Alva Noe's Analysis

Alva Noe begins his essay with a full paragraph informing the reader about Sebastian Seung’s plan to build a map of the human brain. After this paragraph, Noe attempts to develop an argument against the idea of the brain map by using an irrelevant example. “Trying to understand how the brain work […] would be like trying to understand how a bird flies by examining individual feathers. “ This “evidence” doesn’t fully support Noe’s argument and is off topic. In the next paragraph, Noe attempts to use an analogy about computers and how they work. While this example could be useful, Noe spends a whole paragraph of his essay talking about computers instead of brain maps. In paragraph seven, the writer returns to both the topic of computers
and the topic of birds. He also adds information about quantum mechanics and the stock market. These ideas are not evidence; they do not add anything to the argument. In Noe’s concluding paragraph, he introduces even more information, this time in the form of evidence. This piece of evidence is only two sentences long. “Gareth Cook, who wrote the recent New York Times Magazine article on Seung’s quest, was wise to refer to Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges’s cautionary tale, On Exactitude In Science, about a map being built as an exact, to-size replica of the domain being mapped. Such a map can’t serve any explanatory purpose whatsoever.”
Throughout Alva Noe’s essay, he constantly introduces more and more random information without actually providing evidence for his argument. Also, through the entirety of the essay, Noe’s writing displays poor grammar and punctuation. Alva Noe’s essay was poorly written and researched.