CONCEPT

You Are Not Your Brain

Alva Noë’s foundational claim that consciousness is not produced inside the skull but is an activity of the whole organism in its ongoing engagement with the world—a precise philosophical thesis about the location and nature of mind that demolishes the computational metaphor at its root.

The sentence sounds like a provocation, but it is a precise philosophical claim. Alva Noë’s insistence that you are not your brain is not a denial that the brain is important. It is a denial of the claim that the brain, operating in isolation, produces consciousness the way a processor executes a program. The brain is necessary for consciousness in the same way an engine is necessary for driving—but an engine does not drive. Driving is an activity that requires the engine, the vehicle, the road, a driver with intentions, the ongoing coordination of all of these in real time. Remove any element and you do not have a lesser version of driving; you have no driving. Consciousness is exactly this kind of thing: an activity of the whole organism, requiring the body, its sensory and motor capacities, and an environment to act in. The view belongs to

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