Alva Noë

At the German hotel where Jos Stelling's The Girl and Death takes place, the guests include everyone from incapacitated men and women patiently awaiting death (the hotel seems to function in part as a makeshift sanatorium) to lively if somewhat unhinged residents given to impromptu performances of Romeo and Juliet ...

In an essay in The Baffler a couple of weeks ago, David Graeber offers the idea that there is a play principle embedded in all levels of physical reality. His essay, which ranges playfully from Spencer and Darwin to panpsychism and string theory, ponders a deep and serious ...

I went to see the new RoboCop the other day with my colleague Hubert Dreyfus. As it happens, the movie features a character named Hubert Dreyfus. The character in the movie isn't based on Professor Dreyfus; it is an homage to him.

Dreyfus-in-the-movie is a senator who's bent on ...

Neil deGrasse Tyson and the Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey team dropped the ball in the episode on life and evolution that just aired.

It's not that Tyson and his team said anything wrong. So what was missing?

They beautifully illustrated how natural selection works by analogy with the ...

An article last week in The New York Times reported that the scientific jury is still out on brain-fitness programs. It seems that playing computer games designed to work your powers of perception, memory and attention can lead to significant and lasting improvement in one's ability to play those ...

What's brown and sticky?

A stick.

I actually laugh every time I hear this joke. That, no doubt, tells you something about me. It doesn't take a lot to make me laugh.

People laugh at different jokes. And there seem to be social, cultural, national, age and gender ...

The idea that the world might be living in a simulation — discussed in Marcelo's post this week — is brought to life with wit and power in Peter Weir's 1998 film The Truman Show. Young Truman, who has been raised inside a simulation — a reality TV ...

We see symbols and their power at work in the recent controversy surrounding the effort to extend bans on smoking to the electronic cigarette. An e-cigarette is no more a cigarette than a chocolate cigarette is.

But — as with the case of toy guns — this ...

Today I want to offer two observations about the non-human, love, and home.

Yesterday I watched a boy walk his dog. The boy must have been about eleven, and the dog roughly two. The human, and the dog, seemed very much in love, a thought that would have occurred to ...

My son didn't weep when his beloved 49ers lost to the Seahawks in the NFC championship. His team may have been vanquished, but at least there was ground for hope that the Broncos would stop the enemy from winning the Super Bowl.

Ah, the ways of love and hate in ...

Among the clutter and furniture of our intellectual lives, there are dictionaries. Although they have probably disappeared from the bookshelves of most college students, they haven't disappeared. They've migrated online.

I thought of this while reading an article in The New York Times on the truly Herculean labors going ...

When we gaze up into the night sky, we look out into the past. Adam Frank makes this point eloquently in a recent post. And it is a point redolent with consequence in the field of physics. It is the starting point of Einstein's special theory of relativity.

But ...

My first reaction to the news that the sign interpreter on the platform with world dignitaries at the Mandela memorial was a fake — he was not interpreting; nor was he signing; he was just pretending to do so — was that I must have accidentally clicked onto ...

A sharp and well-reasoned letter in The Guardian a few days ago by University of Cambridge philosophers Rae Langton and John Dupre makes a much needed observation: If there are behavioral or cognitive or mental differences between men and women, you would expect these to reveal themselves in neural ...

I agree with commenters on my post last week who challenged the idea that religion and science are competing theories. They are not.

For one thing, religions are not theories; they are not in the explanation and prediction business; and the value that attaches to religious ideas, cultures, texts, ...

Education is necessary if democracy is to flourish. What good is the free flow of information if people can't make sense of it? How can you vote your own interests if you don't understand the consequences of policy choices? How can you know what's best for you or your community?

Sometimes art leaves things as they are and gives you an opportunity to notice; we saw last week that this was the case with Robert Irwin's show at the Whitney. And sometimes art bangs you over the head with new experiences. Richard Serra's work is an example of ...

The elements of Robert Irwin's installation at the Whitney Museum of American Art — the show ends today — are named in the work's title: Scrim Veil--Black rectangle—Natural Light. There's no mystery. No magical ingredient.

It's a large rectangular room with a black floor divided lengthwise by a taut ...

Music is not sound art, even though musical ideas find natural expression in melody and harmony, timbre and rhythm. Music may be carried in sound, but only in the way that our applause at a concert is carried in sound. Applause is clapping; it is stomping and shouting. These are ...

Privacy is the state of being unobserved.

Looking back at history and prehistory, privacy is the rarest luxury. It requires walls or seclusion. It is not our natural condition.

In recent times people have taken privacy for granted, the same way we take other modern conveniences for granted. There's nothing ...