Mick Hartley

I haven't read the book, but this review is interesting:

Put succinctly, what Alva Noë is offering in Out of Our Heads is nothing short of a paradigm shift, complete with an incisive criticism of the status quo of neurosciences and a suggestion for an alternative model. The scientific study of consciousness in general, and what Noë calls the establishment neuroscience in particular claims to have broken free from its philosophical foundations. Although Noë acknowledges that the problem of consciousness is a scientific problem, one for which a scientific answer should be expected, he challenges the scientific community's contention that consciousness no longer remains a philosophical problem.

The key assumption behind the science of consciousness is that consciousness is an internal process that occurs in the brain. Noë's chief goal in the book is to show that this highly questionable, yet unquestioned assumption, has led the consciousness research astray; in brief, the search for consciousness has focused on where it isn't. Noë opens by challenging this assumption, and offers an alternative picture. Instead of characterizing consciousness as an internal process (like digestion) Noë proposes a picture which takes consciousness to be an activity (like dancing).

I don't think this is quite the revolutionary approach that the reviewer seems to think it is (writers like Raymond Tallis would, I think, have no problem with this), but then it's part of the way these things work that both author and reviewer will emphasise the iconoclasm. Still, I think he's on the right lines:

Noë argues that the question of consciousness (that is, which beings are conscious) should be viewed as a question of life: "life is the lower boundary of consciousness". But in order to do this, we cannot regard conscious beings just as the locus of processes or physicochemical mechanisms. Rather, when we try to study the mind, "we need to keep the whole organism in its natural environmental settings in focus".

To put it more straightforwardly: it's not the brain that's conscious, it's the person. Which is why, to the extent that neuroscience attempts to find the answer to consciousness in the workings of neurons and the like, it's bound to fail, and why consciousness remains very much a philosophical concern.