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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Blogger Alva Noë says he doesn't feel that, as an instructor, he has a right to ask students to come to class without technology, "even when I think, even when I know, that it would be a good thing."
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It ought to be possible to compare the DNA of a random individual with DNA from around the world to make a call on ethnicity, but there are problems with tests of this kind, says commentator Alva Noë.
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You can hardly overstate the extent to which The Nutcrackerbelongs to the ritual of Christmas, but it came rather late to the game, says commentator Alva Noë.
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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.
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There is something downright terrifying about the new Pixar movie's nihilistic conception of ourselves as zombie puppets living in a confabulated universe, says commentator Alva Noë.
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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.
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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.
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Why do we watch horror movies? Where is the pleasure in the impossible? Philosopher Alva Noë does his best to answer these, and other, questions.
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In RoboCop, a character named Dreyfus is at odds with one named Dennett. In real life, Dennett is one of AIs great champions, and Dreyfus one of its most trenchant critics.
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Anri Sala's installation at the Venice Biennale explores music, the body, technology, gender and the making of art. Alva Noë says the three-part work is a delightful puzzle, with all the pieces coming together in the end to envelop the audience in a story that is bigger than the sum of its parts.