#921 Alva Noë - The Entanglement: How Art and Philosophy Make Us What We Are

00:00 Ricardo Lopes: Hello, everybody. Welcome to a new episode of the Decent. I'm your host as always Ricardo Lops. And today I'm joined by Dr Alva Noe. He's professor and Chair of Philosophy at the University of California Berkeley. He is the author of many books. And today we're talking about his latest one, the entanglement, how art and philosophy make us what we are. So, Doctor Noah, welcome to the show. It's a pleasure to everyone.

00:27 Alva Noë: Thank you very much for inviting me.

00:30 Ricardo Lopes: So the first question I would like to ask you is um since you are, I guess we could say mostly a philosopher of mind, what got you interested also in art and what is art for you and how do you approach it in the book specifically?

00:52 Alva Noë: Yeah. Thank you very much. That's, that's in a way the uh it's both a personal question about me, but in some ways, it really gets us right to the very heart of the book. Um There's different ways I can answer it. Um One is that sort of biographically, my first book was called action and Perception. And the central theme of action and perception was the idea that that um the best sort of, by a lot, the best biological way to think about perceptual consciousness is as something that the animal accomplishes or achieves and that it does so against the background of its situation and the environment for humans, that also means the cultural environment. Um So this sort of idea which is sometimes called an uh the the inactive approach to perception, places great emphasis on um the animal's embodiment and the animal's skills or the person's embodiment and the person's skills um perception isn't something that happens inside of us. It's something we do. And to my um great surprise, I received a lot of um responses to the book from people working in the arts, especially people working in the performing arts, dancers, uh choreographers, but not only dancers and choreographers, also painters and sculptors and, and other kinds of artists. Um And they all were in sort of interested as, as a community they were interested in, in seeing what my approach to perception offer them, how it supported their understanding of their own work. But I immediately became interested in these conversations with the question. Well, what, what do they have to teach me about the phenomenon that interests me, what are they doing anyway? What is, what is this work of, of, of artists? What is, is it, are they just making decorations? Are they making pretty things? Are they? I mean, what, what are, what are they doing especially since they take themselves very seriously. And uh uh and we take the arts very seriously. So this got me interested in the question, what is, what is art and what is the source of its value? And my, my first attempt to explore that was in my book, Strange Tools, which was published at the very end of 2015 Strange Tools, subtitle Art and Human Nature. Um And in that book, I really asked the question, what is our, what, why does it matter to us and what does the fact that it matters to us? Tell us about ourselves? Mhm. Um The, the current book, um the Entanglement goes way beyond uh Strange Tools and it's been kind of a, a transformative experience for me writing it. Um But um to come back to your, your question, you can think about the question, what is art kind of anthropologically? Mhm. Um Or if you like philosophically and, and the contrast I have in mind there is in one sense, we all know what art is, we can just refer to it. There's, there's painting and there's music and there's film and there's dance and there's pottery and there's um you know, installation art and I'm, I'm forgetting one, I'm sure. But, but art is this specific set of making activities that preoccupy human beings pretty much everywhere and pretty much always. Um So there's a, there's probably if you think of art in terms of those collections of, of things that we do playing the drums, playing the flute, writing novels, with all of all of that is art. There's probably not any straightforward way of, of uh defining what art is. It's just simply, it's all of that. And so that's what I mean by an anthropological approach. You just kind of we all kind of know roughly what we're talking about when we're talking about the arts. Um Can you go deeper, can you say something more, more um profound about what art is, why it, why it matters to us? And I think you can um I'll tell you my bottom line, but in a way how you get to the bottom line is the more interesting question. I think that art is uh art, arts, the arts are practices and their practices through which we reorganize ourselves. And even I would go so far as to say, liberate ourselves from the habits and other systems of organization, cultural, biological, emotional linguistic that in some sense, hold us captive. And I mean, I could say one more thing about that. Um You know, the thing is one of the beautiful things about art and what makes art puzzling is that on the face of it materially speaking, it really looks no different from other forms of technological manufacture and making, you know, um people make things I make, you know, somebody manufactured this glass of water. Um THE, the pen, the computer, the telephone the systems that we're using right now, the clothes that we're wearing all of this is made and art is just more stuff that we make. So, one of the interesting questions is how does the making, the dedicated dedication to making in the sphere of art differ from the dedication to making in the sphere of manufacture or industry or technology? And um answering that question is the key. Mhm

07:06 Ricardo Lopes: So you mentioned many different things there and we'll certainly get through them in our conversation. But uh the question I have now is then art is much more than, at least in your perception, much more than uh than just a cultural curiosity. As many people would probably think of it.

07:30 Alva Noë: Right. Right. I guess there, there would be a view according to which, you know, there's the important, the really important things in life, food and security and shelter. And um and only once a society gets to a certain stage of security and wealth, do you have time for art? Art is this kind of, it's an extra, it comes, it comes after and you can do without it. No, the view that I try to develop in this book, the arguments I make is that there is nothing which is recognizably a human form of life that doesn't have art. And that's because art is um in some ways, I want to say it's both and a response to the human condition and a precondition of the human condition. Um We, we make art to, to cope with the challenges of our own existence. But art then changes the character of our own existence. Um And this, by the way, a phrase that I use throughout the book is II, I speak of the entanglement of life and art and in a way this is the kind of the core thought there art starts from life. Mhm By that, I, I don't mean that art is about life in a kind of semantic sense. Some artist, I make a picture of you and then it's about you and it's about something I experienced in my living world. Um But I mean, something more like we make art out of life or life gives art its raw materials. But the very act of bringing those raw materials into focus in the way that art lets us do gives us resources. This is I'm speaking very abstractly now I can give examples later but gives us ex example, gives us resources for living differently so that we make art out of life. But then life becomes something new in an art world and then art becomes something new given that the change in life and you get a kind of historical circular pattern of making and remaking and making and remaking. Um WHERE we face a kind of almost paradoxical conclusion, which is that um we are somehow by nature bound up with art. But by that very fact alone, it's no longer quite appropriate to speak of our nature at all because our nature is changing. Um And there's even a sense in which a AAA rigorous meaningful sense in which we are ourselves artworks.

10:48 Ricardo Lopes: So could you give us perhaps some examples of how that entanglement between life and art plays out?

10:58 Alva Noë: Yeah. Um I'll give you two. I discuss a number of different examples in the book, but I'll give you, I'll give you two right now. Um One is a kind of fairly straightforward one. Um TICK tick dancing, it's tempting to think of dancing as a sort of a natural human capacity. Um OR at least it seems to be universal in human societies and, and if you think about dancing, it um it serves all sorts of psychological slash anthropological functions. People dance at weddings or funerals or they dance in clubs and when they dance at clubs, it's partly social and it's about communication and maybe about courtship or about, you know, romance or it can dance. Dance can be many, many different things, but it's always something it's dancing is always bound up with needs. Dancing is also very interesting because it's um it, when people dance, whether in a club or at a party, they feel um they get caught up in the dancing, the dancing has a kind of bodily entrainment to it. You, you, you, you don't, you don't dance in a deliberate controlled way if you dance. Well, at all, you let the dance just happen and you just move, you let the the demands of the situation, the partner of the music they govern you. So dance is a very interesting, a cognitively, extremely interesting thing that people do. Um But now what about the art of dancing? What about choreography, the kind of thing that happens on the stage, right? Well, choreography is, I would say it's dancing severed from the way in which it's ordinarily embedded in our lives. Um The dancers on the stage are not wooing, they're not courting, they're not um they're not. Well, what they're doing is an interesting question. But one of the, one of the things that I would say about what they're doing is that they're putting, they're displaying dancing itself. There's this thing we do, it's called dancing. And then the, the art, the art dancers are putting that thing. We do itself on the stage and saying this is dancing and so in effect, they're putting us on the stage as people who are habitually culturally organized by dancing. Um So I, I see a difference between dance. Sometimes I say dance with a capital D and dancing. Mhm Dancing is embedded in our culture and our psychology and our economy of living dance is this kind of representation of this thing that we do when we're dancing. But the image that dancing gives us, excuse me, the image that choreography gives us that dance with the capital D gives us of what we do when we're dancing then becomes a template or a model or even a kind of score for how to dance. So that how we spontaneously dance you or I when we're at a party or celebration or in a nightclub ends up being influenced by the art of dance. But then the art of dance is concerned with the way in which dancing organizes us and our lives. So the art of dance will then be influenced by the changes in the way we dance. And so you get a kind of a loop of the representation of dancing, altering dancing and dancing, giving rise to new pictures or models or templates or scores of what dancing can be. No, you might think. Yes. Well, there's the kind of natural phenomenon of dancing at the core and then there's this kind of cultural play that has happened on top of it. But those are now in tango, they cannot really any longer be disentangled except in thought. Now what it is to be a human being who dances is to be a human being whose sense of what it is they're doing has been made available to them through art over long periods of time. So dance and dancing, art and life have become inextricably entangled. And this is something we live each of us individually. In the first person, you know, you watch, I talk in the book. But I imagine a little girl dancing by herself in a room to music. What she's doing is is informed by a whole set of ideas and images about what she's doing. This is called dancing. Dancing looks like this. This is not dancing. That that's something else. This is how one dances, this is how dancing looks to other people. So that there's an interesting way that the girl might just think, oh, put on the music and dance. No thought at all. But in an interesting way, I think she embodies or incorporates a whole art history which, which is not ever finished. So that's one example. Um Now that's another another example um is um it, it's, it's actually slightly more complicated. Um But I'll see if I can get a simple version of it and we can get into complications if we need to. But um if I show you a photograph of my son, this is my kid. It's on my Facebook page. It's in my fa family photo album here. This is my son. My, my photograph is functioning, I believe as a tool or instrument for display. It's serving a playing a role in the communication. I'm letting you see something, I'm showing you something I'm framing um a kind of extension. This is the Edinburgh Castle, you know, or this is what the uh lounge looks like at the Lisbon airport. We use pictures to show and we use pictures to show for all sorts of reasons. I can go online and buy a coat, looking at the pictures of the coat and I can zoom in and zoom out or choose this color or that color. Look at this model. Is that model or every week I get in the mail from my supermarket. The, the, the latest deals on chicken and broccoli and there's pictures, there's pictures of chicken, there's pictures of broccoli pictures function in a kind of social economy of communication. Now, I think actually there's a very interesting set of questions there about how depiction works, how pictures work and I have ideas about that. But, but what I'm interested now is the fact that when I make, when I make an art picture, I'm no longer just playing the game of showing you something because the interesting thing about an art picture and this is analogous to the dancing situation. The interesting thing about an art picture is there is no one right way to see it. There is no one thing it is showing. It doesn't have a caption that exhausts what it is of it. It, it resists um being reduced to a function. It has no, there is no user manual that tells you what it is or how to use it or how to make sense of it. The what the picture does the eye picture is, it takes itself as a picture and extracts it from the cultural communicative background against which pictures normally have a depict function. And thus it throws you the person looking at this work of art back on yourself to interrogate yourself about the role that ordinary non art pictures have in your life. Um How pictures shape what we think it is to look at something or how pictures shape what it is we think to show something or how pictures affect our, our feelings about other people or how we use pictures in different ways than we use in person viewing. So all of a sudden this work of art has the capacity to what seen and being seen and looking and showing and the role these play the meaning these have in our lives themselves on display. Just as the choreographer puts dancing on display, the the picture puts all the different things that pictures can mean for us or the things that are depicted can mean for us. Like how I feel about the one depicted, my daughter or God, how, how do we process what we see? And the work of art then gives us an opportunity. Um The picture gives us an opportunity if you like to uncover the place of pictures in our lives. Um And that then in turn, I believe changes. So what we take for granted about pictures in our lives and lets us have different and new attitudes, not just to pictures, but also to seeing or to showing or to communicating with pictures and thus you get an entanglement of the art of pictures in our lives with pictures. And when you, when you remind yourself that we've been making and using pictures to show since prehistoric times, the claim I would make is that our very conceptions, I, I don't say concept are very conceptions of what seeing is and visual life is, have been made and remade through picture making practices and in particular art making practices with pictures over and over and over and over again. It's another example. So then, and this starts to get very exciting for a philosopher because now you come along and you're a cognitive scientist and you want to study vision and you think that there is this fixed stable thing called seeing? Mhm But do we actually know what seeing is independently of that generative work of re understanding what we're doing when we see that is shaped in part by pictorial?

22:26 Ricardo Lopes: And so give, given what you're what you just said there. Uh HOW does that all tie to questions surrounding human nature? First of all, I guess what is human nature? Because many times when we use that term, people are referring to something like um some sort of innate psychology that we are born with something that is unchangeable, something that is sometimes probably the result of our evolutionary history. But in this particular case, by adding art and then later on, we'll also get into philosophy, what kind of picture. Do we get about how we should understand human

23:22 Alva Noë: nature? This is the hardest question. Um BECAUSE it's not, it's not that I really want to deny human nature. It's that I want us to recognize the always already already problematic nature of human nature. And in particular, I want to say that human nature is an aesthetic problem. And let me see if I can explain that. OK. Um I mean, I mean, actually, first of all, as a preliminary for your, for your audience, I should say, and this is this, I think is not an original idea to me. Um And is not um even all that controversial anymore. Um I think we all recognize how human life is scaffolded by culture and technology. Um We, we can do things you and I not because we're so smart, but because we are members of a community that gives us the instruments to do it. So we don't catch our own food, we don't make our own clothing, we don't um solve our own survival problems. We, we rest on um a, an existing network of knowledge and technology that lets us be the way we live. And this, you know, this goes down to very profound levels. Um We use writing and language to think with. So our very cognitive powers are, are extended uh as the image goes through um through technology. Um So, in some sense, we already know that human nature is the stuff of change and evolution because all of this is evolving and changing. Um In fact, if you, if you think of leading sort of accounts of human evolutionary origins, what seems clear is that most of the primary mutations responsible for modern Homo SAPIEN were done a few 100,000 years ago at least. Um So all the stuff that we've made since then, language, dress, culture, communication, all of that can't be explained just with reference to the mutations, that stuff that has been done through collectives of, of this particular ape that we are over, over time. So, um so already we're, we're at a step of removal from a certain kind of naive biological reductionism on any I think persuasive conception of the human mind and the human life. Um What I believe is further the case is that human beings resist the ways they find themselves organized by habit, organized by technology, the technology we speak of technology. But what is a technology? A tool is just the physical component of a suite of ability, skills, practices, techniques, habits. So if I can write with a pen, if I can type on a keyboard, I have Inc Corp, I have been shaped, I've been molded, I have been controlled by the keyboard so you can see it. Um Or the pen, the pen is designed for my hand and my hand learns to be a different kind of thing with the pen. I think that art and philosophy will come to philosophy, you said mhm are ways that we put ourselves on display for ourselves and, and let us make changes, let us resist forms of habitual organization. So, and that's, that's the work of art, that's the work of philosophy and that's, that's resistance to technology, that's resistance to culture in a way. It's, it's paradox because we think of art as culture. But in a way I'm saying art is anti culture, art says no to what culture defines us as culture says, this is how you walk. This is how you talk. This is how you look, this is how you feel. And art says no, art gives us different ways of walking, talking, looking, thinking, feeling um which then in turn changes that so does this mean there's no such thing as the science of human life? No, but it means that there's a place inside life for the aesthetic. And I think it has historically been extremely difficult and maybe even it's finally impossible. I'm not sure but extremely difficult for science for what we call experimental or empirical science to comprehend the aesthetic and it's in a limit place in our lives. Now, let, let me say why? Why I say that? Um I actually already gave this example, take the question of perceptual consciousness. So scientists say, OK, consciousness, it happens in the brain, we can explore its neural correlates, we can use brain imaging and different theories of the brain and different theories of cognitive psychology to model what goes on in the brain when you see, right? But that takes for granted that we know what seeing is. And I submit that there are no final settled unproblematic ways of answering the question. What do you see? Now, scientists for, for experimental purposes may choose to operationalize the notion of seeing this way or that way and that's fine. But you and I are the subjects of seeing, always realize that there's more that we're not saying is that we're leaving something out. So right now, I I see the screen but I also see the background. Now, do I see all the detail in the background or do I see some of the detail in the background? Do I only see what I care about? But also my vis my experience right now, it's guided by interest concern what we're doing. It's not separate from our communication. It's also not not separate from emotions that I have or curiosities that I have or uh you know, a desire to promote my book or a desire to explain these ideas or desire to come across in a good way. I mean, this is very, very complicated what set of relationships I have to my circumstances that I would describe by saying, you know, I see your image on the screen, but I see your image on the screen as a kind of uh cliche or minimal uh under under description of what I see. And my claim is that our relationship to our own experience is a little bit like our relation to a work of art. There's no one exhaustive way to characterize its meaning. And moreover, the very activity of thinking about our experience, like thinking about the work of art changes how we experience the work of art and changes how we experience ourselves. And I think that's true for all of the fundamental human categories. Uh It's true for emotion, it's true for perception, it's true for consciousness, it's true for feeling. It's true for affect. I even think it's true for, for rationality. It's true for, for for reason itself, which means that um science rests on this molten unstable, constantly changing, legitimately contestable domain of the human. And uh that's, that's an important limitation. It means I think that a certain kind of positive knowledge such as we have in physics or chemistry is not going to be available to us in psychology or cognitive science.

32:57 Ricardo Lopes: So, uh I mean, I guess that you've already addressed there at least a little bit the question of uh in your view, why probably disciplines like psychology, cognitive science and other sciences of the mind are not fully equipped to for uh to give us a complete understanding of our human experience, human psychology and so on. But then uh could we get that full picture by adding this understanding of art and philosophy that you present in the book. And if so, and if so what kind of understanding would this be, if not a strictly scientific one?

33:56 Alva Noë: Right. It's interesting. We, you know, we, we assume it's a very funny and bizarre idea that one would, uh, that one would think that all knowledge and all experience could be packed into the shape of science. Science is itself a particular mode of human life and inquiry. And when you're, you know, when you're um ta talking to your kid at dinner, your relation to your child is not the relation, you have to an empirical phenomenon. Uh You're in a relationship with your child and your concerns as a parent. I'm just saying that as an example, I don't know whether you have Children, but um your concerns as a parent are as much as you care about what's best for your child and what science will tell you what's best for your child. Your concerns as a parent are not epistemological in that sense. Um And so much of human life has nothing to do with um with uh with what we do when we're in the laboratory. Um And one of the curious things that philosophy has done is it's opened up this thought that somehow the truest mode of human relationship with the world around us is something like that of the scientists relation to the scientific object. Maybe, maybe this goes back to, to Descartes. I it may go back farther. But um you know, in the book, I talk about the contrast between between Descartes and Vica um uh for Des Cartes, the scientific method, the geometrical method is, is the basis is the fundamental mode of knowing Vico, who I'm, I'm not an expert on and I rely heavily on secondary sources in my understanding of Vico. But Vico is um especially I might say a lovely book about him by Jurgen Trabant. Um uh Vico is a uh is a person who thinks of poetry and wit and style and irony as the basic modality of human knowing. Um And there's a kind of comprehension, a kind of deep, intellectually rigorous comprehension that has to do with language, words, with the play of the intellect, not the deduction, but the flirtation. It's a, it's, it's real. I don't know if he would have said that actually, but it's, but not the deduction, but the um the ironic play of, of storytelling. Um And it's, it's interesting because obviously we need both, we need both, both, both complement each other. But um so the idea that there's no place for the kind of special work we do when we do science is, is a form of irrational is, but the idea that all human knowledge should take that form is I think an equally benighted form of misunderstanding. And it's one which interestingly, uh it strikes me that it's one that we're confronting in a very interesting way in the intellectual space surrounding artificial intelligence, um which is its whole separate topic. Uh We can put to one side. But um but so one last thing then, then I'll shut up because II, I do give two long answers. I apologize. But the, I think another name for that space or method of inquiry, which is necessary and complementary to, to natural science is philosophy and dark. So, um it's, I think that there's a way in which um what philosophy and art aim at doing is not um taking questions for granted and looking for the solutions, but they explore the questions we've neglected or they um you know, a quote that I give in the book comes from, from the American writer James Baldwin is that art uncovers the questions that have been hidden by the answers. So, and I think something like that is true of philosophy as well. It's, it's not the answers, it's, it's, it's um what the answers hide from view. Um And one of the interesting things about a work of art and this is this is a really important piece of phenomenological data. One of the really interesting things about a work of art is it's there for you on display. It's nothing is hidden as Liechtenstein might have said it's just, it hangs there, it sits there and yet you cannot really see it, it defies straightforward, seeing it, it makes you do something in order to see it. So for me and this is, I haven't had a chance to say this yet in our conversation, but it's, it's, it's crucial. I think um I think you appreciate this based on your reading of the book. But I offer a new definition of the aesthetic in this book or not a new definition. I, I offer a way of thinking about the aesthetic, which I think is somewhat novel. And for me, the aesthetic denotes the work we do of trying to see what we cannot see or of trying to bring into focus, what is open to view, but somehow cut off from it. Aesthetics names the movement from not perceiving, to perceiving or not seeing, to seeing or perceiving or seeing to seeing or perceiving differently. And uh that's the work that, that Plato did and that's the work that Kunz did and that's the work that Hagel did. And that's the work that Wittgenstein did and that's the work that Frager did and that's the work that, that all great philosophers really aim at not new data, not new facts and but new ways of seeing what was there all along or which is just to say works about or philosophical work invites you to make changes to yourself so that you can come into a relationship with what is there all about. And my view is that you can't, you can't eliminate that. I mean, you li you can close down every art department and every philosophy department and only fund engineering and physics departments, but you can't get rid of art and philosophy because art and philosophy are prior to physics, um physics is seeking the explanation, art and philosophy are about perception. They're about a more immediate kind of, of knowledge. Um Yeah.

42:26 Ricardo Lopes: So let me ask you one question about philosophy just to clarify this point because it's actually something that uh I mean, I'm not sure uh what is your precise idea here. But when you use the word philosophy, when you talk about philosophy here in our conversation, and also in your book, are you referring to what uh philosophers, academic philosophers or any other sort of professional philosophers uh do? Or is it a broader activity that people who are not professionally, philosophers can also do and can also experience through, I don't know, thought processes, processes of reflection about their own condition about what kinds of questions might raise uh about the existence or anything else uh around

43:35 Alva Noë: them. Yeah. Beautiful, beautiful question. Exactly goes right to the very heart of the issue. Um It reminds me of where our conversation began with my distinguishing uh anthropological sense of what art is from a more philosophical sense. And I think exactly the same point can be made about philosophy, you can think of, you can think of philosophy as whatever it is that is taught in philosophy department. So whatever it is that is published by books that are categorized as philosophy books. Um And in that sense, and that does kind of give you a nice way of picking out what it is. And if you're, if you're a person out there in the world who's never had the privilege of studying philosophy, that's a useful way of thinking about what philosophy is. This is your opportunity to, you go to a university and you meet people who are dedicated to this work. Um And that's a very valuable thing, but I would say two things first that um there's an additional further sense in which philosophy is a certain style of intellectual work. And that although academic philosophers do that work, uh that work is not confined to the work of professional philosophers. And I would say that philosophy um uh philosophical problems presents itself potentially at least in every walk of life and in every domain. So to make AAA I think a fairly uncontroversial point, um there is philosophy done by people who are empirical sciences. No many people believe. And I would agree that some of Einstein's most important breakthroughs were philosophical in the sense that he wasn't discovering a piece of information about simultaneity. He was really asking us to get to the heart of what we think we mean when we speak of two events as being simultaneous. He was doing a kind of conceptual analysis which for me and I have a kind of platonic view of this is a kind of reminding ourselves of how our concepts work and of, of what our, how our concepts relate to each other. So similarly, I think a lot of the work that counts as cognitive science, whether you think of, of uh work by linguists like Noam Chomsky or work by vision scientists like David Maher or James Gibson uh has aspects that I just straight philosophy. You see this in mathematics. I think a lot of a lot of mathematics or like take Fraga's anxieties about what numbers were, those were philosophical anxieties about the the ontology of number. So I say all this just because philosophical problems aren't the private property of card carrying academic professors of philosophy. You can be a mathematician or a neuroscientist or a linguist or a computer scientist and engage with philosophy. So, moreover, I think we engage in philosophy all the time when we uh outside of intellectual life altogether, when we uh when we interrogate our lives and our values and our choices um ethics is not confined to the academy. Ethical problems are, are real problems and they're philosophical problems. So what's the definition of a philosophical problem then for me, I mean, I, I don't have a, a perfect answer, but it's gonna be something like this. Philosophical questions are questions that are substantial and significant, but for which there are no decision procedures or there are no settled ways of answering them. So, you know, I think a classical example is an ethical kind of where people have different ethical views. There's a real disagreement and it matters, but there isn't a method for deciding it's, and that's what I would say is so there's, there is, I mean, there is a method for, for, for engaging intellectual exchange and argument, but there's no method for deciding um in the way that there is inside well-developed empirical theory. Um Now what I, the way I just define philosophical problem is precisely the way um can't defined an aesthetic problem. The thing about aesthetics is um different people can have different aesthetic responses and there's no way of deciding in advance as it were, who's right and who's wrong. And yet, according to Kant, the disagreement is inters subjectively significant, actual disagreement. It's not like I like vanilla, you like chocolate. It's like no chocolate is better than vanilla. And it's, we can, we, we can argue about that. Um um uh And people do argue about it and they do change their minds over time, not because there's a Qed. So I think it was actually Gilbert Ryle who said no philosophical argument ends with a Qed. Thus, it prove um I agree with that. Now, let me just let me say something else. A very interesting question. What the way I've just characterized philosophy is how that stands in relation to the actual practice of professional philosophers um at universities. Um Is this a revisionist analysis or am I saying that there's what, what, how does, how does, how does that, that go? And um I guess I would say something like this, the final value of the work done by philosophers at universities like my own is the way it enables the kind of change and transformation that I'm talking about. Whether or not that's the conscious aim or objective of the philosophers in question and whether or not they have that particular self understanding. So, you know, these days, I think especially in the analytic philosophical world, there's a huge pressure to model philosophy on the model of the sciences. So to give, to give an example, it is rarely discussed. But I think it's very interesting. Yes, in science, you write abstracts of articles and people can search abstracts and that's very useful because if I wanna start working on a certain protein, I wanna search and find out who else has worked on that protein and be sure I've read everything that's ever been written about it. And so now we abstract philosophy papers too. If you try to publish philosophical article, you need to submit an abstract. But a philosophy paper cannot be summed up as a simple finding or abstracted claim because there are none in philosophy that is in philosophy. The the very meaning of the claim is always what the paper is about. Philosophy literally doesn't have a bottom line. It's it's always an interrogation. The meaning of the bottom line depends on all the conversation and reasoning that gets you there, which is why we can read Kant without agreeing with Kant. We don't say, oh, he was mistaken. Therefore, we don't read him or Plato is mistaken. Therefore, we don't read him or, you know, Bertrand Russell was mistaken. Therefore, we don't read him. And there's a way in which the category of mistake is not even relevant. What we're interested in is whether the work they're doing helps us with the problems we have. And that depends on the work we do with the text. And there is nothing to do with the bottom line. I mean, it doesn't to do with the bottom line, but it has to do with how we reach the bottom line, you know, are mathematical propositions synthetic a priori. Well, what the really interesting question is not whether co was right or wrong? But what does that mean? What does it mean to say that the synthetic opera? Why would one say that? What is one trying to, what is the insight one is trying to capture, capture when you say that? And then you can go further, you say, well, it means we don't, we don't use ordinary empirical methods for verifying mathematical statements. Well, that's true. Um So why aren't they, why aren't they just here? Well, and yet they seem to be substantial, not merely logical, they seem to be telling us about something they seem to have content. Oh OK. So they're synthetic. And so then you tell Mr, but then there's, you can get into the discussions and maybe that is, or it isn't a useful way of summing it up. Most people these days I think, don't argue for the view that mathematics is synthetic or p why not. Um Anyway, so, so one of the ideas I play with in the book, which is kind of a uh a whimsical idea. But I think there's, there's really some truth to it is I think of a philosophical text is like a musical score. And when I teach my students a philosophical text, I'm teaching them not to know what the author believed, but I'm teaching them to play the score, to play along, to play with, to make, to make philosophy, with this, this, this, these resources and you know, finally the, the the students are gonna tell me whether it's meaningful to them and they either will or will not keep playing philosophers grow out of fashion. You know, when I was a student starting my graduate studies, you couldn't have a philosophical, philosophical conversation about anything without talking about Donald Davidson. Mm Or, or, or coin, I don't often hear people refer to Quan and Davidson these days, not because their work is any less important as it once was, but people are less interested in playing it. They wanna play other music now they wanna play other styles of, of thinking. Now, I might, I might not be correct about that, but that's a, I'm giving that as an example. Um Kant has stayed in fashion ever since he, ever since he appeared Hager Nietzsche. These guys, they're, they're like, always popular. Why? Because they're right. And what we talk about the difference between analytic and continental philosophy, that's the most to anybody who's outside of philosophy, that's the stupidest thing that there could possibly be like or for that matter, Western philosophy versus world philosophy. Why, why should, why should we only care about philosophy in one language or in one tradition? That's silly. Um On the other hand, if you think of it, is it like music? Well, people live inside their musical cultures, they live inside their artistic cultures. I can't, I don't know how to speak Chinese and I don't know how to play Chinese philosophy. I mean, that's in, that's I don't mean to be making an argument for uh or like ignorance. But on the other hand, people specialize people live inside the, the places where they find themselves. Um And in doing so, they also expand. So European philosophy is, is not confined to Europe. So

57:53 Ricardo Lopes: let me ask you one question, I think that you've already been touching on this throughout our conversation. But when it comes to science, specifically taking into account the sort of a framework that you present in the book. And since science itself is also, of course, a human endeavor then um how does it relate to philosophy, to art? And I, is there space for uh art, for example, in the very practice of science or not?

58:36 Alva Noë: Yeah. Um So I'm thinking about it because it's um I, I really don't wanna say no to science, I wanna say yes to art and yes to philosophy. And I think that um I mean, I think that there, I mean, in the book, the way I explore this is I want to differentiate art um from life or arts, from technology. And I wanted different which means like I differentiate art from design. Um And I differentiate philosophy from science, but these are entangled, right? Um There is, there is no science without philosophy and there is no philosophy without science. Um Not just because some philosophers are sometimes interested in empirical questions or some scientists are sometimes interested in philosophical questions, but because science and philosophy are different neighborhoods or sort of different ends of a spectrum to change the metaphor. And they, they have there's also neighborhoods where they're very near to each other. So some philosophical work just is not in interestingly or meaningfully different from empirical scientific work and vice versa. Um So notice I'm not saying, oh yeah, scientists should study art because it'll be a useful method for their scientific work that may or may not sometimes be true. Um I mean, a very interesting domain kind of problem that comes up in science is uh is visualization. Um WHETHER a scientist is trying to visualize a black hole with a picture or visualize or in some sense, represent the structure of a protein molecule or whether they want to um represent how the brain is built. I mean, an interesting example is uh Gogi and Kahar one, the Nobel Prize essentially for making good pictures of cells. They just took pictures of cells, they figured out how to do it, but they didn't just photograph the cell. They Dr Ramon Khal drew the sir and his drawings were theoretically informed explanations of how the cells worked. So he's a, he really understood the dendritic and the the the the axonic structure and the um the cell body versus these, these, these fingerings that that come out. Um So in a way, all he did was help you see something that was there, which is very close to my definition of what an artistic project is. And he certainly, apparently from what I understand about uh Ramon Kaha, uh Santiago Monica's life as if he, he wanted to be an artist. And his father said, no, his father said you have to stay in the family business, which is medicine. So he found a way to be an artist in medicine and these drawings of his, I'm sure you've seen them. Now there's now some beautiful books available, the new production, um these are puzzling drawing. Now, I mean, they're interesting drawings. Now, for me, I said at the outset that the difference between an art drawing and a and a and a mere pictorial drawing is that a mere pictorial drawing has a function, it's of something and you read the caption and that tells you what it's of and this is a representation of that. Um So if you stick strictly to that definition, then, then uh Ramonica has work is not artwork, it's illustration. OK. But is it only that, is it ever, only one thing are things ever? Only one thing? This is a really interesting point because um this is a feature of the entanglement. So take, take the great paintings of renaissance churches in a, in a sense, they have a caption. These are illustrations of stories from the Bible for illiterate people. These are precisely didactic, functional tools for indoctrination. But they're not only that they're never, they're never only that. I mean, sometimes they are only that and then they're not very artistically interesting. But the reason why we why even non-christian people, non-religious people visit those churches today is because they're not only that. Mhm And that might be true of Kahal Ramon Kala as well, which is interesting. Um So I don't want to be dogmatic and this is why I use this metaphor of the entanglement because it, it allows you to see how two things can become one thing even though there are two things.

1:04:49 Ricardo Lopes: So uh, I have one last topic that I would like to explore with you here today. I'm not sure if this will be necessarily my last question or not. But let's see. So, e even before we started recording, we were talking a little bit and one of the subjects that we touched on that we, I thought would be very interesting to bring back here to the interview was that, um, across the world at the moment, at least, and you were talking about there in the US? And I said that here in Portugal is more or less the same. People are feeling this sense of uneasiness. We think that or we look at things as very fragile. Uh I mean, the economic situation, the political context, new wars breaking out climate change and so on, everything seems very unstable. And the reason why I'm bringing this to the conversation is that, uh I mean, is there any way by which we can understand uh our current state and the way we react, reacting to things, our sense of uneasiness and so on through the kind of framework that you bring to your

1:06:17 Alva Noë: book? Yeah, I'm, I'm glad you bring this up. It's something I've been thinking a lot about. One of, one of my favorite texts in this vicinity is Hussars, this the um the crisis of the European Sciences. Um I don't know if this is a book that, you know, um it was published in the, it was written in the late 19 thirties. After Hal was already in exile, he was forced into exile, lost his professorship because he was Jewish. And in under national socialism, he couldn't, he couldn't teach. Um HE was in Prague, I think when he wrote, when he wrote this book and you know, the, the Second World War was on the horizon, Confronting Germany Europe and the World. And in that book, whose role makes by my reading at least a wild clam, he says that the problem that the world is facing is a philosophical problem. You know, here's Germany getting ready to invade all of Europe. He himself has been deprived of his position. Anti-semitism is run amok and the problem is philosophical and specifically, he thought it was a problem with European science, a philosophical problem about science. Mm um And then further what the problem was for hu was not that science was too insufficient or too weak, but that it was too strong, it was too powerful, it was too effective. Science was taken over everything and every space seemed to be a scientific space. Um But Huso said that that the kinds of standards of precision positivity that science offers us don't apply to ourselves. Just as I've been arguing, they don't apply to consciousness subjectivity, they don't apply to reason itself. Now, how you get from there to the Second World War is that's a kind of a what I'm not sure this, that's the direction I want to go in. But our cultural moment strikes me as very, very similar to his we science is immensely prestigious in our world today. And yet the fundamental picture of human life that science offers, it is very limited. I mean, there are different, there are different offerings. There's the evolutionary perspective, according to which we're genes, there's the sort of the neuroscientific perspective according to which we're just brain cells. There's the kind of computational perspective according to which we're just algorithms. Um But I think that there's something dissatisfying and unbelievable that the embodied socially situated historical beings that we are could be just brain cells or just genes or just algorithms. And um and that then in turn, I think maybe breeds anti scientific suspicion because there's a kind of way in which science is making claims that are not believable. So, and maybe that feeds crisis, I'm not sure, certainly one of the different crises we face when you think about the climate crisis is how many people deny the climate crisis. Um OR um you know, we saw, we saw during the pandemic how many people denied the uh the necessity and efficacy of vaccine, um religious religious fundamentalists around the world, you know, deny evolution, they deny anything. And uh and in one sense, don't get me wrong. I'm I, I speak as a, as a lover of science. Um IN one sense, I think they are rightly castigated as ignorant and idiotic. These people who, who attack science in that way, but not entirely because science as hr feared, knows no bounds and seems to be the only game in town. But the, but these important questions that matter to us about values, subjectivity, consciousness, rationality, these questions are not scientist questions, but how do we answer them? Well, they're philosophies questions. They're arts questions. So again, I, I would be embarrassed to argue that art and philosophy can save us. You know, that, that, that, that, that um that we can, you know that art and philosophy are gonna cure the climate crisis. No, obviously not, you need science for that, but science alone can't do it either. Art and philosophy are, are part of a solution. And um so in a, in one way, I'm very, you can think of my book. It has many I'm doing, I'm doing different things in the book. But one of the things I'm doing is I'm making an argument against uh the sort of the stem worldview, science, technology, engineering, mathematics as if that's, that's, that's the important thing and I appreciate that um not everybody can be a philosopher, not everybody can be an artist, just as not everybody can be a science or an engineer or a scientist or an engineer. But um it does seem to me that um if we neglect science and our, our situation is very helpless, excuse me for neglect philosophy and art, the situation is very helpless. So,

1:13:34 Ricardo Lopes: yeah, so perhaps that would be a good note to end on. Uh THE book is again the entanglement, sorry,

1:13:43 Alva Noë: a very sad and depressing note, I suppose. But in a way, I mean, it to be a positive, a positive note and I'm singing the praises of art and philosophy.

1:13:54 Ricardo Lopes: Yes. So the book is again the entanglement how art and philosophy make us what we are. I'm leaving a link with in the description box of the interview and doctor. No. Uh Just before we go apart from the book, would you like to tell people where they can find you when your work on the internet?

1:14:19 Alva Noë: Oh, yeah, thank you. I had a uh um I teach at the University of California in Berkeley and um you can, you can Google me and find my website. Uh There, I actually have a private website as well. Albano.com. So it's my www albano.com. Um I'm on uh I'm on what used to be called Twitter at Albano. Um And in addition to my post at Berkeley, I'm currently an Einstein, visiting fellow at the Free University in Berlin. So I spend a chunk of time running an art and philosophy project there. Um And so I can also be contacted through um through uh the Free University. Um And for, for those of you in Germany or in Europe.

1:15:12 Ricardo Lopes: Ok, great. So, Doctor Noe, thank you so much again, for taking the time to come on the show. I really love the book so I can't recommend it enough to my audience. And I hope that everyone out there that will eventually listen to or watch this interview will buy the book. So thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show. And it's been a real pleasure to talk with you.

1:15:37 Alva Noë: Thank you Ricardo. It's been a pleasure for me too and thank you to your audience.

1:15:41 Ricardo Lopes: Hi guys. Thank you for watching this interview. Until the end. If you liked it, please share it. Leave a like and hit the subscription button. The show is brought to you by the N Lights learning and development. Then differently check the website at N lights.com and also please consider supporting the show on Patreon or paypal. I would also like to give a huge thank you to my main patrons and paypal supporters, Perera Larson, Jerry Muller and Frederick Suno Bernard Seche O of Alex Adam, Castle Matthew Whitting B no Wolf, Tim Hall, Erica LJ Connors, Philip Forrest Connelly. Then the Met Robert Wine in NAI Z Mark Nevs calling in Holbrook Field Governor Mikel Stormer Samuel Andre Francis for Agns Ferger Ken Herz J and Lain Jung Y and the K Hes Mark Smith J. Tom Hummel Sran David Wilson, the Yasa dear Roman Roach Diego, Jan Punter, Romani, Charlotte, Bli, Nicole Barba, Adam Hunt Pavlo Stassi, Nale Me, Gary G Alman Samo. Zal Ari and YPJ Barboza Julian Price Edward Hall, Eden Broner Douglas Fry Franka Gilon Cortez or Solis Scott Zachary. Ftw Daniel Friedman, William Buckner, Paul Giorgino, Luke Loki, Georgio, Theophano Chris Williams and Peter Wo David Williams Di Costa Anton Erickson, Charles Murray, Alex Chao, Marie Martinez, Coralie Chevalier, Bangalore Fist, Larry Dey Junior, Old Einon Starry Michael Bailey, then Spur by Robert Grassy, Zoren Jeff mcmahon, Jake Zul Barnabas Radick, Mark Kempel, Thomas Dvor Luke Neeson, Chris Tory Kimberley Johnson, Benjamin Gilbert Jessica a week in the brand and Nicholas Carlson Ismael Bensley Man George Katis Valentine Steinman, Perlis Kate Van Goler, Alexander Abert Liam Dan Biar Masoud Ali Mohammadi Perpendicular J Ner Urla. Good enough Gregory Hastings David Pins of Sean Nelson, Mike Levin and Jos Net. A special thanks to my producers is our web, Jim Frank Lucani, Tom Vig and Bernard N Cortes Dixon, Benedikt Muller Thomas Trumble, Catherine and Patrick Tobin, John Carlman Negro, Nick Ortiz and Nick Golden. And to my executive producers, Matthew Lavender, Si Adrian Bogdan Knit and Rosie. Thank you for all