Out of our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness

Where is our consciousness? The immediate suggestion is that it is in everybody’s respective heads. But is it, really? Where exactly? If we could open up our head and dig inside, do we expect to discover an inner space full of elfin thoughts, images, feelings and wishes, all pushing each other around? Surely not; we are not so stupid to think that! The next suggestion is that, as consciousness is in fact some kind of brain activity, then it must be in the head because that is where the brain is. But is this suggestion any improvement? Is consciousness really an activity of the brain? Many people hold this view as so self-evident that they may fail to understand why anyone might want to question it; it would appear to go without saying. (For example, when you open Francis Crick’s classic The astonishing hypothesis (Crick 1990), you see that no alternative would even cross the author’s mind.) However, the philosopher Andy Clark has already produced the thesis that mind, in fact, is not in the head; but Clark is not willing to say the same about consciousness. Yet now Alva Noë, in the present book, has taken the further step, and is keen to defend this mind-boggling thesis: according to him, consciousness cannot be seen, reasonably, as being in the head. To explain, let us start with the mind. What does Clark mean when he denies that it is in the head? Well, imagine that somebody asks you whether you can multiply. “Of course,” your answer would be. “But can you multiply also very long numbers?” “Sure, there is an algorithm which I know, and knowing it I can multiply numbers of any length.” “But can you do it with your head alone?” “Well, if the numbers are long, I may need a pencil and a sheet of paper, or something like that.” “Hence is it so that multiplication ceases to be, as numbers get longer, a mental activity?” “Well, not really, it is the same algorithm all the time, only ... the mind needs some aids.”1