IS THE MIND IN THE BRAIN? A REVIEW OF: OUT OF OUR HEADS: WHY YOU ARE NOT YOUR BRAIN, AND OTHER LESSONS FROM THE BIOLOGY OF CONSCIOUSNESS BY ALVA NOË (2009)

Noë's book is part of a movement in the philosophy of mind called enacted mind, or extended cognition. He argues that the mind is not the brain or part of the brain. He believes that the mind cannot be understood except in terms of the interaction of a whole organism with the external environment, especially the social environment. This view bears many resemblances to behaviorism, especially with regard to what the mind is not. Nevertheless, Noë is vague about what he believes the mind is. He speaks of the world as “showing up” and of our knowledge of our own minds as differing from our knowledge of the minds of others, but he does not say exactly where this showing up takes place and what the difference between our knowledge of our own minds and the minds of others consists of. For him, the brain, as the mechanism underlying behavior, remains an important component of mental activity; for him, brain, behavior, and world together constitute consciousness. I argue that this way of looking at consciousness retains elements of the Cartesian philosophy that Noë wants to reject and would deflect the attention of psychologists from the true causes of behavior in temporal and social histories of reinforcement.

Many if not most modern philosophers in the U.S. and Great Britain believe that behaviorism, as a philosophy, is dead. According to The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Graham, 2010):

The deepest and most complex reason for behaviorism's decline in influence is its commitment to the thesis that behavior can be explained without reference to non-behavioral mental (cognitive, representational, or interpretative) activity. Behavior can be explained just by reference to its “functional” (Skinner's term) relation to or co-variation with the environment and to the animal's history of environmental interaction….

Unfortunately, for behaviorism, it's hard to imagine a more restrictive rule for psychology than one which prohibits hypotheses about representational storage and processing.

Such a self-imposed constraint on behavioral thinking, Graham believes, must be inadequate to explain most of what is interesting and important about human behavior – that is, the mind. He suggests that a path toward behaviorism's revival would be to incorporate neuroeconomics:

Behaviorism may do well to purchase some of neuroeconomic's conceptual currency, especially since some advocates of the program see themselves as behaviorists in spirit if not stereotypical letter….One assumption in neuroeconomics is that full explanations of organism/environmental interactions will combine facts about such things as reinforcement schedules with appeal to neurocomputational modeling and to the neurochemistry and neurobiology of reinforcement.

This is a purchase that many modern behaviorists seem to feel is worth making – as witness the presence of an editor for behavioral neuroscience on the board of this journal, the flagship for behavioral research.

The book under review, by a philosopher of mind, part of a modern movement in philosophy called enacted mind, extended cognition, or embodied mind, may be seen by behaviorists as offering a rationale for the postulation of events in the brain (“neuroeconomics”) as part of the triumvirate: “…brain, body, and world,” which “together maintain living consciousness.” (p. 42). However, it is necessary to recognize that, unlike behaviorists, Noë is not primarily interested in explaining behavior—he is interested in explaining mental events, particularly consciousness. Once consciousness is understood, he believes, the mind will be understood. He says, “The problem of consciousness, as I am thinking of it here, is that of understanding our nature as human beings who think, who feel, and for whom a world shows up” (p. 9, italics added). Thought and feeling, and presumably sensation, perception, imagination, are conceived as parts of consciousness.

Dissatisfaction with neural representations as explanations of mental events, as well as the divorce of the mind (in such identity theories) from its biological function, has led Noë to expand his concept of the mind outward from the brain to overt behavior, including social behavior. Thus, like many modern behaviorists, Noë is interested in both the interior (neuroeconomics) and the exterior (overt behavior) of the organism. But, unlike modern behaviorists, his object is to develop a philosophy of mind and not to predict, control, or explain overt behavior as such. As we shall see, this difference is crucial.

Noë's central idea is that consciousness is primarily something that occurs not in the head but in the world. Here are some quotes:

After decades of concerted effort on the part of neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers, only one proposition about how the brain makes us conscious—how it gives rise to sensation, feeling, subjectivity—has emerged unchallenged: we don't have a clue. (p. xi).

Consciousness is not something that happens inside us. It is something we do or make. Better: it is something we achieve. Consciousness is more like dancing than it is like digestion…. The idea that the only genuinely scientific study of consciousness would be one that identifies consciousness with events in the nervous system is a bit of outdated reductionism. (p. xii, italics added).

In this book I argue that mind science, like biology more generally, must give pride of place to the whole living being. (p. xv).

…to understand consciousness in humans and animals, we must look not inward, into the recesses of our insides; rather, we need to look to the ways in which each of us, as a whole animal, carries on the process of living in and with and in response to the world around us. The subject of experience is not a bit of your body. You are not your brain. (p. 7)

This sounds a lot like behaviorism. The quotes could have come from Skinner. However, the word behaviorism and the word Skinner appear nowhere in the book. This absence is a pity given the many strains of behavioral thought in the book, but understandable considering the suspicion and downright hostility to behaviorism among philosophers.

Although the main thrust of the book is towards behavior, especially social behavior, consciousness is not, for Noë, a purely behavioral concept. Like Graham (2010), Noë implies that a science of consciousness as behavior cannot stand as such, that such a science would be incomplete without understanding what it means for a world to “show up” for a person.

Noë rejects “neural identity theory,” the identification of consciousness with neural events—either particular neural firings (Churchland, 1986) or complex mechanisms extending across several brain areas (Tononi & Edelman, 1998). But he also rejects, at least implicitly, what might be called, behavioral identity theory—the identification of consciousness with patterns of overt individual and social behavior.

The general theme that consciousness is both behavior of the whole organism and behavior of part of the organism is repeated throughout the book:

My central claim in this book is that to understand consciousness—the fact that we think and feel and that a world shows up for us—we need to look at a larger system of which the brain is only one element. Consciousness is not something the brain achieves on its own. Consciousness requires the joint operation of brain, body, and world. Indeed, consciousness is an achievement of the whole animal in its environmental context. (p. 10, italics added).

One of the central claims of this book is that…we ought to focus not on the brain alone but on the brain in context—that is, on the brain in the natural setting of the person or animal. (p. 70).

Brain, body, and world—each plays a critical role in making us the kind of beings we are. (p. 184)

You could as well say that consciousness requires the joint operation of heart, body and world, or hand, body and world, or digestive system, body and world. The body, as Noë himself emphasizes, includes the brain. Then why is the brain taken out, so to speak, and given a causal role alongside of and in addition to the body? Certainly brain damage can produce profound effects on behavior, including effects on the features Noë attributes to consciousness. The brain is a vital organ. But so are the heart, liver, lungs, and digestive system; damage to any of them also produces profound effects on behavior. No one can deny that the brain is a vital mechanism or claim that its study is not of crucial importance to society, of greater importance probably than the study of overt behavior. In some (I think rare) cases brain research may suggest directions for behavioral research (although the opposite is much more frequently the case). However, as brain research progresses we are moving not one inch toward the understanding of consciousness and not one inch toward the development of a “science of mental life,” in George Miller's (1962) words. On the other hand, behaviorists, especially as they study self-control and social cooperation (patterns of behavior extended over time and social space), are developing a science of mental life.

Some modern neuroscientists and philosophers of mind (for example, Searle, 1997) claim that brain activity is not actually identical to mental activity but rather “causes” or “gives rise to” mental activity. They believe that consciousness and neural activity are more or less abstract levels of description of the same thing, just as the molecular structure of an I-beam and its tensile strength are different levels of description of the I-beam. Consciousness for them is merely an abstract way of describing activity in the brain. But if mental (or conscious) activity is an abstract description of neural activity (physical activity, after all) why is it any more plausible that the physical activity occurs inside the head than that it occurs in overt behavior? Voluntary behavior is most clearly and distinctly (to use Descartes' criteria) caused by its consequences in the temporal and social environment. Even the most complex temporally and socially extended patterns of overt behavior evolve over a person's lifetime just as complex structures such as the eye evolve over generations; the selection process rests in the feedback contingencies between those patterns and the outer environment. If the criterion for a physical activity being a conscious activity is closeness to its causal source, it would be the outer environment rather than the brain that satisfies that criterion, and which is therefore most usefully considered to be the locus of consciousness as well as all mental events.

The typical philosophical defense of consciousness as an internal activity is introspective —we just know it to be the case. Noë is not immune to such claims. “Mere behavior,” he says (p. 26) “is at best an unreliable guide to how things are for a person.” “How things are,” like “showing up,” is undefined by Noë. “How things are” and “showing up,” the ultimate differentia, for Noë, between my knowledge of my own mind and my knowledge of yours, are based on introspective reports. But, as Skinner (1957) and Wittgenstein (1958), a philosopher Noë clearly admires, have argued, introspective reports are not actually reports of anything at all. We do not go around reporting on our internal states (saying, “I am happy,” for instance) for no reason, any more than we go around reporting about the external world (saying,“The grass is green”) for no reason. Both kinds of “reports” presume a listener and a situation of social interaction and mutual reinforcement. When we say, “I am happy,” we are predicting some aspect of our behavior in the immediate future. And the evidence for this assertion, for the person doing the reporting, is no different in principle than it is for the listener. If the introspector's history of reinforcement (“mere behavior”) were known to the listener as well as it is known to the introspector, the listener would know better than the introspector, more directly and fundamentally than the introspector, what the state of the introspector's mind was. A child may say “I am happy.” But a mother may say, “No you're not,” with perfect validity. I may honestly say, “I am happy” and my wife of 50 years may say, “No you're not,” also with perfect validity. Introspection is not a royal road to our own minds. More than a hundred years of study of such reports, beginning with Wundt, have told us as little about consciousness as has the study of the brain. The road from “mere” behavior to our own consciousness lies in the temporal and social contexts of our own overt behavior—contexts that are in principle as available to others as they are to us.

Noë correctly criticizes the notion that consciousness must occur wholly in the brain as a remnant of Cartesian psychology in modern philosophy. Nevertheless, Noë believes that a world somehow “shows up” in consciousness. In Descartes' dualistic theory, a rose would show up in consciousness (the innate idea of a rose would wake up, as it were) as a consequence of a real rose acting on the sense organs and the information being transmitted through the pineal gland in the brain to the incorporeal soul. In modern neurocognitive theories, which Noë traces back to their origin in Descartes, “showing up” could be taken as the formation of an internal representation. But Noë skillfully and persuasively argues against the usefulness of the concept of internal representations. Out of Our Heads never clarifies what it means for a world to “show up.”

Let us therefore consider for ourselves what “showing up” could possibly mean. Since Noë rejects Cartesian dualism, “showing up” does not seem to mean showing up in a nonphysical, spiritual consciousness. Since Noë also rejects neural identity theory, “showing up” could not mean showing up wholly within the nervous system. Noë says that consciousness is like a dance (rather than like digestion). We may ask then, when and where does a dance show up? When does a square dance or a waltz show up? A waltz shows up when music in three-quarter time is being played and people are moving together in a certain way. The concept of a dance has fuzzy edges but it is usually easy to discriminate between situations where a waltz has shown up and situations where it hasn't. The place where a waltz shows up is on the dance floor. The dance does not exist in any identifiable form inside the heads of the dancers—not in their brains, and not in their peripheral nervous systems. To imagine that a dance shows up anywhere inside the dancers is like imagining that the time shows up inside a clock. Certainly there is a mechanism inside the dancers (or the clock), and they could not be dancing (or indicating the time) unless the mechanism was in working order. Moreover, by exploring the innards of the dancers, a future brain scientist might conceivably be able to infer that they were waltzing. But if you were mainly interested in the waltz itself (if you were a choreographer for instance) it would be foolish to do so. Noë makes this perfectly clear over and over again. The very title of the book implies that when a dance “shows up” it shows up in the overt behavior of the dancers, not inside their heads, and still less anywhere else inside their bodies.

To take another example, a baseball game normally consists of 18 people hitting, pitching, fielding, running bases, etc. A baseball game shows up on the field where it is played and nowhere else. Moreover, each of the players is playing the game from the first pitch to the last even while she is standing stock still in the outfield, even while she is sitting on the bench while a teammate bats. On another field in England a game of cricket may be showing up at the same time. Another player may be standing stock still in that outfield in the exact same stance as the baseball player here in the US. Yet, even though they are doing the exact same thing, even though their behavior at the moment is exactly the same, the games they are playing are obviously different. What counts for the game that shows up is not what any one player is doing at this very moment but what she is doing in its temporal and social contexts. If the question you are asking is what shows up, where does it show up and when does it show up, the context is more important than the individual act.

However, whereas dances, baseball games, and even the movements of clock hands are like consciousness in certain ways, they are not conscious acts. Noë's point, in contrasting dancing to digestion, is that a dance (like consciousness) is behavior of our whole bodies in the context of their external temporal and social environments rather than behavior of something within our bodies in the context of other internal events. A dance is clearly a behavioral pattern. According to Noë, consciousness is like dancing in the sense that both are behavior of our whole bodies. Then what is the difference between dancing and consciousness that makes one “merely” a behavioral pattern and the other a mental event? This is what Noë never makes clear. The difference cannot be that consciousness is internal whereas dancing is external because their common externality is precisely the sense in which Noë claims they are alike. The difference cannot be that consciousness could not occur without a complex neural mechanism because dancing also could not occur without a complex neural mechanism. Then what is it?

Suppose you were passing by a ballfield where a baseball game was occurring (was showing up) and you called to a player in the outfield and asked her, “Do you know that you are playing baseball?” That would be a stupid question but it would not be a meaningless one. The player might reply, “You idiot, of course I know I'm playing baseball.” Obviously, she knows that she is playing baseball at the same time as she is playing it. She knew it before she answered your question and after she answered it. At some point before the game she probably knew that she was going to play baseball and after the game she will know that she was playing baseball. Her knowledge shows up not only in her answer to your question, but also in her behavior prior to the game, and her behavior after the game, perhaps long after. The game that shows up on the field is an abstract concept—the same for players and spectators. When they talk about the game afterwards they are all talking about the same thing. (Similarly, a dance, even a solo dance is the same dance for the dancer as it is for the spectators.) However, the knowledge of the game is different for the pitcher, the outfielder, and the spectator. First, the behavior that constitutes the knowledge is different for each of them; second, the behavior that constitutes that knowledge starts in advance of the actual game and ends long after it is over.

The outfielder's answer to your question is not by itself her knowledge. As Noë might say, it is mere behavior; it is knowledge only in a certain context. The crucial question, the question that Noë does not clearly answer, is what is that context? Is it:

• 1An event or a series of events in a nonphysical mind located deep within her brain?
• 2Neural activity in a specific area of her brain?
• 3A more complex “field” of neural activity together with neural feedback from her actions?
• 4Covert behavior: Her unobservable muscular movements and what she says and pictures to herself before, during and after the game?¹
• 5The overt behavioral pattern that contains her answer—her making an appointment to play, her preparations beforehand, the character of her actions on the field, what she says to others about the game, what they say to her and her verbal and nonverbal behavior afterward?
• 6Or is it better after all to eliminate all mental terms from our scientific vocabulary?

Noë implicitly rejects #6. Let us reject #6 as well. I believe that it is the acceptance of #6 by behaviorists that has led to the marginalization of behaviorism within academic experimental psychology and its demonization within philosophy. Noë explicitly rejects #1, #2, and #3. He does not consider #4, a concept of mind accepted by many behaviorists. I believe that the area between #3 and #5, covert muscular movement, is much too narrow to contain all of our mental lives. It has all the disadvantages of #3 without any of the complexity that, it would seem, a theory of mind would require. But this is not the place to argue the point. (See Rachlin, 2012, especially “Response to Schlinger” for such an argument).

Noë seems to reject #5. Of the six alternatives I list, only #5 implies that, in principle, the outfielder has no better access to her own mind than does a hypothetical observer, close to her, who could observe all of her actions. In fact, #5 implies that an observer may know the outfielder's mental state better than she herself does since the observer's view is more objective and comprehensive than hers. Noë does assert that the minds of others may be known to us on the basis of our interactions with them. He says (p. 32), “That my wife and children and parents are thinking, feeling beings, that a world shows up for them—that they are not mere automata—is something that only insanity could ever allow me to question.” But there is that word, “mere” again. What would be so “mere” about an automaton that behaved exactly the way Noë's wife and children behave? The extra requirement (that a world “show up” for them) seems to me to be a back-door way of smuggling Cartesian dualism (#1) into a theory of mind.

My own preference is for #5. My practical reason for holding #5 is that it fits with the evidence from my current research areas: self-control and altruism. The difference between a self-controlled act or an altruistic act on the one hand and an impulsive or selfish act on the other is most meaningfully conceived as a difference in the extent of the overt pattern of which the act is a part. Impulsive and selfish acts are easily explained in molecular terms; their reinforcers are evident. But the reinforcers of self-controlled and altruistic acts are abstract and spread out in time and social space. A self-controlled act may have no reinforcer whatsoever. Refusal of a single cigarette, for instance, may never be reinforced in a normal social setting. Good health and social acceptability reinforce only widespread patterns of cigarette refusal. Self-control is thus a characteristic of the mind in a way that impulsiveness is not. Similarly, particular altruistic acts are not reinforced—by definition. But widespread patterns of altruistic acts may be intrinsically valuable or may be reinforced by generally improved social relations not contingent on any single act.

If consciousness were just body and world, as #5 implies, rather than “brain, body, and world” as Noë repeatedly asserts, a science of consciousness would be a purely behavioral science; consciousness would be a relationship between the organism as a whole and its environment. Noë, in this book, refers to no behavioral studies, no studies of self-control or altruism, apparently so relevant to his thesis. Instead, the research referred to is almost all neurocognitive. Admittedly, much of it is cited only to question its value. But nothing is proposed to put in its place.

Then what, one might ask, is the point of reading Noë? The answer is that behaviorists will find Noë's attack on internal representations and the neurophysiological studies underlying them to be acute and heartening. He takes on the fanciful speculations of Francis Crick who he quotes: “You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are nothing more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules” (p. 5). He also rejects the entire research program for which Hubel and Wiesel won the Nobel Prize. Noë attacks “the common belief among neuroscientists that vision presented the brain with a problem in information processing, and that the parts of the brain dedicated to vision could be thought of as…machines for ‘transforming information' represented in one system of neurons into progressively more refined and complex representations of what is seen” (p. 156). Before you can ask how the brain processes visual stimuli, Noë asserts, you have to ask why the person is making a visual discrimination in the first place: “You can't understand how a particular cash register works if you don't understand what it is for…” (p. 158). Sometimes, he implies, brain research just gets in the way of what really matters:

The fact that we can see thanks only to the workings of our wet, sticky, meat-slab brains doesn't make seeing an intrinsically neuronal activity any more than chess is….And, crucially, you don't need to understand how brains work or how computers are electrically engineered to understand that. Chess is only played by systems (people and machines) made out of atoms and electrons. But chess isn't a phenomenon that can be understood at that level. And the same is so for vision (p. 159)..

Computers can't think on their own any more than hammers can pound in nails on their own. They are tools we use to think with. For this reason we make no progress in trying to understand how brains think by supposing they are computers. In any case, brains don't think: they don't have minds; animals do. To understand the contribution of the brain to the life of the mind, we need to give up once and for all the idea that minds are achieved inside us by internal goings on. Once this is clear, we are forced to rethink the value even of Nobel Prize-winning research [referring to that of Hubel and Wiesel] (p. 169).

Noë rejects what he sees as the folk-psychological view that the mind exists in the brain alone. He wishes to extend our concept of mind out from the brain and into the external world. These are not insignificant steps towards a revival of behaviorism within philosophy. But, while reaching out, he hangs onto the undefined notion of a world “showing up” as central to his concept of consciousness. This, it seems to me, is a detour on the road to understanding the mind.

To summarize: A, The main reason that consciousness is not identical with a brain process, abstractly or particularly described, is that a brain without a body can never be conscious. B, The reason that consciousness may be identical with overt behavior, in its temporal and social context, is that a whole organism may be conscious regardless of the mechanism inside the organism. Out of Our Heads makes a case for A, but does not go on to make a case for B. In several articles and a book I have tried to argue for B (e.g., Rachlin, 1977, 1985, 1992, 1994, 2003, & 2012). If B were true, brain research, however important, would be irrelevant for behavior analysis (although the reverse would not be the case). If B were true, behavioral economics and evolutionary biology would assume a more central place in behavioral research than they already occupy. And, if B were generally recognized, studies of ethics, government, religion, clinical psychology, social psychology, and anthropology would be firmly based on behavioral principles such as those governing the research published in JEAB.