Alva Noë
Alva Noë is a contributor to the NPR blog 13.7: Cosmos and Culture. He is writer and a philosopher who works on the nature of mind and human experience.
Noë received his PhD from Harvard in 1995 and is a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is also a member of the Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences and the Center for New Media. He previously was a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He has been philosopher-in-residence with The Forsythe Company and has recently begun a performative-lecture collaboration with Deborah Hay. Noë is a 2012 recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship.
He is the author of Action in Perception (MIT Press, 2004); Out of Our Heads (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2009); and most recently, Varieties of Presence (Harvard University Press, 2012). He is now at work on a book about art and human nature.
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Facing unresponsive brain-injury victims is a real-world example of the fact that we are locked out of the minds of others — but new research shows promise in restoring consciousness, says Alva Noë. -
Monuments play a different cultural role than do other kinds of artworks: To let a monument stand, or to take it down, is to take a political stand on its subject matter, says blogger Alva Noë. -
It is a principle of most modern thought about language that the relation between signs and meanings is arbitrary. But a new study finds a connection between sounds and ink on "paper," says Alva Noë. -
Pandora's Lab stresses that for science to work, it needs to base claims on data, studies need to be replicable, and scientists must be more attached to science than to their own ideas, says Alva Noë. -
Tesla CEO Elon Musk last week warned that AI is an enormous threat. There can be no doubt that the advent of smart, rather than smart-ish, machines, is a long way off, though, says blogger Alva Noë. -
Blogger Alva Noë talks with a dog trainer who says the need to give shelters, handlers and adopters the resources required to keep dogs and people supported and safe is critical in the process. -
Last week, a Wisconsin company offered its employees the option to have a chip inserted into their bodies in an effort to help them navigate the workplace. Alva Noë asks: What's the big deal? -
Blogger Alva Noë considers the proposition of stats in baseball, reviewing a book by Keith Law that suggests irrational tradition shackles progressive thinking in the sport. -
In a new study, neither control subjects nor those who used Lumosity games showed improvement beyond getting better at the specific games they were playing, says blogger Alva Noë. -
Blogger Alva Noë reflects on Richard O. Prum's new book, Darwin's "other" idea, and the connection between the natural world and art.
