Alva Noë

Alva Noë is Professor of Philosophy and a member of the Center for Mind and Brain at the University of California, Berkeley. A recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, Noë is known for his work in perception, consciousness, and the philosophy of art.

In Action in Perception (MIT Press, 2004) and Out of Our Heads (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009), Noë formulated Sensorimotor Contingency Theory (alongside J. Kevin O’Regan). He argues that perceptual consciousness is an enacted activity, grounded in an organism’s mastery of the lawful sensorimotor dependencies linking bodily movements to changes in sensory input.

Noë’s externalist and enactive perspective indicates that genuine perceptual consciousness cannot be created simply by scaling neural network parameters on a server; it requires continuous, embodied, and dynamic physical agency in the world.

Known for. Sensorimotor Contingency Theory, Action in Perception (MIT Press, 2004), Out of Our Heads, Why You Are Not Your Brain (2009), Strange Tools (2015)

Coverage on this site

• Evan Thompson Alva Noe Enactivism AI Consciousness Sensorimotor Grounding 2026 August 2026

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Every researcher covered on this site is indexed in the directory of consciousness researchers, grouped by the position their published work defends. The positions themselves are set out in the index of consciousness theories.