Life after Life: Striving with problems (in a good way) with philosopher Alva Noë

Alva Noë is Professor of Philosophy, and Chair of the Department of Philosophy, at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is also a member of the Center for New Media, and the Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences. Professor Noë is a 2012 recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a 2018 recipient of the Judd Hume Prize in Advanced Visual Studies. Until the end of 2024, he is an Einstein Visiting Fellow at the Free University in Berlin. He is the author of Action in Perception (2004), Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness (2009), Varieties of Presence (2012), Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature (2015), Infinite Baseball: Notes from a Philosopher at the Ballpark (2019), and Learning To Look: Dispatches from the Art World (2022). His latest book is The Entanglement: How Art and Philosophy Make Us What We Are (2023). https://www.alvanoe.com/

In this conversation, Andrea and Alva engage in an enlightening journey together through the realms of philosophy, neuroscience, and the arts, opening the work Noë has done and exploring its themes of self-awareness, identity, action and perception.

With insights from influential thinkers and doers like Vico, Dreyfus, Cezanne, Merleau-Ponty, and Noë himself, this conversation delves into the profound connections between love, work, and personal development and becomes a poetic meditation on meaning and connection. Per usual in Love and Philosophy, we find the motif of the loop that never quite returns to where it started, the dynamic entanglement of life, and how this gets conveyed through writing and language. Alva and Andrea explore the complexities of presence, the role of habits and societal structures, and the evolving understanding of vision and perception. The conversation also shows how interdisciplinary approaches and transformative literature shape our identities and consciousness from childhood on, and ultimately offers a balanced, holistic view of the human experience as difficult but worth it. Tune in for a thought-provoking discourse on the power of performance and the representation of self, including what tricky words like 'representation' and 'agency' might really be pointing at within the intricate dance of art and philosophy.
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Transcript

Striving with Problems, In a Good way: The Entanglement with Alva Noë

andrea hiott: [00:00:00] Hey, everyone. Welcome to love and philosophy. This is a conversation with the philosopher, Alva Noë. Alva is a professor of philosophy and the chair of the department of philosophy at the university of California, Berkeley. He's also a member of the center for new media. And Institute for cognitive and brain sciences. He received the Guggenheim fellowship in 2012. He's also an Einstein visiting fellow at the free university in Berlin. He's author of many books, which we talk about here. Action and perception, for example. Which is 20 years old from 2004. His latest one is The Entanglement. How art and philosophy make us what we are. That's from 2023. And he also wrote other books. You've probably heard of like strange tools or out of our heads. Infinite baseball. Varieties of presence. And I really love this conversation. We [00:01:00] touch on so many things that I care about. Some of the main themes of his work. Relative to philosophy, human perception. Self-organization self-awareness. We also talk about how our early life experiences shape and extend into the work we end up doing. We talk about this idea of work and what it really means. Alva kind of sees work. As what does he say? A fundamental mode of being, I think he calls it. He sort of dedicated to that, and that is actually connected to love in a very deep sense. That we explore here from different angles. Also this word, striving comes up a lot and that's not necessarily meant as a bad thing. He says something like maybe being present is hard. I think that's important to think about sometimes. Not that it's just this graceful easy thing, but then maybe we have to work in order to be present. It's an interesting side of being here now. [00:02:00] He also talks about love as a life process. Something that's I think making us and remaking us. And how there's really nothing harder than. Holding another person in view. And actually feeling intimate. And yet at the same time, if that's. What we're all trying to do in very different ways and from very different perspectives. 

 Alva, I had this conversation in the summer, the end of the summer. I'm always way behind posting these conversations because they're for research. And I need to look through them and deal with them for research before I edit them and post them. So usually it takes a couple months, but in any case, this one, I think we did in August when I was in the United States. And then I had to go to Singapore for work and on my way back, I had a flight through Helsinki. And it just happened that Alva's 20th anniversary conference or some people [00:03:00] there were putting on a conference for him because it was 20 years since he wrote action and perception. And it's changed a lot of people's lives. And interestingly enough, when I was on the plane going to Helsinki. I watched a film called perfect days, which was made by Wim Wenders. And I think 2023. And the script is written by Tacoma. I think it's filmed in, in Tokyo. I bring it up because it's about a janitor and the way he looks at the world and the detail he takes in his job and in looking at the trees and just being present. And I hadn't remembered it, but in this conversation, Alva actually talks about A short story one of the first short stories he wrote. Or maybe it was this first attempt to write a short story, which was about a janitor and his everyday life. Not really being about being a janitor, but about observing the world and being present in the world so there's another little loop. 

That was really interesting when I listened back to this talk because that [00:04:00] movie perfect days kind of stayed with me for the same reason that this conversation means a lot and has stayed with me

and as a way of trying to send you a little love today. I'm going to do something a little unusual and read a poem. It's kind of weird thing to do, but in this talk, he brings up a poem by delmore Schwartz. And that reminded me of a poem by Derek Walcott. And I'm going to read it. Uh, just to kind of close off this intro, but the reason I'm reading it is because one of the seams that goes throughout this conversation, and it's also a major part of my research that I'm very interested in in trying to find ways to explain it goes all the way back to Hegel 

 An complex systems and all of this, and the spiral that I talk about with the Iain McGilchrist. And, you know, if you, if you listen to the conversations, it's a theme, but. This looping, that's not a looping, that's a spiral. This. Stance that is within itself, not static. 

This paradox that we hold an [00:05:00] in so holding realize it's beyond itself. This looping motion or practice again, that I do feel in the writing, but you can never really quite say exactly in words. , of coming back to ourselves and knowing ourselves of, of seeing ourselves from a different position only to realize that's the position we're in and. There's something just so gorgeous about it. And it's obsessed me for my whole life. Uh, since I first read philosophy. And. Yeah, Here's a poem that sort of is expresses it to. It's called love after love by Derek Walcott. The time will come when with elation, you will greet yourself arriving at your own door in your own mirror. 

And each will smile at the other's welcome and say, sit here, eat. You will love again, the stranger who was yourself, give wine, give bread, give back your heart to itself. To the stranger who has loved you all your life. Whom you ignored for another, who knows you by heart? [00:06:00] Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes, peel your own image from the mirror. Sit feast on your life. 

Okay. Hi, Alva. We already said hi a bit, but thank you so much for being here today and for doing this. 

alva noë: It's great to be here. Thanks. Thanks so much for inviting me. 

andrea hiott: I know you've been traveling a lot You're finally back in California, and I've flipped too and I'm in the state But I'm glad we found a time to talk because I've been you know Walking around listening to you on audiobooks and then reading of course your books, too And there's just so much it's so rich, but to get into it I was gonna ask you if we could start a bit with The idea of organization, which is a word I love a lot that you use, but maybe about your path, your journey, when did you begin to sort of notice your own, habits or began to think of this idea that you could think of your own [00:07:00] consciousness and maybe even have some agency of organization over it?

alva noë: What a great question. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. I feel like I feel so privileged to have that question because it's not a question I've actually asked but it's, um, the minute you say it, I feel like, oh, yeah, actually, I've always been very aware of myself. Even from a very young age. Like a young kid. I mean, I remember, you know, I kept a diary when I was, when I was a kid, like starting it around, well, how old was I in 1976? I guess I must have been about. 10 or 11. Um, and I remember, because I happen to remember, because that was the bicentennial year, but I can remember. I was 

andrea hiott: about to say, how do you remember the year?

My goodness, but that's awesome. 

alva noë: Well, I, I, because I can actually, I have an image in my mind of my notebook and, and like writing July 4th. I can't, I just have this, I associate it with the year, but I remember, um, I remember I was mad, I was, I was precociously in love with this girl. [00:08:00] And, uh, she lived with her mother and her brother.

And I remember I used to want to share my, my life with them and let them know where I was and what I was doing. I just remember being very, very conscious of the fact that, yeah, life was kind of organized around habit. And, you know, here I was in this place and then I go to school along this path and, um, she lived there and that's how she got home from school.

Oh, wow. So you were already 

andrea hiott: thinking about, like, the regularities and, 

alva noë: and 

andrea hiott: so. 

alva noë: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I remember one of my. One of my first ideas for a short story, which I never executed, or I never successfully executed, but was, was for like a house cleaner who's, who cleaned the house, but his real joy in life was sort of keeping track and monitoring as a, monitoring the lives of the people whose houses he cleaned.

And that there was a kind of fascination With human habit, human regularity. I never of course would have [00:09:00] framed it in those terms. So in a way I'm, I'm a very lucky person because I'm, I'm, I'm paid to write.

And teach and talk about ideas and that's really all that's ever really mattered to me since since the time I was a little child. 

andrea hiott: It's interesting that it came through writing because maybe we'll get to it or we can get to it now but I think a lot when I'm reading you and just also in other

work that I'm trying to figure out about the role representation plays, and by representation I don't mean in the head, for those of you who are, who think I mean that, I mean like what you were talking about with your notebook and writing, and what you, you talk about it this way too, with writing is important and especially in entanglement. I wonder, like, what was the kind of phenomenology of that, or, I mean, if you can remember as a kid of, because when you talk about it, I remember it too, I also had like a little journal and it feels like the beginning of myself in a way when I look back at it. I just wonder, is there any [00:10:00] continuity to you writing in that journal and thinking about those things and kind of also what you just expressed about being so lucky to be doing what you're doing?

alva noë: Yeah. You're reminding me of one of my favorite poems. It's by Delmore Schwartz, and the opening line is, I no more wrote than read that book, which is the self I am. In other words, I'm not the author of myself, and I don't know myself. Because I'm, like, I'm a process that I'm trying to figure out in the middle of it.

Um, but of course I think there's a way in which that's exactly wrong. We do write ourselves, and we do create ourselves in writing ourselves. Not necessarily with a pencil and paper. But, we, we, we do, we act, we dance, we play, we work, we love, we seek friendships. But we also are always, you know, both aware of the fact that we're witnessed by other people, and also [00:11:00] trying to catch ourselves in the act of doing it.

And the act of trying to catch oneself in the act is transformative, it changes us, it reorganizes us, self consciousness. I've been reading a book recently. It's not a new book, but it's very, very good book. It's called Love and Its Place in Nature by Jonathan Lear, a psychoanalyst. It's a really, really good book.

Um and, uh, this is, these are my words, not his words, but, but he sort of talks how in the psychotherapeutic setting, there's kind of a way in which the self is made. The self emerges through the conversation, through the dialogue. And I, I guess I believe that, right? And I, and I've always sort of, experienced that, um, that the work of, of writing it down is also the work of becoming.

 That connection is very clear, I think, in the arts. [00:12:00] Take, take choreography, for example. On the one hand, choreography is, is dance. It's movement. It's embodied. It's, um, it's beyond language. It's beyond concept. And yet the very word choreography is sort of writing, the graphy is about writing the body.

It's about, um, keeping track, or finding articulation, or organization, or pattern, or meaning. So there is an interesting way in which the dancer While at this, on the one hand, moving beyond the word and the written word and the concept is actually creating the resources to write themselves down. If 

andrea hiott: that makes 

alva noë: any sense, that's a pretty free, that's a pretty free thought.

Um, so, um,

yeah, I mean, I think the impulse that the artist has to tell their story, or the [00:13:00] writer has, or the philosopher has, you know, philosophers have this impulse. Think of Descartes, he wrote. He wrote his Meditations, which was a sort of a first person narration of where he is and even in his book, um, in his Discourse on Method, he similarly is, is practically reflecting on the ways of making knowledge, the ways of, of understanding.

Um, there's an Italian philosopher who I've discovered who I love, although I find him very difficult to read. His name is Vico. Uand he's a little bit younger than Descartes, but he's, he's interestingly the anti Descartes. Um, so whereas Descartes thinks that everything, um, that knowledge is really grounded in, in sort of definitions and inferences and the logical deductive method and something like [00:14:00] geometry.

So that starting from first principles, you can figure it all out. Vico is more interested in language and culture and poetry and. Communication and style and literature and, and the kind of the kind of knowledge that gets expressed in really understanding what other people are saying and their nuance and their inflection and their ironies and their play.

Um, and he also wrote an autobiography, but he wrote his speaker wrote his in the third person, which I think is very cool. He wrote his autobiography from the point of view of the other, because he had this idea I think that we live outside of our heads in relation to the other. 

andrea hiott: Yeah, 

alva noë: that's very inspiring.

Is 

andrea hiott: that the person you talk about in Entanglement, too, with the, do you mention him? 

alva noë: I do mention him. Yeah, it's the Entanglement. Yeah, I do, I do, I do talk about him. , I talked with him and with, with the 

andrea hiott: paradox and Dreyfus, is that the same or is that Yeah, [00:15:00] yeah, yeah, yeah.

That, that is the same. Because I was thinking of paradox, uh, as you were talking too and

alva noë: Right. This, 

andrea hiott: like what, what you started with, with, or, or the poem about reading and writing and not being the reader or the writer. I'm not sure I said that right. But, and it reminded me of the poem. I'm not sure if it was Delmore Schwartz, but also where you hear someone knock at the door and you open it and you meet yourself for the first time or something and also I think about T. S. Eliot, you know, returning to the place you started and knowing it for the first time and also the quote which is at the beginning of one of your books. I think it's entanglement about if you wanted to see something new then walk the same path every day 

alva noë: there's 

andrea hiott: something in the way you talk about looping.

There's a kind of practice or movement to this that for me feels like holding the paradox. That's how I often put it. Because you're not trying to reconcile opposites or not see that things are different. 

alva noë: You're 

andrea hiott: seeing that everything could have a different opposite from a different point of view or something there's yeah and something about represent representation is part of that process.

alva noë: Yeah, I mean I think there's a lot of paradoxes kicking around. Um, so one that like in connection with the [00:16:00] vehicle and drive this

drive this had this idea that, um, um, what we really know, um, is, is that when we're, is that when we're, when we're really engaged with living. Um, yeah. Ourselves kind of disappear and we just get in the flow and open up to the world around us. Um,

and, um, so there's a way in which, there's a way in which, um, let's see, how should I, how should I put this? Uh, the hardest thing it is to know is yourself. Um, but then Dreyfus, uh, sorry, Vico has this idea. That the things we know best are the things we make. [00:17:00] Um, but then that raises the question, well, if making is sort of like Dreyfus understands it, where when you make it, you kind of just get involved with the flow, then how do we ever, how do ever how do we ever really get aware of what it is we're doing when we're making?

Yeah. So this idea, this idea of need's, use that word I used before, the problem of catching yourself in the act. 

andrea hiott: Mm-Hmm. . 

alva noë: Mm-Hmm. . And, yeah. And it always changes, it always changes things to do that. So that was a bit of a, that was a bit of a winding and I think maybe slightly confused comment. 

andrea hiott: Not at all, it's, I like it, it's trying to get into things that are really hard to talk about but that I want to talk about that mean a lot because for example this idea of presence or, I mean already you were talking about the dancing and the choreography and Somehow, there's a way in which when we represent things, then we open up new possibilities for how to do them, in a sense. And I guess sometimes we could confuse what we make with the making and the doing, [00:18:00] maybe, relative to what you just said, or something, but the thing is, the thing that's hard to hold in which, when you, and what you were just saying, what it brought up is this idea of presence or, or flow, because if you're the dancer, let's stick with that.

You don't want to be thinking about the choreography really, when you're dancing or or is, You know, what's, like, that's kind of the weird space, too, where you, and, and you show this, too, I mean, this is almost like a practice that you're offering, even in the way that you write it, and, and this practice opens you up to new forms of agency, but it's also kind of a portal to not have to, uh, what, I don't want to say think, because we're, you know, that would be too hard, but to, to just be present, too, but know you're present, so, I don't know, what does that bring up for you?

alva noë: Yeah, that's, that's wonderful. Wonderful line of, line of thought. I mean, I think, I think that, right, the idea that, you know, you might have the view that if anything comes for free in life, it's being there. Like, you know, you're just born. You just, you just are. You're just there. But you don't know [00:19:00] you are yet.

Yeah, but, but, but even beyond, even beyond knowing it, the idea that maybe presence is hard. Maybe you need to work to achieve it, to actually be in the room, be here now, be with you now. 

andrea hiott:  This is a really, a point I want to dig into a little bit, because is it that it's, Like when you're just born or when you're just here we could think of different kinds of forms of life like consciousness at the most Like just being aware alive.

I don't know how I want to describe it You don't necessarily know that you are and it can be hard in terms of painful But it's a different kind of hard once you come to know it I mean like come to know yourself for the first time in all these ways We've already been talking about this practice of Becoming aware of yourself.

That, that feels very hard, right? And almost like you need time and practice to even be able to handle becoming aware of yourself in the world. Does that make sense?

alva noë: Yeah. Because, because, I guess I would say, and by the way, these are ideas that I think, um remind me of some of Thomas Fuchs's ideas, who I know you [00:20:00] know very well.

Um, but, , you know, I think we are always in relation with others. So there's a way in which there is no, there is no I before there's a we, and there's always a we at the beginning after all we're born out of the, we slip out of the body of another person. So, there's a sense in which we're literally the, we have to work, we have to strive to become, we have to strive to write that book which is the self we are, because it's unwritten and the mere, the mere physical existence of this organism isn't enough.

There's, there's more that has to happen. before we really, uh, take shape. And, and I think that has two sides. It has, it has to do with, um, achieving the world's presence, um, being able to come into relationship with what is there around you, if you're caught, if you're stuck, [00:21:00] if you're ignorant, if you're angry, if you're indifferent, if you're depressed, you can't come into relationship with what there is around you, growing, flourishing, um, learning.

Language, all the different things that we learn about how to use and hold and move our bodies. All of that gives us resources for being with others, being with the environment. So, so we need to do so much so that there is a world for us. And, um, the flip side of that is, That achievement of the world is the achievement of ourselves in a way.

It's the, it's the performance or inaction of, of ourselves. And that to me is, um, you know, I think life is hard. I think you can probably sort people into two different sorts, the kind of think that basic, that the basic process of living consciousness and the works are sort of [00:22:00] easy and automatic and biological and just happen, or people like me, who think that it's all a kind of striving.

It's all a kind of working towards. Like work for me, this is kind of a ridiculous thing to say, but work for me is kind of like the fundamental mode of being. I work, I work to know another. And if I'm dedicated to the work of knowing another, really knowing another, And knowing the other in a way which is good for me and good for the other, that's called love.

Um, we're, and, and it's not easy. Oh God, wish it were easy. But there's nothing harder than holding another in view for yourself and achieving and sustaining intimacy. So one of the, I'm kind of, this is moving away from presence, but one of the things that I'm, I've, I've seen in my work, starting from Action and Perception, which was published 20 years ago, is that [00:23:00] I started out with this idea that perceptual consciousness is a matter of sort of skillful engagement with the world, and I'm just more and more interested in the ways in which that's hard to do, that's loaded with feeling, and it's loaded with value.

It's not sort of just cognitive, um, or just bodily. It's, it's, um, it's human, um, so that emotions like love, or I don't know if it's correct to call it an emotion, attitude states like love, are really Life processes, the processes of living and being that make us and remake us. Um, actually, let me go back to something you said at the very start.

 You asked about the word organization. You said it was a word you love or you like the concept. And I had a lot of pushback from my friends when I started using the word organization. Because one of my friends said, [00:24:00] that's like, you know, business school talk, you know, the organization chart of a company, or, you know, in the 1960s or 50s, they used to talk about the organization man, who was like the corporate, the corporate person.

And that was very, very far from what I was interested in talking about. I was interested in, I was trying to find some way of grounding the notion of habit, of grounding the notion of spontaneity, of grounding the notion of, of, um, automatic, coping, um, which is always integrated. You know, the way you walk, the way you sit, the way you talk, the way you use your hands is tied up to what you're doing and what you're doing is tied up to the culture you're in and what's expected and what's correct and what's allowed and how you type and how you write and how you sit and how you dress and how you can govern your posture.

So there is a way, a [00:25:00] sense in which Abbott is connected to a kind of integration and organization. But, and that's, I think, kind of clear the way I describe it, how you dress and how you sit and how you look and how you act. There's a way in which we're, we're sometimes, uh, oppressed by our habits, oppressed by the ways we find ourselves stuck being.

You know, I think a lot of, there's a lot of interest in the culture now, we don't need to get into this, but there's so much interest in the culture now about like rethinking gender, rethinking, rethinking identity concepts. And I think a lot of that is rooted in this. in this appreciation that, damn, there's so much that we just take for granted about the way we're put together, the way we're organized.

Why can't I be different? Why can't I reorganize? Why can't I, why can't I do it in a different way? Why can't I be the woman? Why can't I be the child? Why can't I be a person? I don't know. It's, that's usually the space where it's talked about in. So I do think that [00:26:00] this fundamental basic thing about human life, which is the ways we find ourselves organized habitually.

Is also

something that we can never just take for granted and we often need to resist

andrea hiott: maybe when we're representing it, we're doing a kind of disruption or resistance. It's, the reason I like organization, well, there's a lot to get into here. There's so much that is exciting for me, but that word for me, I think of like an organ or an instrument or a, maybe the root of that whole word, which is really a kind of, it holds this thing of representation with it in a way because, gosh, how to say this?

I mean, there's the whole ongoing process of life and of being alive and of, you know, Action as perception and perception as action. I mean what's going on? However, we want to describe it But then we do use create make things like we were talking about even if it's choreography of a dance it doesn't have to be an object but often objects through language and so on we represent and For me that [00:27:00] that's kind of an organ or an instrument or something.

I mean, so it's not that I can understand what your friends were saying, that it does sound like you're trying to put things in a certain way, but that's only if you don't understand that there's this process going on by which we kind of share via instruments, whatever, or technologies, or tools, or, you know, however you might say it, that, as you were saying before, we're sort of trying to help each Reorganize each other, but also something I think is very important to you is the emancipatory Potential of that the liberation the 

alva noë: yeah, 

andrea hiott: like as you were saying we're stuck in our habits But we don't know we even have the habit So and again, it's kind of like what we're talking about before where you become aware of yourself You become aware of your habits through one another and this is a kind of agency or

what do you 

alva noë: yeah Well, I don't know. Is it a kind of agency? Agency is one of those words. I actually, I also don't like the word representation. I use it occasionally and exactly the way you're using it. So [00:28:00] I don't object to your use of it, but I do think it's a word that tends to make people go, like, what, what is it?

What is representation? I agree. If you, so it needs to be used with real caution. I mean, one, one, one way I like to think about it is, um, and this is directly on the point you were making, we. Insofar as we're a problem to ourselves, we, we seek to kind of understand what we are and what we're doing. And in that sense, kind of capture ourselves or fix ourselves or represent ourselves, um, to ourselves.

It's this thing we do. So we, it's like, We try to,

in some sense, make a map, or make a representation. 

andrea hiott: Or use language, right? I mean, for me, language is a representation. It's the only kind of representation, which I'm glad you brought that word up. I really don't think we have internal [00:29:00] We can, we can, the thing is, we can make representations of internal patterns that are going to be consistent.

But I think this gets very, very confusing. That's one reason I still use the word, because I think it's a problem that we have to solve, but I'm glad you brought it up. Yeah, 

alva noë: yeah. So, just to get kind of academic for a second, I, I like to think that, um, like we do things with language. We, we, we talk and, um, negotiate and argue and fight and flirt and, and, uh, criticize and, um, tell and disclose and reveal and attack.

We use language for all these different things. It's just kind of silly to think this should be one word representation that refers to all of that, like language, language is doing, language is part of our, our animality, our, [00:30:00] our, our sociality. And, you know, I think there's a philosophical tradition that wants to say, no, we use language to represent the world report, you know, describe states of affairs, say whether or not they're true or false.

I think that's just a kind of. That's one of the many things we do, we do with language. Um, so another kind of representation in the traditional sense is, uh, pictorial representation. And that's also, as I write a lot about in my book, The Entanglement, that's also very mixed up. And there's, there's a lot of different senses of the term picture or, or, or that kind of representation can be, can be interestingly criticized and unpacked.

But, but where I, where I think you and I are exactly in sync and in agreement. is that we appreciate that there is this urge to bring us into [00:31:00] focus for ourselves and that doing so changes us. And that's really exciting. And language definitely has that function. When you and I talk, we also reflect on our talking.

And we try to, try to cope with discrep like right now, actually, discrepancies in the way we're using the word representation. So, so language becomes a problem for us. That is to say, what we're doing, how best to understand what we're doing becomes a problem for us. Yeah, 

andrea hiott: this word problem is another thing I wanted to bring up because you, you often talk about the problem, right?

alva noë: Yeah. 

andrea hiott: In a positive sense almost and um, yeah, I did it just for representation. We could go on and on about that So I will we will bracket it after this But I really literally mean kind of that we find a way to meet somewhere. I mean, maybe later you could help me Think about that better, but it's you know, like it's it's it's that we create literally I kind of mean like the way we wrote on cave walls and stuff like there's some sense in which we find this third space that's [00:32:00] Just a place where we can at least agree on the regularities enough You To communicate, I guess.

, but the process of, of actually speaking and communicating, I would never say is a representation, but 

alva noë: yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, but the problem. Yeah. It's funny when I, when I first met my, my wife, who's not a, um, who's not a philosopher. She was really surprised about the way I use the word problem and nobody had ever.

You mentioned that to me before, because for philosophers, a problem is a great thing. Like, you're looking for a problem to do your dissertation on. You want a problem. Yeah, yeah. What's the problem you're 

andrea hiott: going to solve? 

alva noë: Yeah. And the history of philosophy is the history of great problems. And what you do when you teach philosophy courses, you don't give solutions.

You give problems and you try to show out, you know, how do you know that there is an external world? Exactly. That's a problem. You know, how do you know that, that yesterday, you know, there was a problem? Really happened. That's a problem. How do you know that God exists? That's a problem. [00:33:00] How do you know that you're free to do what you wish?

That's a problem. So for me, and this is a kind of philosopher's thing, problems are good. Problems are juicy opportunities for, um, reorganization. 

andrea hiott: Yeah. 

alva noë: Yeah. Yeah. 

andrea hiott: It's great that your wife brought that up because, that was important for me too to sort of make clear here because, yeah, I mean, in certain, speaking of habits and philosophy in certain analytic environments I've been in, the problematization becomes almost like a fetish or something like, you know, you're almost who can be the best at finding the problems and what's being said and you kind of, then you, but that's.

That's not I mean that can so there's extremes of this But I guess what I wanted for this for a kind of more an audience who's all kind of all over the places like what is the what's where's the problem fitting into this because we have this practice which you present in many different ways of That we've that we're sort of through art or through philosophy and we could go into each of those [00:34:00] There is a kind of practice in which we can reorganize And how do you see, like, I don't know, maybe in art or in philosophy or is, for example, with beholding an artwork or something, I don't know.

Yeah, yeah. Because it has to do with this presence and waking up part too, I think. 

alva noë: Yeah. I'm so glad that you've read my books and that you kind of are, are interested in these questions because, because yeah, that's exactly what I, what I'm thinking about. For me, I said before how hard living is. Well, I think, I think one of the things which is much harder than we usually appreciate is seeing.

Really seeing something, really seeing the thing in front of you, as opposed to just working on your label or your assumption or your, or your expectation. But to actually let the thing be there for you to see it, that takes work. That takes a certain kind of attentional work. And I think It's kind of uncomfortable too.

And, and it can be if you, if you pay attention, it can be uncomfortable. In fact, [00:35:00] in practical life, it's important that when I'm walking down the street, I'm not like, whoa, . Right, right. I have to, I have to get from A to B. That's important too. And, you know, for certain purposes, life is embedded in the tasks of, uh, perception is embedded in the tasks of living.

And that's, that's good. But, one of the things that I think, um, art does is it curates opportunities to do that work of. Moving from not seeing to seeing, or from seeing to seeing differently, really coping with where you are. Um, artworks always exceed what can be taken at a glance in ways that are challenging.

The artwork says, what am I? In my book, Strange Tools, I said, the artwork says, see me if you can. You think you can see me. You think you know what I am. But look again, you don't have a clue. But, says the artwork further, if you pay [00:36:00] attention a bit more and work with me. Maybe you'll get somewhere. And you know, maybe something will happen.

Maybe you'll reorganize yourself. And that's interesting for two reasons. One, because it kind of shows why art is tied up with, um, human consciousness. But it also shows why it's not the art that matters, it's human consciousness. And in a way, that practice of Bringing the world into focus is something we do, try to do throughout our lives and all the time.

This reminds me of one of my favorite quotes, which I think I give somewhere in the entanglement. It's from a French Fluxus artist named Robert Filliou. And he said, uh, art is what makes life more interesting than art. 

andrea hiott: Yeah. I love that too. I hadn't heard it until I read it. And it's 

alva noë: such an amazing idea.

And that's in a way, I just sort of captured that thought here. It's art sheds light on consciousness. [00:37:00] But in a way, what makes art special is the fact that consciousness is special and, uh, and, and learning about consciousness is special obviously there's many different kinds of art doing many different kinds of work.

I don't mean to put it all under sort of a thimble. But, um, but to speak in very general terms, I do think that art gives us opportunities to do that work. To put it the way I was putting it before. of coming into relationship with where we are, who we're with, what we're looking at, the situation we're in. 

andrea hiott: Mm hmm 

alva noë: and then, and so, yeah, to connect, to close off the loop. And so, yeah, art, like life itself, confronts us with problems, 

andrea hiott: problems 

alva noë: for being in relationship. And that's what philosophy does, too. Philosophy just, um, ends to do it in a different space, in a more intellectual space.

But the, the effect is the same. The philosopher asks us to, in [00:38:00] effect, realize that the things we think we know are not stable. Therefore, we need to try to know them all again, but there isn't any such thing as finally knowing them. 

andrea hiott: So 

alva noë: there's a kind of philosophy invites you to, to go unstable, 

andrea hiott: to 

alva noë: go, to let it, to let it go.

And see what happens. For 

andrea hiott: me, this is really crucial, important. And something that I think relates to another important part of your writing and your work, which is that philosophy doesn't need to try to be science. Which, because what you're describing there for me relates to love in a way, and sort of in the way you've already brought up, because when you're in a love relationship, we're all in love I guess already, but you're kind of waking up to be able to handle that in a sense that we're talking about.

And whether that's through another human being, or that's through looking at an artwork maybe, or creating an artwork, or reading a book, or, I would say it could come In many ways that we wake up to that part of ourselves. But, but as you said, it's [00:39:00] dynamic and it's, um, it's always going, it's always moving.

It always needs to be reseen. I mean, I wanna push you a little bit on the seeing thing, but we'll get to that. But first for me, that is kind of what's different from something like science and something like the way we were talking about representation, where in that kind of an organization. You need different kinds of ways of doing it and I mean, I'm just opening up some kind of doors.

I won't give you my View of it, but when I was reading you I was thinking about this about how people in my circles even not with Thomas Fuchs But in the neuroscience world are trying to science if I philosophy in a sense and that it feels like we're hurting something that would be like trying to sciencify art you express it better in your books, but what does that open up for you? 

alva noë: Yeah, well, absolutely. That's, that's, um, you've said it extremely well. Um, so there's two crucial, two crucial points, one and two. One, science and art are [00:40:00] different. Science and philosophy are different. And they differ in this.

Yeah. That art and philosophy, unlike science, never have clear cut standards or practices for measuring their own success. They, they can't, they can't take for granted the standard by which they could say, I've succeeded.

And, and, and one of the nice, nice revelations about that is when you study a philosophy text, you don't sort of memorize the findings. There are no findings. You memorize, if anything, the arguments, which is to say, the, the pathways to the findings, so that you can make those arguments your own or think creatively with them.

Um, so philosophical texts, like, like artworks, become something like scores for having experience by. Um, now, so that's the first point. But the second point is, and now I take [00:41:00] it all back, is I think art and philosophy and science are entangled with each other. So there are artistic moments inside science and there are scientific moments inside philosophy.

And, those lines are never drawn sharper because we're not just one thing. We're always in motion in relation to our own questions. So, so a philosopher, a scientist might begin thinking they, they know what the standard of, of, they know what their test is trying to prove. But then the experiments comes up with unconclusive results that force them to get philosophical about what they were presupposing.

And, you know, that's what Einstein did with thinking about space and time and he, he realized that we couldn't just take the meaning of those terms for granted. They needed to be, you know, something as basic as what does it mean to say that two events happened at the same time? Yeah. All of a sudden that, that needs to become a problem.

That was not a, that was not a problem. We were just measuring events. All of a sudden that becomes a problem. And that's philosophy. So, so I think that you know Einstein was [00:42:00] a great philosopher. Um, he was also a great scientist, and many of the greatest philosophers, Leibniz, Descartes, um, were Barclay were also great scientists in the truest sense of the word.

So, in a way, I think that there's a really interesting, interesting way in which. that entanglement means that you can never, we can never dogmatically say, Oh, that's just science or, Oh, that's just philosophy. Well, those are fighting words. Those are, we can, we can, we can't just take that for granted at the same time.

I think there's all the difference in the world between science and philosophy. 

andrea hiott: It's wonderful that you say it like that, because again, I mean, my whole thing and what I'm obsessed with it is this kind of, you know, common patterns and holding the paradox and how to talk about it in a weird way because our language is sort of patterned by dichotomies and I mean, you kind of disrupted this with your, with your book 20 years ago, but we can come back to that.

But what you're saying, I think is, is, is wonderful. And [00:43:00] it's not that we, what hurts me sometimes is to see that we try to think that this particular quality of philosophy and art that we've been talking about. needs to feel like the quality of science, right? Or as if you have to choose one or the other.

That's the thing. You don't, we don't have to choose, but when we're engaging and orienting, we can orient scientifically or philosophically towards the same process, right? Towards, with different, yeah, I mean, I don't know. 

alva noë: Yeah, I mean, I think to really discuss this in more nuance, it'd be interesting to look at, um, you know, actual scientific practice and actual, say, practice inside neuroscience.

I think I am, I have become more and more and more over time, increasingly skeptical of neuroscience. Um,

not because I want anybody to stop [00:44:00] asking questions or stop doing the research. But because the things that when, at least when we're talking about. neuroscience in the space of the human or human, the human mind. Um, very few of the concepts we use to characterize our, our experience or our consciousness or our cognition are themselves stable, fixed, and unproblematic.

Memory, perception, awareness, sentience, uh, empathy, compassion, you name it. We, there's, there's room for philosophy there. And I think often, often neuroscience. in the interest of coming up with experimental results or that is instrumentalizing a concept for the purpose of using it inside an experiment, ends up missing the interesting, missing the concept.

And so there's a kind of almost, so the way I put it in my [00:45:00] newest, in my newest book, and I'm changing all the time, the way I'm thinking about it, but the way I put it in my newest book is that human beings are problems in the way we were just talking about, specifically they're aesthetic problems to ourselves, meaning We can't even really see ourselves.

It's like looking at ourselves is a bit like looking at an artwork. You can see ourselves this way or this way. It's never fixed. It's always richly indeterminate. So, so what does it mean to study the neural substrates of an, of an indeterminate, of an indeterminate phenomenon? Um, so this is why I, I'm often annoyed at, at what seems to me like a falsification or Reductionism in neuroscience that, that goes, that goes in the wrong direction.

Um, 

andrea hiott: yeah, I mean, I understand sometimes we, we also think that the, I mean, there's something about like noticing the regularities that can be very helpful if you're trying to understand mental illness and things like this, or, I mean, it, there's a [00:46:00] wonderful richness to noticing the regularities and so on, but when we start talking about consciousness, we often What I'm calling representations, but the measurements we've made or the assessments we've made with the process itself That's dynamic and ongoing as you've described and different for everyone as you also, you know Show in the work.

Um, yeah, but we could go in that forever Feel free to say what you want to say, but I also want to talk about seeing a little bit, too 

alva noë: Okay Well one very brief comment on that just just as a sort of a friendly comment before we turn to see Um, I actually think that the best neuroscience is medical in its orientation Um like the work of Neurologically oriented psychiatrists.

Um, actually, by the way, this is not an original comment, but it's an amazing fact about the brain sciences, that in 2024, we still have so many different names for them. And people talk about cognitive neuroscience and neuropsychiatry and psychology and [00:47:00] psychiatry and, and, um, um, neurology versus neuroscience.

And there's, it's so interesting that I mean, this is the piece that I'm sure I've heard somebody else say. If we have a lot of names for phenomena, it's probably because we don't really know what we're talking about. We haven't really figured it out. And I think that's um, that's really something for neuroscience to be sort of humble about, that we're in that state.

But one of the areas that I really like the most and have the greatest, I feel is in a way the most rigorous, is, is, is, medically oriented brain studies. And I say that because very often people who work in those areas, you know, like Thomas Fuchs or like, um, like Oliver Sacks, is they forced to, they're forced to keep the whole person in view.

And the really, the living human, it's a good way to say it. Yeah. The living human being is in view. Yeah, 

andrea hiott: exactly. 

alva noë: And, and that's, that's, that's a great way 

andrea hiott: to say it. Yeah. Because that's what get lost. That's what gets lost in a lot of the 

alva noë: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Okay. See, [00:48:00] 

andrea hiott: okay. See, well, it kind of, we can, I can even bridge with the neuroscience, because with the neuroscience, I studied the hippocampus more theoretically because I feel like it's.

It's kind of trying, it's an area of the brain where we can start to see how to hold paradox. Um, but, and, and with action and perception, your book from 20 years ago, which is pretty cool that the anniversary is coming up. Um, I feel like something that was important, like a realization that people might've had or something disruptive about that book was that it called into question this notion that perception is in the brain.

Um, and, and it kind of brought us into the body and that perception is action and. Yeah, I mean there would be so much more to say about that but in the book to get to seeing There's a lot about touch and there's a lot about I mean I I don't know, I invite you to completely disagree with this, but when I'm reading that book, I feel like the whole body is a perception instrument or something, and it's, touch is the best way to describe it, because it's [00:49:00] somehow, with our eyes we are also touching, and with our ears we're touching, and everything is, you know, touch, but then by the time I get to entanglement, I'm, I'm, I feel like we're talking about seeing a lot in that, and, and, With good reason and artwork and stuff, but I just wanted to bring that up for you and that in this context of paradox and stuff we've been talking about or getting beyond dichotomy or I wonder how you see that, that touching the way you saw it 20 years ago and the seeing now and yeah.

alva noë: Oh, that's, that's great. Um, so my understanding. Are you really asking.

Is it, is it sort of a backwards move to be focusing so much on, on seeing? Is it, is it in a way what you're, what you're saying? I guess I'm 

andrea hiott: wondering what, if, because I, I almost think by seeing you also mean something more than just looking with your eyes. So, it's almost like, yeah, I mean that's, you're still talking about it that way, but The examples feel very vision oriented, but the [00:50:00] results do not feel vision oriented, I guess I would say.

alva noë: Yeah, that's, yeah. I,

so in the Entanglement, I have, I have a chapter on writing, I have a chapter on dancing, I have a chapter on pictures. Um, so it's, it's sort of, it's actually meant to, it's organized as a chapter on, on writing. There's a chapter on pictoriality, and there's a chapter on choreography. So, choreography stands to the moving body, as pictoriality stands to the scene body, as writing stands to the speaking body.

So, I'm interested in those, those kinds of representational schemes and the way they loop down and change what they, what they represent. 

andrea hiott: Yeah, I'm sorry. I should also say learning to look and I mean, I've actually looked at all your, a lot of your work. I just, for some reason it feels like there's more of a focus on, 

alva noë: yeah, 

andrea hiott: on the art, the, the dancing and the, even that, you know, I'm not even trying to like criticize and say you've gone to seeing, I'm just trying to open it up of, yeah, 

alva noë: trying to understand 

andrea hiott: how you see what perception really is.

Is it still, [00:51:00] is it, is it a embodied, whole bodied process or? Yeah, how do you think about that? 

alva noë: Yeah. Um, right. So, I, the first thing about, and by the way, I'm actually starting a new project with the art historian Alexander Nagel on the history of painting and perspective. I'm so interested in these questions.

And one of the things I want to argue, and CastingWords This was an action of perception already, is that it's a mistake to think of vision as optical, right? So we have this whole tradition of thinking about light, creating a mapping on the retina, and we have a sort of an internal picture, and then we compute a representation of the scene.

I want to say that no, seeing is more like Hugging someone. It's more like, it's more like climbing a mountain. That scene is like that. That's what I was 

andrea hiott: trying to get to. And out of our heads you [00:52:00] also give this example of how we can see without our eyes, so to speak. Yeah, yeah. So that's what I'm trying to dig into right there.

alva noë: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So, so I totally think that. Um, uh, so that means that, like, there's, there's, and there's nice paradoxes in the space of this. For example, one of the interesting paradoxes is that we can see more than is visible. Yeah. Because if you, if you think of what is visible is just what projects to your eye.

We're not confined to what projects to the eyes. Um, and, um, one of the things I'm, I'm writing about is how, in a way, perspectival painting developed, you know, in the 15th century, Um,

developed a kind of account of the visible world and took that to then constrain visual experience. [00:53:00] 

andrea hiott: But 

alva noë: actually, the visual world has never been like it's represented inside a perspectival painting. And drawing on art historical work of Alexander Nagel, I'm trying to show that very quickly, Renaissance painters themselves tried to explode the limits of perspective by, by making moves within their artistic strategies.

That couldn't make sense of in perspective, in particular, they got interested in life size painting and in bodily scale, which has no particular standing or interest from a purely perspectival point of view. What I just said, Maybe it was completely unintelligible because I was referring to quite subtle internal arguments to this, to this thing I'm, I'm now doing, but this is just to say that, um, for me, how to think about vision, specifically vision, um, is really an interesting and [00:54:00] outstanding and burning kind of problem for me.

It's something I'm, I'm still after all these years, um, where I've discussed how we see and what seeing is so many times, I'm still concerned with it and still feel that there's, There's ways in which it, it, it troubles us. Now, often when I say, see, I'm actually just speaking more generally about perception where I don't necessarily mean the visual modality.

Um, so for example, blind people,

actually, that's a funny term because blindness doesn't come in one size and people who are so called legally blind have all different degrees of partial vision. So, in a way, blind people are really just people who see differently, ironically. Exactly, [00:55:00] yeah. It's just 

andrea hiott: that what regularities we, the majority of people associate with something like seeing.

That's right. They don't, they have different ones. That's 

alva noë: right. That's right. They have different ones. And, and they, and then among them, there's many, many, many different ones within the community, the community of the so called blind. But the point is that. The blind live in a world that is as replete with shape, size, meaning, spatial extent, and maybe even color as our worlds, that is, we, we supposedly normally sighted people.

So, um, I'm interested, I am interested in, uh, trying to explode and to, to rethink what, what, what the visual is. I'm not really answering you very clearly. Here's, here's a good No, it's 

andrea hiott: wonderful. I, I think it's an important point and I think there's other Like, people are starting to, there's some thing about seeing without eyes, [00:56:00] and someone asked me if I wanted to have a dialogue with someone who's writing about that, so I haven't looked into it, but it's exactly what I wanted to open up a bit, because I think your work is opening it up, and as you were talking, I was also thinking of Dreyfus, who I think has also been important for you, and for some reason I was remembering him talking about like, Cézanne, the art was not about seeing, it was about Expressing almost like a bodily state or something, it's so hard to talk about, but I think about it a lot in art when you, if you look over time at different styles that have come, they're not about seeing in a vision sense, they're about how we're being in the world, right?

You can, you can link that stuff. 

alva noë: Absolutely. So Cézanne is fantastic on that topic and Merleau Ponty wrote an essay. called Cézanne's Doubt, which is, um, a beautiful study of Cézanne, Cézanne's work as a kind of a paradigm for what the phenomenologist is trying to do. [00:57:00] And um, Merleau Ponty says things about Cézanne like, Cézanne was trying to see as if no one had ever seen before,

encountering a world that had not yet been fabricated and constructed according to our own imagination. Ideologies. He talks about how the poet speaks as if no one has ever spoken before, like, actually, not just reusing sampling language, but inventing language, um, and that Cézanne, going back to the painter, was concerned with, um,

expressing [00:58:00] appearances exactly, and that that's an infinite task. So there's a weird way in which, I'm just riffing on your mention of Dreyfus and Cézanne, um, there's a way in which the artist is doing something God like, is doing something God like. With all the expansiveness and power of infinite creativity.

And, you know, you're right. It's not connected to the blindness and disability issue. We talk about vision the way people in industry might talk about fast fashion or something. Like, we just assume we know what we're talking about. Like, T shirts. This is a T shirt, you know. This is a visual experience. But what is a visual experience?

What is, what is clothing, you know, targets T shirts? H& M underwear, um, those are pre fab concepts 

andrea hiott: and, 

alva noë: and visual experience is a pre fab concept. [00:59:00] That's the other thing Mello Ponty says talking about Cezanne, um, he says, the very idea that we see in different modalities at all is the imposition of a scientific idea on lived human experience.

In lived human experience, there is no touch as opposed to sight, as opposed to smell, as opposed to taste. There's just our being with the world, being in the world, being with the world, and then we develop a model of this, the brain and there's the eyes and there's the ears and there's different channels of information processing and we, all of a sudden we have this, this knowledge, every child learns.

Five senses just like they learn that there are cows and there are goats. Yeah, but there's like 

andrea hiott: many hundreds of senses really And they're all one process that has to do with that thing. We won't go into representation again, but we studied it how we've studied it Yeah, it's sort of static put it into static things and then we take those as if those are the real thing But they're not we've lost that.[01:00:00] 

alva noë: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so so, um, I do think that um some people thinking about disability You Not just blindness, but other forms of disability, I think are very, uh, inventive on these issues because they also realize that it's not just phenomenology, which is at stake, but it's, it's respect for their lives, which is at stake in different lives that differently.

andrea hiott: Yeah, and I think it's so important and it gets to beautiful parts of entanglement and we can come back to reorganization and organization a little bit, um, but because as you were described, like, you talk about style a lot, we don't probably don't have time to go into that, but you know, this idea of like habits that have kind of Yeah.

created almost like streets or paths that we're all born into and we take for granted of like what you're saying about what it What's a cool t shirt or what's this or what's that? And all of these we don't quite realize are habits that could be changed or that aren't [01:01:00] necessarily the same for everyone According to different abilities instead of disabilities.

Um, and so I feel like within entanglement, you're, you're showing this process of how, through philosophy and art, through, you can correct me, but through somehow becoming aware of, of whatever it is that's in front of us, it could be an artwork, it could be the nature, I guess, it could be a book, I don't know, idea, um, that we can then develop some way in which we can Notice our own habits or our own participation in habits, um, which then changes what's possible for that kind of thing that we're noticing or focusing on or observing the creation of that and vice versa and so on.

I don't know. But how would you better clarify? 

alva noë: Yeah, that's a, that's a complicated intersection. Yeah, entangled. Um, uh, one of the, one of the ways I put it is that we're not [01:02:00] just creatures of habit, we're creatures of style. And part of what that comes down to is that, um, human beings are always not just exposed to other human beings, but we experience ourselves as we are or might be experienced by others.

So,

so we have style. So what that means is that everything you do.

is to some degree uniquely your way of doing it so that another [01:03:00] sees you in the way you do it. Now I say to some degree or another because, um, one of the interesting things about style is you can imitate a person's style. I can try to talk like you, um, or I can try to walk like you or dance like you or write like you or, um, do a podcast like you.

Um, and so style becomes a kind currency or It's tradable, it's exchangeable, it's visible, it's meaningful, it's recognizable. So that we're all the time, I sort of have this image of fireflies flashing their lights in the summer night. 

andrea hiott: some last night, by the way. Oh really? Yeah. 

alva noë: I think right in the Atlanta area you would see that.

Yeah, I 

andrea hiott: was very excited because I hadn't seen them in a long time. So it's great you brought that up. 

alva noë: Do you call them lightning bugs or fireflies? Yeah, lightning bugs. Lightning bugs. Yeah. I think I grew up calling them fireflies. But, but lightning bugs, they flash, they [01:04:00] fire, they flash at each other and there's this kind of, and I think that's what we're like.

We're constantly flashing at each other. And um, And then based on how people respond to us, we also change ourselves. Um, I don't mean to make it all sound too intellectual. It's, a lot of this stuff is not, is not self conscious. I to talk 

andrea hiott: about. It's like, you're always, that's why it's a practice, right?

That, that you show in the writing. Cause you have to hold both of these things at once. That habits are sort of inherited. And also because we're unique spatio temporal bodies, they're unique. It's, at the same time. 

alva noë: Yeah. And 

andrea hiott: we can, as you kind of express her, you know, we can want to be identified with certain regularities.

And so we take on those regularities, which is taking on the habits, which is a style. But at the same time, we can never escape our body. So we're going to always have something a little bit, a little bit of a different flash if we're the firefly or whatever. I mean, we're always in this. 

alva noë: Yeah, yeah. [01:05:00] Um, and And another thing about, about style is that you can criticize another person's style.

Like, you can, you might not see it. It's a little bit like how hard it is to see, but if you see it, you can say, Oh, that's kind of a pretentious style. Or that's a, I don't know, that's a awkward or ungainly, or I don't know, whatever you might say, it's critical. But the very fact that it's a space of possible criticism is interesting.

Also space, a space of possible praise. In my book, Strange Tools, I argue, and this is a piece I wrote that's captured in the book that nobody else has ever, very few other people have picked up on it, but I think it's such a clever idea, is um, is I argue that like pop stars are really style stars. They're style artists.

What they're really working with is style. And they use music as an [01:06:00] instrument to further the cultivation of style. Which is why, when we go to rock concerts. 

andrea hiott: Don't you go to a concert in the book when you're talking about this? Or is that like confusing something else? Maybe it's learning. 

alva noë: Yeah, maybe in Learning to Look I talk about some concerts. Maybe it's 

andrea hiott: Learning to Look, yeah. But um, 

alva noë: but um, but you know, the idea that we, the idea that we um, I was just hearing an interview on the radio today with, with the Swiftie talking about going to a Taylor Swift concert and screaming and shouting and dancing and singing along and dancing and singing along.

It's less about listening to the artist. make music than it is joining with the artist in some kind of celebration. 

andrea hiott: Yeah. Becoming that kind of, um, I don't know, I mean, it relates to this, this embodied perception, action flow that we were talking about earlier, where when you, when you're in a group, for example, at a, at a concert, you kind of become that together.[01:07:00] 

I don't know. There's. What is that that's so exciting about that? Is it, it reminds me of you writing in your notebook, you know, or a little kid or something. There's some kind of, it's not that we're reflecting ourselves, but we're almost like expanding. 

alva noë: Yeah, that's, that's a very interesting question. I don't have a good answer to that.

I remember when I was, um, to get personal again, in 1986, I also remember the year. Um, maybe it was 1985 or 87, but the reason I remember the It might have been 85. The reason I kind of remember the year is I was at a, uh, protest at Columbia University against, um, the University's investments in South Africa.

And, um, I was with my two friends and one of my friends was saying, Well, you know, these, these, these mass [01:08:00] gatherings are kind of alienating and they, they're, they, Put you in an emotional space that takes you away from the right use of your reason and your reflection and your self control, and they're dangerous, and we should resist getting caught up in the, in the power of the crowd.

andrea hiott: The crowd, like Elias Canetti or something. Exactly, exactly. And, and 

alva noë: I was arguing, actually, no, you just need to let go and trust, trust the process and, and that, you know, this is a chance to have solidarity with these other people. And I remember we had this interesting argument about it. And uh, That is interesting.

Interesting. Both points were true. 

andrea hiott: Exactly. Again, I was going to say it's the paradox because if you're going to let yourself go with the flow, you also need to be present of yourself still to be able to catch yourself, unveil yourself, so to speak. That's a hard thing to learn, isn't it? I mean, you brought up this, this time period.

Like, when did you start thinking that philosophy was the way to, to deal with these things? Like, was it just a natural flow? And then from there, [01:09:00] I think the artist kind of discovered you and then it, it kind of went into that. Or, I wonder about that organization and reorganization of you and your life.

Yeah. 

alva noë: Yeah, I'm very lucky because in a way, uh, I started as a very young person, like 12 or 13 years old. I was very, I was already interested in writing and I quickly got interested in philosophy. I think it was in eighth grade when I read, uh, for the first time I read a philosophical piece of writing.

andrea hiott: What was it? Do you remember? Or it was, it 

alva noë: was, It was, it was Jean Jacques Rousseau's Discourse on the Origins of Inequality. Oh 

andrea hiott: my gosh, in eighth grade? Okay. 

alva noë: Yeah, yeah, my history teacher gave it to me because we were studying the French Revolution. I said, you should, you should read this. 

andrea hiott: Teachers, I love teachers.

They give us these little things that just sit us on courses for the rest of our lives. Absolutely. 

alva noë: She cared about what I had to say about it. She, she respected me. She, she [01:10:00] made me feel like my thoughts and opinions were Relevant. Yeah. It matters so much. Mrs. Gordon. She's gone now. But, um. 

andrea hiott: Oh, thanks for saying her name.

I just had dinner with a friend of mine who's a teacher and I was literally telling her that they're like the most important people in the world for exactly this reason. 

alva noë: Yeah. I agree. I agree. Um, and then, um, a little while after that, uh, a guy, a carpenter who worked with my father had a copy of, of, um, a little book by.

By Sartre called Existentialism and Human Emotions. It's a little slim paperback. I still have it because he gave it to me. Oh, 

andrea hiott: wow. 

alva noë: Um, and it was lying around. It was lying around my dad's, my parents house. And, uh, I read it. Oh. And I remember not understanding a lot of it because he talked about Catholicism and there's all sorts of politics in it, like Marxism I didn't know anything about.

But he did talk about, um, talking about this idea that philosophers used to think [01:11:00] that your essence preceded your existence. That what you are was fixed and then you just, you just come into being, um, but we believe that existence precedes essence and you can make yourself what you want to be or what you are.

Like you can, you can make yourself yourself. And I didn't, you know, I was literally 13 years old, so I didn't understand that the way, the way one would as an adult, but, um, it totally blew my mind. It completely blew my mind. And, um, yeah. Yeah, so I kind of thought that I had a natural attraction to philosophy, but I still didn't really, since, if I, if I can just say a little bit more about myself personally, I didn't really know what philosophy was.

andrea hiott: It was more that you found this exciting, 

alva noë: yeah, 

andrea hiott: book. 

alva noë: So for example, I thought, I actually thought literature was what, what I wanted to be. I wanted to be a writer, I want, and I'm reading, reading novels and short stories that seem to me. It's really amazing, amazing [01:12:00] place. And 

andrea hiott: that makes sense. Cause you found that, did you find the power of, was that unveiling you to yourself a bit when you started reading and writing or there's something that feels very, Yeah.

Connected. Yeah. To what you're doing in the philosophy there. That, this, this looping. 

alva noë: Yeah. Well, there were three, there were three things that I read

and now maybe I'm in, I'm in 10th grade by now. One was James Joyce's The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. One was Omas Man's short story, Tony O'Kruger. Oh, wow. And what, and, and do you know that one? 

andrea hiott: Mm hmm. And one was Omas Man is big for me too. 

alva noë: And one was, um, a crazy short, not, a novella by Robert Musil called, um, Young Tourless in English, or in German it's called Die Verwirrung des Zirkelns Tourless.

andrea hiott: Yeah, I also [01:13:00] know Robert Musil too, that was a big thing. I think I've read that one before, but I'm having trouble, is he like? 

alva noë: It's a crazy story about a boy in a military academy. And it involves kind of bullying and brutality and sexual experimentation and, um, but anyway, but all these 

andrea hiott: people. Pushing at the edges all of these books that you 

alva noë: described.

It shocked me. All of them shocked me. And all, all of them, all of them were by boys. All of them were about artists. All of them were about the artists finding themselves and becoming who they were to become. And in a very romantic way, totally captivated me. And those, those books really, really. And the reason I mention that is that, um,

I then went off to college and I actually, I tried writing fiction or poetry and I, I [01:14:00] never really knew how to do it. I never, I could never do it. I could never figure out how to do it. But when I took a philosophy class, I, I knew how to do it. Like, it just came very, very natural to me. And by the way, I didn't.

I had to learn so much and I flunked out of things and I had to work very hard to actually become, uh, to become good at it. But the interesting thing, and then I'll shut up because I'm going on too long, but the interesting thing for me personally is that, is that I then sort of found my bearings in academic writing, doing philosophy, but gradually over the course of 25, 30 years, worked myself back to the point where I began, which was that.

What I was really trying to do was add one with this artistic practice. [01:15:00] I'm not doing science. I'm not trying to prove little theorems. I'm not trying to make my contribution to a pre existing problem. I'm trying to free myself in the way art can do, in the ways I find myself being. 

andrea hiott: That's very beautiful, freeing yourself in the way art can do, because I talked about emancipation and I do feel like that's kind of what the entanglement, once we understand It's too much, you know, what you're trying to say in entanglement.

There's a kind of liberation or something and yeah, that's beautiful It makes a lot of sense that those books and they're so much about art and that they're also connected to another word I wanted to talk to you about but we'll just kind of touch on it really quickly is performance that there's a performative That's not, um, not performance like fake, but performance like artistic, uh, uh, a way in which that becomes the process [01:16:00] of recognizing or reorganizing and organizing or where those organizing and reorganizing meet, so to speak.

Does that make, does that sound, does that make sense or? 

alva noë: Yeah. Yeah. Because, um, because we're not in our heads. We're in what we do. And performance in a way is a term for the most general modalities of our doing. And performance also carries this idea, which is so important to me. It's not just doing, but it's doing in a social space.

It's doing potentially at least under the eyes of others. Um, I think there's this whole idea that, you know, the real you is hidden away inside of you, but I think actually that the real you. is something which is always becoming in performance. So the, the, the, the word I used in action of perception was inactive.

It's an inactive approach to perception. We, we enact our perceptual consciousness in what we do. Um, uh, sometimes I talk about achievement. Sometimes [01:17:00] I talk about performance. Uh, Judith Butler. Talks about performance and she took that idea from the ordinary language tradition philosophy to, to Austin and the idea of speech acts and things like that.

So I use it in a slightly different way from her, but I think my, my, my, my usage agrees with hers. Um, and, um,

right. The idea that performance isn't superficial, that performance is. Existential. Yeah. Yeah, right. Exactly. 

andrea hiott: Right back to that Sartre and that, and that stuff of, um, it's, it feels more almost like putting yourself to be seen in the way that we've been talking about sight, right? Which is very hard for us.

And I almost feel like we've, our habits as a society, society, as you were kind of Touching on are almost like to do the opposite now you you hide your real self away or you're trapped in your brain, right? [01:18:00] and so you your real self is trapped in your in your brain and there's something about There's something very liberating about thinking of performance as a space to connect and reorganize and be safe, you know Even as you take risks, I don't know.

alva noë: Yeah. Yeah, right. That's what we That's like, as a parent, that's what you're trying to let your kid understand, that they can do, they can act, they can be, they can fuck up, excuse my language, um, and that it's safe to do that. It's safe to do that. To try to do things and in some households, um, people are too critical, they shut down the freedom that the child has to act.

andrea hiott: I'm so glad you brought that up because I want to come to love, right? We have to go, I mean, I could talk forever about a lot of these things, but for now, that, what you just described, feels to me like love, there's some kind of, I think it's a Winnicott quote [01:19:00] or something about the child being able to play in the presence of its mom without knowing its mom is there or something, where you open up the space where you're safe to be and explore, does that have to do with, I mean, we've been talking a lot about individual and philosophical and art, but there's also the idea of like a wider idea of organization, you know, in terms of, What we are as humans and do you see a way in which maybe it's too idealistic, but could we learn to treat each other like that in other areas of life too? 

alva noë: You mean is it possible to to love each other? Is that what you're asking? I guess 

andrea hiott: to I hope it's I know it's possible to love each other, but I I suppose in something like the performative aspect of of one of these Ideas of art or even in in philosophy or science or when we think about like the major challenges that we face as humans Let's even go there ecologically or mentally or in terms of what what we fight about We're entangled right and and understanding that entanglement in the way that you present it whether through the [01:20:00] making If we want to think of it as art or through the theory, if we want to think of it in terms of the philosophy and the way we come up with these guiding habits, I mean, when we realize we're entangled, when we develop this practice that we've been talking about, and I know you don't want to use the word agency, but I do feel like it's a kind of free will or something that you can unveil yourself to yourself, does it also give us a chance to look at that differently, maybe from a different perspective?

Place. Do you ever think about that? 

alva noë: Or is it too big? Yeah. Yeah. No, no, I do. I do. Just quick little parenthetical comment on agency.

One of my biggest criticisms of myself, of my writing, or of my view, is that I haven't quite come to grips with the notion of agency.

Because

so much of what we do just happens to us. [01:21:00] And so how do we, but yet, yet, it's still what we do. Like we let it happen, or we enable it to happen, or we express ourselves, and it's happening. So how to find that balance? So since Action of Perception until now, I've been always trying to find a way to tell a story of the self as both striving and achieving, but also as part of a larger world involving in social phenomenon.

Anyway, it's just a, it's a term I'm It's just a thing I'm really busy with in the sense that it's a problem for me. 

andrea hiott: There's free will and there's not free will. I mean, it's a lot of what we've been trying to do here and what I think this practice of entanglement is, is trying to do. if we unstick it from a linear mindset, which is another reason I like organization because it implies that everything is already there.

Yeah, and there's no beginning or end, but everything's constantly scaling and reconfiguring differently. 

alva noë: Yeah, yeah, yeah. 

andrea hiott: Then you have both of these at once. There are [01:22:00] parameters by which of course you don't have free will and then there is, but within that you do have some. 

alva noë: Right. Right, right, right. To put it, to now go back to the other sort of thing you're asking, maybe this is not quite the level you're asking it about, but, um, I do think that one of the discoveries that's important to me, you already touched on it, is that science is different from art and philosophy.

And I guess, I think we need art and philosophy. I mean, we can't escape art and No. Even if we try to, but trying to is dangerous. It leads to a culture dominated by science and engineering and sort of a kind of capitalism run amok, I think. Um, and I'm, I'm worried about, um, I'm worried about changes happening in, in society.

That have to do with the disvaluation of philosophy and, and [01:23:00] art, and acting as if they're only really valuable to the degree that they're like science. So, philosophy is valued because it is actually making contributions the way science does. And I'm sure you know that in the Netherlands and in many places in the world now, a lot of times the way art is funded, It's through university degrees, so you have artist research, and that's great that artists are being funded, but it's kind of bad that they're being funded as if they're science.

Because I think they should be able to be funded for their own autonomous form of work. Anyway, so, I guess I do think that, um, I wish, I wish that there were a way To bring this kind of understanding that I'm trying to develop in this work into a more public conversation, um, like I wish to use the language you've been using.

I wish we could hold paradox in public spaces more readily, you know, [01:24:00] um, you know, I don't want to get into politics, but just a very interesting thing that happened recently. Was, um, the, the controversy over, uh, President Biden's cognitive decline, his perceived cognitive decline, and I just thought that would have been such an amazing opportunity for the world to have a conversation about neurodiversity, changes in consciousness.

The fact that there isn't only one way to be a conscious human being, an intelligent human being, a competent human being, , whatever your views about whether or not he, I don't really know anything about his specific cases, but, you know, you can be changed and different, and yet capable of work, capable of leadership, capable.

And, that seems to me a very simple case. Where we should be able to hold both sides of that in a public space. [01:25:00] I haven't heard anybody say that. I haven't heard anybody say that. It's either yes or no, black or white. 

andrea hiott: Exactly, I think, and that speaks to this, what, style and habits and this, that, I think it's Simone de Beauvoir who talks about being kind of railroaded into things and you don't even know you're on the railroad or whatever.

Yeah, and I guess, What I feel in your book and what I feel in a lot of really good philosophy Is that there's a practice to it? There is a performance to it that as you talk about a bit you almost Show us or teach us the patterns of a different way of kind of you know moving right? Moving and thought but also embody.

I mean because those aren't separate and I feel like We need that now on many different scales. Like it's, it's an important, you know, the making and the theory actually scale up to these levels, like what you're discussing right now, we are, I mean, this, I'm getting to my own stuff, I guess, but I do feel like we're stuck in a way where we think a paradox means you choose between different [01:26:00] one or the other, instead of like what you just described, opening the space, holding the paradox is what I say, because then you see the richness of, oh, it could be like this.

Or it could be like this, or I'm this person in this situation and this person in another. And as you talked about at the beginning, that's very hard to be alive in that way. 

alva noë: Yeah. It's a 

andrea hiott: hard thing, you know, it's work, but we need ways to do it. 

alva noë: Yeah, that's beautiful. I completely am with you on that. And uh, um, it goes to thinking about rationality.

I think people think there's just one way to be rational, um, but on that one way of being rational, you know, there's the evidence, there's the rules of logic, and there's what follows. And either you're right or you're wrong. But what's interesting is that in so many domains of human life, right and wrong are meaningless terms.

Um, you and I, or they're not [01:27:00] meaningless terms. But they're intrinsically disputable terms. That's the point. So, you know, I might think, no, it's wrong to do that. And you might say, no, it's not wrong to do that. And both of us, neither of us is thinking, Both of us are committed to the value, to the idea that there's a difference between right and wrong.

But, we realize that it's fraught, it's, it's a site of conflict, it's potentially disputable. And to me that's the, the very hallmark of the aesthetic. Which by the way, um, the philosopher who I think, two philosophers who I think really brilliantly understood this. The first was Kant, um, who in the Third Critique says that the interesting thing about the aesthetic is that There are no rules.

There's no, there's no proofs. There's no, like, I can't prove to you that something is beautiful. Either it is or it isn't for you, right? Either you experience its beauty or you don't. But beauty is not [01:28:00] merely subjective or questions of aesthetic aren't merely subjective. They're both intersubjectively significant.

It's not just beautiful for me or beautiful for you. We can argue. There's something for us to fight about that. Um, and yet there's no independent decision procedure for deciding. And that's also, I think, I think, although I think some people wouldn't agree with me, I think something like that is true throughout our lives.

It's true in ethics, it's true in politics, and it's true in relationships, and it's true it's true all over the place. And we need, we need a new conception of, of, of reason that lets us encompass that. 

andrea hiott: I agree. And that touches on something you discuss in different books to have not thinking of reason as a choice you make over emotion or instead of emotion or instead of feeling that in the same way you.

Those aren't either or either, you know, and yeah, and as you were talking, I was thinking, you know, if two people are walking to the same place or up a [01:29:00] mountain from different paths, then we could fight about whether we should go right or left, but it makes no sense because we're on different paths, but we might still get to the same place even if we go different directions, but we don't have a way of talking about that, thinking about that yet.. But I think what you're doing and the kind of philosophy that you've been working on for all this time opens that up because, you know, perceiving is a way of acting and acting is a way of perceiving and it's a way of holding the paradox for me of, of what all this stuff we've been talking about.

So I just want to say thanks for doing it. And I'm glad you read those books when you were a kid and started on your lucky path. 

alva noë: Yeah. Well, thank you so much for being, uh So, um, so interested and curious, and through your interest and curiosity, very inspiring to me, is nothing, I'm sure you know this in your own creative work, that there's nothing that feeds you more than the sense that you're In relationship with someone else.

So, thank you.