I can only hope that the book is clearer than this interview, which I found extremely frustrating, both as a research psychologist once working in psychoneuroimmunology and on grounds of simple clarity. If you boil this discussion down to its essence, it seems to resolve to:

1. Consciousness isn't just the brain and neural system.

2. What is it?

3. It's the brain and the neural system engaging with the world.

4. What do we study, if not the brain?

5. Oh, we should study the brain.

6. So we can study the brain to discover consciousness?

7. Oh, no, consciousness isn't just the brain and neural system...

More than once, Gordy Slack attempted to pin down what an actual scientific study would look like to investigate this approach to consciousness, and never really got anything more concrete than studying the brain! Saying that "it should be cross-disciplinary" is fine and dandy, but you have to measure something, and Noe never really says what that is.

Furthermore, Noe grossly oversimplified both brain function and neuropsychology. Nearly twenty years ago, it was found that every one of the 100 splits in each of your 10 billion neurons act as a "decision gate," in effect a tiny computer. Every one of those 200 nerve endings also has from one to three neurotransmitters -- and while I'm out of date, some counts of neurotransmitters from back in the day went over 100. All these neurons interconnect in highly complex ways. In the 1980s and early 1990s it became clear that at the very least we are looking at complex, four-dimensional (including time) waveforms, not single little neurons lighting up when you read or speak or think or see. Everything takes the whole brain, to greater or lesser extents. He's right that fMRI isn't stop-action photography of the mind in action, but no sensible neurologist or neuropsychologist thinks that, either. That's a straw man at best - claiming that this is a modern form of phrenology, which it decidedly is not.

It is obvious that the brain is the platform on which consciousness rests. There is already some evidence that it sits in the neocortex (more or less), and is isolated from other brain functions. Arguing that a brain in a bottle, for example, might not have consciousness is also obvious but not helpful. Apart from some old-guard cognitive scientists who are still falsely comparing the brain to a PC (and "artificial intelligence" gurus like Marvin Minsky), no one thinks we know as much as we should about how the brain works, and how it generates thought and action. Alva Noe correctly identifies this, but fails to realize that we know that already, and also fails (at least in this interview) in indicating the way we should go. Indeed, until very recently, the only tool we had to study consciousness was on the outside -- how people behaved and described their thinking. The new neuropsychologists and their tools are the biggest breakthrough we have ever had in studying the mind. I'd rather listen to a Joseph LeDoux talking about his meticulous, thoughtful, and elegant studies of the neuronal pathways of fear any day.

As a result it feels like someone looking over my shoulder at a half-finished crossword puzzle saying "look! You've missed filling in half the puzzle!" Yes, thank you, we knew that. Perhaps there is a reason that psychology departed from philosophy over a century ago.

The dominant view in neuroscience today represents us as if we were strangers in an alien environment. It says that we go about gathering information, building up representations, performing calculations and making choices based on that data. But in reality, when we get up in the morning we put our feet on the floor and start to walk. We take the floor for granted and the world supports us, houses us, facilitates us and enables us to carry on whatever our tasks might be.

This paragraph seems to embody Noe's argument as succinctly as anything in the interview, so it's a good place to start.

To me, these are merely two different ways of describing the same acts. The latter simply emphasizes how natural the former process feels to us as we experience it from the inside.

Whether you feel alienated by a more clinical, scientific description is hardly relevant. I find the former description intricate, beautiful, even awe-inspiring.

However, he does a great service in pointing out how inextricable our consciousness is from our surroundings. They've tried sensory deprivation experiments, and have found out what happens to our minds when deprived of its external interactions: we go crazy.

To say that the world is a part of us, or vice versa, could also be described in another way: Because information remains encoded in our surroundings, the models in our brains can be clunkier than they otherwise would. That's why we become strangers in our own rooms when the lights go out, even if nothing has moved, or why you can drive by the same intersection a hundred times and still be unable to list the businesses located there. Because we can usually get the information just by interacting with the thing again, our brains happily discard most everything it takes in. When we stop interacting with a thing, most of our memories of it fade, or get conflated with other memories.

In other words, without surroundings to be conscious of, our experience of consciousness would be a pale, lifeless imitation of even our most boring everyday experiences. It's something to keep in mind, but I don't see it as a barrier to the ultimate understanding of consciousness.

obvious.

I didn't get a clear understanding of why I am not my brain. It is pretty obvious that all thought processes, and consciousness, come from the brain. On the other hand, figuring out how it emerges from neurons firing is a quite daunting task. The same thing happens in physics: An emergent phenomenon like water waves must be related to the motion of water molecules, but its a waste of time to attempt to describe water waves using atomic collision theory. Similarly, there may be a theory of consciousness that exists on a higher "level" than neurons firing. However, even if this is true, it is still true that, underneath it all, we "are our brain".