-as-object.

In Out of Our Heads, meanwhile, Noë spends a lot of time discussing both real and hypothetical cases of persistent vegetative state and locked-in syndrome, two conditions in which the victims experience a horrifying loss of control over both their physical bodies and their communicative abilities. Noë’s first mentions of these conditions occur on page 14 and 15, respectively, where he describes the cases of two real-life women with PVS and locked-in syndrome. In the next few pages, Noë speculates about these conditions by positing theoretical patients in theoretical situations, and by page 27 I had noticed that these theoretical patients, too, were in every case women. Another real-life case, Terri Schiavo: an unpleasant flashback to the Bush years, and yet another woman. When Noë got to discussing the phantom limb phenomenon, again his theoretical patient was a she. I appreciate 21st-century scholars’ attempts to compensate for the historical exclusion of women from the ranks of scientific and medical study, but why were all of these particular patients women? I started to wonder if there were something natural or comfortable for Noë about associating loss of limbs or bodily autonomy with women.

I don’t mean to suggest, based on this scanty evidence, that Damasio’s scholarship is untrustworthy or that Noë has a problem with women. But I do think both of these examples are reminders that every scholar has blind spots, and that we as readers need to look out for them.

I came away from last week’s discussion of Damasio irritated and frustrated. I felt not only that I had lost my provisional hold on Damasio’s central ideas, but that the only way to regain that provisional understanding would be to read Damasio again after disregarding everything that was said in class.

It’s possible that our discussion was unfocused and simply failed to get an adequate purchase on the case Damasio is trying to make in Self Comes to Mind. It’s also possible that Damasio’s case itself lacks focus, and that this is the inevitable upshot of working from a “framework” as opposed to a central thesis. The sheer number of key terms there were for us to unpack in the first half of the class suggests that there is a great deal going on in Damasio’s argument, with many entry points and no obvious center to any of it. Maybe Damasio’s framework just doesn’t stand up well to discussion.

Part of the problem with Damasio, too–or at least my own problem with Self Comes to Mind—is that though he is clearly something of an amateur philosopher, his authority is based on his standing as a neuroscientist. This knowledge sets up an expectation on the part of the reader that Damasio’s case will be backed by empirical evidence – the gathering of which, after all, is what differentiates scientists from philosophers, whose evidence, per disciplinary convention, is permitted to be much more informal and anecdotal. Yet Damasio was repeatedly forced to acknowledge the many places where empirical science has not yet (as he insinuates) caught up to his argument; in fact the book sometimes read as if Damasio were attempting to dictate the direction of his colleagues’ future experimentation so that his framework would be bolstered by empirical support after the fact, and would thus appear prescient as opposed to merely premature.

Noë, by contrast, has a few professional connections to neuroscience but is primarily a professor of philosophy, and his book grounds the question of what consciousness is, disciplinarily speaking, in philosophy, with occasional detours into neuroscience and psychology where those fields provide relevant support for his argument. Given the highly fragmented and incomplete state of neuroscience’s empirical findings about the nature of consciousness, it seems to me that Noë’s approach puts him on firmer ground than Damasio’s.

While I don’t see the stances of Damasio and Noë as necessarily opposed to or precluding one another, I did find it interesting that in a few key places, Noë appeared to be attempting to wrestle questions of consciousness away from the grip of neuroscience by defining them as inherently non-empirical and incapable of being solved empirically in a neuroscientific setting. Regarding the problem of how we can know or prove that other people, or other species, have consciousness as we ourselves do, Noë writes,

We think that the problem we face is a theoretical one: how to acquire knowledge of another’s mind on the basis of what he or she says and does, or on the basis of a neural signature. But we don’t face this problem. We cannot take seriously the possibility that others lack minds because doing so requires that we take up a theoretical, detached stance on others that is incompatible with the kind of life that we already share with them. All this points to something paradoxical about the science of the mind: science requires detachment, but mind can only come into focus if we take up an altogether different, more engaged attitude. (26)

In this case, Noë is not taking the question away from neuroscience in order to claim it for philosophy: rather, he drops the ball into the court of a different science:

Does this mean a science of the mind must be impossible? No. There is a way forward for science. The solution comes when we recognize that there is a rigorously empirical alternative to mechanistic detachment on the one hand and mere personal intimacy on the other. This is the perspective of biology. (26-27)

Still, neuroscientists of Damasio’s stripe are likely to be a little miffed at the suggestion that such a question is not, and cannot by definition be, part of their purview at all.

Even more important are the problematic implications that Noë’s notion of consciousness as “something we do…not something that happens to us” creates for any kind of empirical science. Noë’s position is that consciousness is not isolable, either in a bodily location or a neural process, but rather is entirely dependent on living, nonstatic interaction among the brain, the body, and their environment at a given moment. If consciousness is dynamic and contextual, and the context for consciousness is constantly shifting, how will it ever be possible to fully duplicate the conditions for testing any aspect of consciousness in a lab? It may be possible to isolate certain elements of consciousness, or certain bodily actions, but if consciousness cannot be comprised of anything short of the full interplay of physical, mental and environmental factors at a given moment, how feasible will it ever be to extrapolate any larger theories about the nature of consciousness from such limited experiments?