Alva Noë

Not so long ago, I was driving with a friend from Berkeley to Marin County. I waited patiently to pay my toll; I'd let my FasTrak account expire, so I needed to pay cash, the old fashioned way.

As I pulled up at the booth and handed over the money, ...

In a fascinating interview on the topic of atheism versus theism over at The Stone in The New York Times, Yale University philosopher Keith DeRose, in email conversation with Gary Gutting, makes the claim that theists don't know that God exists and that atheists don't know that there isn't ...

"European society is very advanced, very civilized. Between holocausts."

The painter Barnett Newman is said to have replied along these lines to a friend who was bemoaning the sorry state of American political life and praising European social democracy.

It's a good joke. It casts light on the whole religion ...

According to a paper just published in the PNAS, our Neanderthal cousins made pictures.

Or at least they found reason to use stone implements to carve shapes onto the surfaces of cave walls. This was hard work requiring hundreds of scrapes. Whether compositions of lines of this sort should ...

When Bud Selig, baseball's long-serving commissioner, visited Oakland recently, he took the opportunity to bemoan the A's inadequate stadium and also to worry aloud about a topic that seems to loom large in the minds of many baseball people these days, namely, the increasingly slow pace of the game.

No doubt some of the autograph seekers leaning across the fence straining for the baseball players' attention were in it for the money.

I suppose a baseball signed by the right person is worth something. Others were collectors working to complete their sets.

But most of us clumped up along ...

In Don Quixote, Cervantes tells the story of two brothers who claim to be excellent judges of wine.

They are given a wine to taste and each pronounces it excellent. One brother notes, however, that its perfection is marred by a vague taste of leather. The other disagrees, observing that ...

There are no chairs to rest on in the galleries at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where the first-ever New York retrospective of the work of Jeff Koons is now on display. There are some benches by the elevators and they are crowded with people studying their ...

Jenny Lewis' voice has helped provide a soundtrack to the last 15 years, but it's not part of one specific sound: She's sung heartsick ballads and spiky rock (in Rilo Kiley), summery surf-pop (in Jenny and Johnny), winsome electro-pop (in The Postal ...

In an essay just published in The Brooklyn Rail, NYU art historian Alexander Nagel argues that it's time to move beyond the relic-cult model of artworks that, he believes, has influenced our attitudes to art since about 1700.

His essay appears in a series of articles in The ...

The U.S. Sentencing Commission on Friday voted unanimously to reduce terms for drug traffickers already in prison.

More than 46,000 drug offenders will be eligible for early release, unless Congress makes a move to stop the plan by Nov. 1.

On average, sentences could be reduced by more than ...

Does the word "at" occur in the "Star-Spangled Banner"? If you're like me, it won't take you long to answer. You sing the song through at faster-than-normal speed in a whisper, or in your head, until you hit the phrase: "at the twilight's last gleaming." (Hat tip: cognitive scientist ...

Whether or not you caught wind of the excited announcement that "Eugene Goostman," a computer program ("chatbot") devised by Vladimir Veselov, Eugene Demchenko and Sergey Ulasen, had passed the Turing Test this past week, there's a good chance you've noticed the widespread public denunciations of the claims.

So ...

I watched Rosemary's Baby, by Roman Polanksi, again last night. It is a monster movie. And like the best movies in this genre, you could call it a skepticism movie. It is philosophical. And, remarkably, it is terrifying because it is philosophical.

Things aren't going right with young Rosemary. ...

I visited the Emil Nolde (1867-1956) exhibition now up at Frankfurt's Städel Museum this past week. Nolde's paintings are small, sketch-like, personal, and serious. They are authentic: one person doing what he obviously needs to do and making no bones about the fact.

I was moved by his ...

I watched Top Gun the other night with my kids. I hadn't seen it in years. It's a remarkable film, first released in 1986, with a fantastic cast — Tom Cruise, Val Kilmer, Tom Skerritt, Kelly McGillis and Meg Ryan, among others — that only gets better with time.

Top ...

Should you kill one person in order to save five?

Whatever your opinion, your judgment shouldn't be swayed by whether the question is posed in your native language or in a foreign language you have mastered. But that is exactly what an international team of cognitive psychologists led by Albert ...

I grew up with Star Trek reruns and I was an enthusiastic viewer of The Next Generation and also Deep Space Nine. But somehow I had missed Star Trek: Voyager. Until now that is. I've been working through the seven-year series streaming on the Internet.

It's so good, so different ...

At dinner the other night with an experimental psychologist, we turned to the topic of science in the popular media. She bemoaned the fact that it's hard to get newspapers to get the facts right; even when you help reporters describe results correctly, she said, there is a tendency for ...

Pop star Pharrell's video "24 hours of Happy" is really something to marvel at. It's 24 hours long and consists of nothing more than loops of people dancing to his song "Happy."

I was immediately struck by the video's commercialism. Product placements are in your face; and the movie ...