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Out of Our Heads
Alva Noë's 2009 popular argument that you are not your brain — that consciousness is not produced inside the skull but enacted by the whole organism in its engagement with the world, and the book that carried his enactive philosophy beyond the academy.
Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness (Hill and Wang, 2009) is Alva Noë's most widely read book, in which he extended the technical arguments of Action in Perception into a general challenge to the neuroscientific orthodoxy that consciousness is a product of brain activity. The book argues that the brain is necessary but not sufficient for consciousness — that conscious experience is an activity of the whole embodied organism in its ongoing engagement with an environment, and that attempts to locate consciousness inside the skull are as misguided as attempts to locate dancing inside the dancer.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The book takes aim at what Noë calls the 'neural reductionism' that has dominated popular and scientific accounts of consciousness. Every week brings another headline claiming that scientists have located love, or morality,