You mean the first interview you linked? I missed a lot of what he said there (audio was not good; again I'd prefer to read a transcript of that interview if one is available). I doubt that Noe meant that he himself is still where Descartes was, but rather that the scientific community still is. Mind/body dualism is still embedded in our culture in general, as well as in our scientific and philosophical presuppositions. Phenomenology is the path to overcoming it in my opinion.
Face-to-face dialogue and written discourse are where I'm most at home. I can listen to music with rapt attention to the whole and the parts, but can't absorb verbal information nearly as well. These different ways in which we humans connect most adaptively with that which surrounds us may be significant in themselves for an understanding of the individuality of consciousness.
here's the bit, from the Brain Science Podcast #58:
transcript:
http://ec.libsyn.com/p/f/5/c/f5c5d2...1ce3dae902ea1d01c08236d4cd5ffd4f&c_id=1521326
"AN: Yes. I think that’s a very fair characterization. There’s this old idea that people have, that goes back to Descartes, I think. Descartes thought that inside of each of us there was a thing. He called it a thinking thing—a ‘res cogitans’ in Latin—and this thing inside of us, it thinks, it feels, it decides. And Descartes thought that each of us is that thing: We are that thing inside us that thinks and feels and decides.
Copyright Virginia Campbell, MD 2009
6
Now, Descartes supposed that that thinking thing inside of us must be something immaterial. Because he couldn’t understand how anything material—anything physical, anything obeying the laws of physics—could be something that thinks and feels and decides. And so, for him the big puzzle was how does the immaterial soul think and feel and decide? And then further, how does it interact with our bodies?
Now, the standard orthodoxy in the current science of consciousness is to agree with Descartes that there is something inside of us that thinks and feels and decides; that we are that thing—that each of us is that thing. But whereas Descartes thought it was the immaterial soul, the current view is that it’s the brain. What the brain does is it’s called on to play a role in a theory which was really articulated in its basic outlines by Descartes.
And one of the things I argue (and here I think this could hardly be called a controversial claim, this is really true; I think all sides of the debate will agree with what I’m about to say) is that at the current time we don’t really have any better idea how the brain gives rise to consciousness than we do how an immaterial soul does—or than Descartes did how an immaterial soul does.
Because we have all this information about the events in the brain—about the actions of cells, about the molecular processes, or the metabolic processes, or large scale dynamic processes that happen in the brain—but we don’t have anything like an insight into what it is about those processes that enables them to give rise to experience. And we don’t have any better idea how the brain does that than Descartes had how the soul does that.
And so, I think that sort of negative finding, that we just don’t even have a good back-of-the-envelope sketch of what a theory of consciousness should look like, gives me pause and makes me wonder whether the problem is that we’re looking for consciousness in the wrong place. We’re looking for it in the brain, we’re
Copyright Virginia Campbell, MD 2009
7
looking for it in these patterns of neuronal or cellular actions, but that’s just the wrong place to look. Because it’s only the larger context—that includes the brain but also goes out of the head and includes the dynamic with the world—that gives us all the ingredients we need to frame a better explanation of how consciousness works.
GC: So, you’re not questioning that consciousness arises in the brain; you’re just saying there’s more to it than that.
AN: Well, I don’t like the phrase, ‘arises in.’
GC: OK."
