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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A boy plays with a dog. A snail snuggles up in its home. What is love? Commentator Alva Noë says it's an irreducible idea that finds expression in all sorts of unexpected places. -
Some birds can dance. These dancing birds can also learn to make vocal sounds by listening to others. They share this ability with humans. But our primate cousins don't seem to be so endowed. Alva Noë asks if there is, indeed, a connection between vocal learning and the ability to dance.
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The anti-pleasure, perfectionist trends so marked in contemporary culture are holding us back from just living in the moment and enjoying ourselves. At least, that's how commentator Alva Noë sees it as he watches TV, and TV commercials, with his sons.
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Does modern physics prove that our experience of the world is an illusion? Don't look to Stephen Hawking for answers.
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Variation is ubiquitous, and our sensitivity to variation is the hallmark of our consciousness.
