Alva Noe Quotes

Consciousness is the fact that we think and feel and that a world, the world shows up for us.

Facts and values are entangled in science. It's not because scientists are biased, not because they are partial or influenced by other kinds of interests, but because of a commitment to reason, consistency, coherence, plausibility and replicability. These are value commitments.

You're experiencing a bit of the world around you when you experience it's color.

Perception is not something that happens to us, or in us. It is something we do.

If you let other people do some of the work that we ask ourselves to do, if you allow for the fact that we are ourselves dependent on and distributed over and in a way made up out of the world and processes around us then we can explain certain questions that we otherwise cannot explain and moreover we discover that we are not aliens in a strange world.

Perceiving how things are is a mode of exploring how things appear. How they appear is, however, an aspect of how they are. To explore appearance is thus to explore the environment, the world. To discover how things are, from how they appear, is to discover an order or pattern in their appearance. The process of perceiving, of finding out how things are, is a process of meeting the world; it is an activity of skillful exploration.

The world shows up for us, but it doesn't show up for free. We must show up, too, and bring along what knowledge and skills we've cultivated. As with a painting in a gallery, the world has no meaning-no presence to be experienced-apart from our ability to engagement with it.

Consciousness is something we do.

One reason I'm not worried about the possibility that we will soon make machines that are smarter than us, is that we haven't managed to make machines until now that are smart at all. Artificial intelligence isn't synthetic intelligence: It's pseudo-intelligence.