Alva Noë
Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness
After I have read Max Velmans, his question ‘Is the brain in the world or the world in the brain?‘ troubles me. Something seems to be wrong with a conventional scheme that photons interacts with retina, that a brain then performs information processing and that all conscious visual experiences are in the brain.
Thereafter I have decided to read another author that also says that conscious experience is not in the brain. The approach suggested by Alva Noë is different (enactive account of phenomenal consciousness) and I should say that it is still unclear to me how it could work. However, the book is well written and there are nice examples to think the problem over. The only critique that comes to my mind right now is that Alva Noë does not mention Max Velmans’ works. I have found this a bit strange. Max Velmans in his book does consider enactive appoach, see for example Is the Visual World a Grand Illusion?
Below there are some resources related to the Alva Noë’s book that I have found in Internet.
Alva Noë’s talk by Microsoft Research
http://research.microsoft.com/apps/video/default.aspx?id=103475
Review of the book by Jaroslav Peregrin
http://www.jarda.peregrin.cz/mybibl/PDFTxt/567.pdf
Papers citing the book on the Google Scholar
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=2750990274718224393