OUT OF OUR HEADS: WHY YOU ARE NOT YOUR BRAIN, AND OTHER LESSONS FROM THE BIOLOGY OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Almost everything we say – that is all metaphor – about our place in the universe is in some way related to awareness of how our bodies and other major organs are situated in relation to space and time. We want to 'get ahead,' put the past 'behind us,' anticipate things 'looking up,' 'stay grounded' and 'get out of ruts.' We want to 'reach for the stars,' 'get in touch with higher powers,' 'get out of our heads' (at least two meanings!), 'go out on limbs' and 'think out of the box.' To many brain centered neuroscientists there is a strong tendency to equate this box with the cranium, but body-mind aficionados find themselves too 'boxed in' by such paradigms.

Alva Noë a Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley considers that 'consciousness is not something inside us…like digestion,' rather ' it is something we achieve.. more like dancing.' Therefore, the aim of Out of Our Heads [let's use the acronym OOOH] is to convince us of this by adopting 'a genuinely biological approach to the study of mind and human nature.' Noë rejects specialist cognitive science jargon as an impediment to understanding, and knows that his criticisms in OOOH will come across as a political attempt 'to change the world…[and] … shake up the cognitive science establishment.' To do this we must give 'pride of place to the whole, living being.' In a brisk rejoinder to Francis Crick's neuro-scientism Noë states that the 'really astonishing hypothesis' is that 'you are not your brain' any more than an orchestra is a self-playing phenomenon. The subtitle of OOOH is: Why you are not your brain, and other lessons from the biology of consciousness. We are living processes interacting within the world. Consciousness is, therefore, 'the joint operation of brain, body and the world.' The OOOH paradigm is supported by child development studies. 'Children are not separate' brains. Their mothers, for example, are 'literally one of the structures constituting a child's psychological landscape.' Thus, not until the age of about five do children begin to see others as conscious beings. This 'theory of mind' paradigm proves that we are morally and deeply 'involved with each other' – first unconsciously, then consciously. From the outset, therefore, the dynamics of consciousness are widely 'distributed' processes as much 'outside' as 'inside' any brain- or body-defined 'box.' The implications are that a biological perspective is essential if 'the meaningful, non-mechanical nature of conscious life' is to be understood. With this conclusion we open the Pandora's box of panpsychism as 'the question of consciousness arises for all living beings' because they all exhibit 'at least primitive agency.' Continuing the out-of-the-box argument Noë contends that consciousness is no more in the cell (neuron) than dance is in the muscle. As cells in the auditory cortex can be visual…there is no necessary connection between the character of experience and the behaviour of certain cells.' Seeing for example 'is not something that happens to us in our brains. It is something we do.' And we do things in a world in which we are involved. [His italics]. 'The body is the vehicle of being in the world' and being 'interinvolved' in the environment. Experiments with phantom limbs show feeling is maintained in a lost limb, just as we maintain feelings for a lost loved one. In a twist on Ramachandran's clever relief of phantom limb pain using mirrors and the motion of the real limb (Network 88), it is even possible to experience feeling as being in an artificial rubber hand (rather than you own hand) if you see it being stroked and tapped synchronously with your own hand!! So where is consciousness? Is it in the extended body, in the skilful extension of the mind into the adept use of a tool or musical instrument, or even in the mind of the involved audience? The best means of extending mind is language. Here, curiously, the important parameter of meaning is 'socially divided' between speaker and listener: just as the meaning of the knight in chess is not in the piece itself but in its function. Noë admonishes mainstream neuroscientists for clinging to the 'simple conception of self' that uses the metaphor of the brain as 'mission control.' He attacks the intellectualist paradigm which sees humans as 'inevitably novice-like' and 'unskilled newcomers' alienated from the world and always trying to figure it out by intense, mental computer-like computational effort. In reality, those most skilled at what they do show the least brain activation when exhibiting the highest performance. [Incidentally, animal instinct is extraordinarily adept and wise in its ability to intelligently navigate the world]. Noë also challenges what he sees as the 'bad science' of skeptical cognitive scientists like Dennett and Blackmore who suggest that the perceived world is illusory. It is true that in the famous Harvard, 'change blindness' experiment, someone giving directions was interrupted by two workers passing by with a door, as a ruse to deliberate replaced the person receiving directions. And the person giving directions did not notice the switch. The traditional explanation is that the brain builds up an internal, but false model of the world. However, Noë notes that our perceptual skills evolved for 'life on earth' not for a world in which objects vanish and materialise by slight of hand. While our cognitive powers may be limited and vulnerable to deception, in order to understand what we see, we actively attune our attention to the external world. There is no evidence we refer to an internal advisor in brain-centred, mission control. Not content with shooting down 'bad' cognitive science Noë challenges the Nobel Prize winning research of David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel on information processing in the mammalian visual system. Noë sees in this work the shortcomings of the 'computer model' and 'neural basis of consciousness' paradigm that assumes 'vision is something that happens passively in the brain.' Particularly egregious, apart from the vivisection involved, was the fact that all the work of Hubel and Wiesel was carried out on animals while they were unconscious!! We know that 'behaviour of cells in the cortex varies, depending on what the individual is doing.' Noë acknowledges that his conclusions are harsh but he nevertheless dismisses the computer model with the Zen-like point that a computer can't think on its own any more than a hammer can pound nails by itself. Hammering away at the 'perverse' 'science fiction' 'prejudice' that brain = consciousness, Noë points out that although stimulation of the brain produces experience, so does stimulation of the body or that coming from the environment. We are, like 'a soccer player in mid-match,' always 'involved in the game' - 'dynamically coupled' with a world outside our heads. [Moves don't play on a screen in our heads, and watching the game on TV is not a substitute for being on the team]. Noë recommends neuroscience rethink its position from the 'ground up.' [Note the, evolutionary process, start-in-the world, out-of-the-head metaphor]. We need to heed the alternative paradigm of an 'embodied, situated approach to mind.' Some traditions see the world as 'maya,' illusion, or as a flat reality captured like a photo by some visual brain mechanism. Not Noë: he concludes that 'we are in the world and of it…patterns of active engagement with fluid boundaries and changing components. We are distributed'— like Noë's message! The 'out-of-our-heads' metaphor seems a powerful clue in itself. Would our consciousness effectively engage with the world 'out there' if it were merely an illusory, brain-centred epiphenomenon analysing replays of world events the dark room of the brain box? Surely the light of consciousness is embodied in us all, and in the world equally, and 'tis illusion to think otherwise.