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The Entanglement
Noë's 2023 book, the culmination of his philosophical project — the argument that art and philosophy do not merely describe us but make us what we are, and the four dimensions of entanglement that define genuine cognitive activity against its computational simulation.
The Entanglement: How Art and Philosophy Make Us What We Are (Princeton University Press, 2023) is Alva Noë's most philosophically ambitious book, integrating his enactive theory of perception, his account of strange tools, and a theory of human nature as constitutively entangled with cultural practices. The book identifies four dimensions of entanglement — body, culture, action, and self-reflection — that together constitute what it is to be a thinking, acting human being. These four dimensions also specify what distinguishes genuine cognitive activity from the pattern-matching performed by AI systems.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The book extends Noë's earlier work by arguing that the embodiment which grounds cognition is not merely biological but also cultural. We are not just bodies in environments; we are bodies shaped by and shaping cultural practices, institutions, meanings, and shared forms of life. Learning to read, to speak a language, to