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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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.
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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.
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Philosophical skepticism, in part coming from Decartes, considers the idea that it's impossible to know another person's reality. Alva Noë ponders this in relation to debates in today's world.
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An exhibition looking at the remarkable friendship and artistic collaboration between Michelangelo and Sebastiano sheds light on important questions concerning original art and copies, says Alva Noë.
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Mistrust of "Big Science" seems to flourish at both extremes of our political community. The best thing we can do to gain trust in science is to do more science — and to do it better, says Alva Noë.
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In the past week, we've looked at a few studies showing ways apes are like us. Today, we consider a way in which monkeys, specifically capuchins, are different, says blogger Alva Noë.
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Blogger Alva Noë looks at new research showing apes understand what we think: They are able to differentiate how someone thinks something to be from how it actually is.
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In videos posted to blogger Alva Noë's Facebook feed this week, a monkey and an orangutan seem to be surprised by stage magic. Noë reflects on the related conversation among his science-guru friends.
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Discoveries like the paintings deep inside dark European caves and 8,000-year-old patterns seen only from the air in Kazakhstan leave us to wonder about our ancestors' intentions, says Alva Noë.
