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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Works of art, in all their variety, afford us the opportunity for boredom — and they do so when everything in our lives mitigates against boredom, says Alva Noë. Maybe this is one of art's gifts. -
A new book makes a strong case for the claim that animals have rich mental lives, says Alva Noë, but falters on the idea that when it comes to knowing what others think and feel, we can only guess. -
If robots pose a danger, it's because, like cars, cranes and jackhammers, they're heavy machinery operating outside the performance specifications of flesh and blood human beings, says Alva Noë. -
In his new book, Chasing the Scream, Johann Hari hasn't quite found the answer, says commentator Alva Noë. But he does succeed in reminding us that there's nothing inevitable about what's next. -
Many addicts opt for self-medication over encounter — they turn inward and shut out the world, says commentator Alva Noë, as he ponders a new book on addiction by Johann Hari. -
David J. Linden's new book on touch brings into focus all the things we still don't understand about the neural basis of this sense, says commentator Alva Noë. -
Commentator Alva Noë says "no problem" is the wrong way to reply to an expression of thanks — for the simple reason that saying "thank you" isn't, or shouldn't be, a veiled way of making an apology. -
When machines, smarter than us, make machines smarter than them, futurists argue, the 'singularity' will have arrived. Commentator Alva Noë, a skeptic, wonders about imparting values — and control. -
Philosopher Alva Noë explores ideas in a new book that suggests consciousness and self is best looked at by combining insight from Western science, Indian philosophy and contemplative practices.
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The end of the World Series allows us to revisit baseball's experiment with instant replay. Commentator Alva Noë argues it has been a success — because it makes the game not more fair but more fun.
