- IONS Film Project Other reviews by Dean Radin, PhD
Publications Book Reviews Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other
Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness by Alva Noe Reviewed
by Dean Radin, PhD on June 1, 2009 In his latest book, Alva
Noë,a professor of philosophy at the University of California,
Berkeley, says that a widely held assumption in the cognitive
and neurosciences—that consciousness is generated solely by the
brain—is wrong. This reductionist idea was at the core of Nobel
laureate Francis Crick’s book on consciousness, The Astonishing
Hypothesis, where he (now) famously wrote, “You, your joys and
your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of
personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the
behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated
molecules.” This mainstream, neobehaviorist stance has been
accepted as self-evident by most academic cognitive and
neuroscientists involved in consciousness studies. The seductive
power of this paradigm is seen in h