Alva Noe, “Varieties of Presence” (Harvard UP, 2012)
New Books in Philosophy
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You Can't Have Novel Experiences
I was wondering if you could maybe elaborate that claim a little bit because that was also somewhat counterintuitive, at least to me. The thought is that we have is that what enables us to bring the world into focus is our ability to achieve access and access depends on skills. And anything that was genuinely, but genuinely outstripped, our sensory motor or conceptual expectations wouldn't affect be something we couldn't latch onto - so it wouldn't show up for us. It's almost as if the knowledge makes new things old and in making them old and familiar, it makes them perceptible. We see this when we get to know styles of art that were previously unfamiliar. But what's remarkable is
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