A few remarks on Alva Noë's Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessors from the Biology of Consciousness. New York: Hill and Wang, 2009.
Alva Noë follows up his wonderful Action in Perception (MIT, 2004) with this book aimed at a popular readership. This post will be less formal than a book review, but I would like to set out some reactions.
First, I think it's great that philosophers write this kind of book. There is a well-established popular science genre, but by and large philosophers have not taken up the challenge of addressing ourselves to the educated lay public. That's a shame, as we should all take seriously our obligations to now and again take on the role of the "public intellectual." There's a complex history here with the mid-20th century turn of mainstream American philosophy away from pragmatism cutting us off from the great example of John Dewey, as well a rather different cultural landscape from Europe, where Bergson, Russell, Sartre, Foucault, Derrida, Bourdieu, Habermas and many others have filled the role of "public intellectuals." Noë thematizes just these issues of public engagement in his Preface, where he writes "Natural science … is not discontinuous with broader human concerns." Rather than being "value neutral," it is a human project, aimed at broadening the human understanding of the world. I would have liked a reference here to Dewey. Not that I know too much about him, but I do recognize these themes as resonating with his.
Second, it's not easy writing this kind of book, for you have to balance some technical precision (why else have a professional philosopher be the author, rather than a journalist?) with a format and writing style accessible to educated but not specialized readers. Noë succeeds, I think, in setting forth his main thesis – that consciousness is an activity arising from the interplay of brain, body, and world, and is thus not located purely in the brain – in clear, precise terms that allow the professional philosopher to recognize the issues involved as well as allowing the intended lay readership to grasp what's important in the debate.
Having said all that, I would like to bring up some fairly technical issues here, but as they concern the political context in which consciousness arises, I think that's warranted. Also, I won't write so much about all things I agree with, or that I like in the book, which are many (for instance – but this is only an example – the great stuff on the "mind in life" thesis). But I hope it's clear that I wouldn't write at all if I didn't think the issues were very important and that Noë's contributions need to be taken seriously. It's more praise to disagree with someone on important issues, I think, than agree with him or her on trivial ones. To be more precise, it's not that I *disagree* with Noë on many of these points, it's just that I would like to extend the argument a few more steps.
End of life issues.
On page 34, Noë writes about the end-of-life issues concerning the difference between PVS (Persistent Vegetative State) and locked-in syndrome. Noë writes:
When the family of a person who has 'become a vegetable' refuses to give up on that person, refuses to consider 'pulling the plug' or 'pulling out the feeding tubes,' what they are saying is that the kind of love and commitment they feel for the daughter or parent or partner is simply incompatible with making the kind of cost-benefit decisions that would justify making the life-ending decision. Others, of course, reach very different kinds of decisions.
There are a number of things to say here. I've tackled many of them in my study of the Terri Schiavo case, which can be read here, here, and here.
First, there's a difference between respecting the wishes of a person, recorded before the onset of PVS, not to receive feeding tube care after the onset of PVS, and a third-party decision. In the Schiavo case, it was never a third-party decision, but a matter of respecting Terri Schiavo's wishes. I explore why most people tend to think of these kinds of decisions as self-centered: "I don't want to be a vegetable, so please pull the plug on me!" But it's also possible that one can wish not to receive feeding tubes for the sake of others. In other words, you might know that your loved ones could never make that decision on their own, so you make it for them.
Second, to be legally ratified, third-party decisions have to be made on a "best interest of the patient" basis. There's a way this could be said to be a "cost-benefit" basis, but just that phrase alone makes it seem like just a monetary decision.
Third, the use of "person" with regard to PVS cases is philosophically fraught. There are many, many issues involved here, but let me just refer to the longer pieces mentioned above, along with this distinction: it might be that when a person before the onset of PVS asks not to receive feeding tubes, that the death aimed at here is not suicide (killing the organism in order to kill the person), but "organismcide," that is, killing the organism that used to support a person but is now only the remains of the person, who died when the parts of the brain necessary for consciousness (but not sufficient – I agree with Noe here totally) were destroyed.
Fourth, I think we need to support the right of persons to direct in advance that they not receive tubal feeding not just in PVS, but also in MCS (Minimally Conscious State) and the locked-in condition. In MCS, severe cortical damage has occurred, but some, "minimal," cognitive function remains. A catatonic "locked-in syndrome" occurs with no cortical damage, hence full cognitive function, but with a closing off of motor control. I would speculate that most people fear a "locked-in condition" when they don't want tubal feeding, though the only reason to believe an MCS is any better than being locked in would be the lowered cognitive function. An other-directed motivation for refusing tubal feeding would not be to avoid the horror of the locked-in state (though that is horror indeed), but to allow some peace of mind, closure, and the ability to grieve, to come to our loved ones.
Again, I don't want to make too much out of just a few sentences, and I don't want to criticize Noe for not going into the details of these knotty issues in a popular book. I just wanted to lay out these reactions.
Dynamics of Consciousness
Noë writes at 50-51: "the baby-caretaker 'dyad' is a unity from which the child only gradually emerges as an individual. We can speak of attachment here, but I prefer to speak of oneness.” This bothered me, as it seems to neglect the Meltzoff-Moore experiments on neonate imitation, which Shaun Gallagher interprets in terms of an early body schema of the infant, which would belie the talk of "unity" and "oneness." Now I completely agree with Noë that independence as isolation is not the correct way to talk about maturation of human beings: "There is no such thing as complete detachment from the community of others" (51). But if you're going to do away with isolation as the telos, you should do away with fusion as the arche.
But I also worry about Noë's reading of maturity as "growing comfortably into one's environmental situation," or as "integration" (51). Many people grow up and become mature but precisely into social situations that are disempowering for them, because they belong to disempowered political categories. It's not that this disempowering experience is limited to immigrants, as Noë seems to imply; it's right here at home that many people never quite feel at home, if you see what I'm getting at. Even though it's a great advance to talk about the embodied, embedded, extended, enactive, affective subject (4EA), we shouldn't talk about "the" 4EA subject, but about populations of subjects, many of whom suffer disempowering subjectification practices.
So, for example, when Noë writes at 77: "The body is present in our normal, active, engaged experience … as a range of possibilities of movement and action" I want to say that such an empowered body schema is not available to everyone at all times. Leaving aside for the moment the issue of disability (but what a sentence that is to write!), I also want to refer here to Iris Marion Young's great essay "Throwing Like a Girl" which discusses the restricted body competence of the feminized body-subject. Young's critique is aimed at Merleau-Ponty, in which the assured competence of the presumably neutral or non-gendered body subject hides a masculinist presupposition. Feminized and masculinized body subjects have different "spheres of competence": a flat tire can appear as a mildly irritating challenge or as an insurmountable problem; a subway entrance as the enticing gateway to the city or as an anxiety-producing danger.
It would be, in my opinion, an unacceptably reductive biologization to generalize the analysis of anorexia Noë gives at 78 ("Her body schema is likely to be just fine…. Her problem is that she feels bad about her body, about how it looks and about her ability to control it.") to cover Young's analysis. In other words, I don't want to say that we all have the same body schema as set of capacities, but that some people have culturally installed distorted body images – in other words, that feminization is a matter of giving people falsely limited opinions about their bodily capacities and / or installing a set of limiting emotional reactions over a body schema that functions just like that of masculinized subjects. Rather – and I think Noë would be open to this approach given his interest in "plasticity" – since our biology is to be open to our culture, we have to locate the analysis of feminization and masculinization at the level of body schema, not just body image.
The key here is to propose a level of analysis that would not be merely idiosyncratic, but that produces traits that would be reliably repeated (to use the distinction Paul Griffiths uses in discussing Developmental Systems Theory in biology) and that would be open to political analysis. This is of course the major problem of feminism, race theory, queer theory, and other such analyses: where to locate the analysis so that you avoid the Scylla of personal anecdote and the Charybdis of ignoring difference altogether. Can we isolate structured subjectification practices that reliably reproduce what we can call a feminized or masculinized body subject? And can we propose that as a philosophical desideratum for the discussion of 4EA cognitive science?
I'll just end these remarks by saying those are the stakes of Political Affect. And by repeating my admiration for Noë's book that it brings up so many important issues, far beyond the few points I treat here.
