Consciousness

• seCtIon one: tHe PRoBLem
  essential to understanding consciousness: ‘Consciousness is in the first place not
  a matter of “I think that” but of “I can” ’ (1945/2002, p. 159). O’Regan and Noë argue
  that classical theories of vision do not explain how the existence of an internal
  representation can give rise to visual consciousness (another version of the hard
  problem). In their theory, the hard problem is avoided because ‘The outside world
  serves as its own, external, representation’. Instead of being about building rep-
  resentational models, ‘seeing is a way of acting. It is a particular way of exploring
  the environment’ (2001, p. 939).
  More specifically, an organism has the experience of seeing when it masters the
  governing laws of sensorimotor contingencies  – that is, when it develops skills
  for extracting information from the world; for interacting with the visual input
  and exploiting the ways in which that input changes with eye movements, body
  movements, blinks, and other actions. On this view what you see is those aspects
  of the scene that you are currently ‘visually manipulating’. If you do not interact
  with the world, you see nothing. When you stop
  manipulating some aspect of the world, it drops
  back into nothingness.
  As with Rensink’s virtual representation, what
  remains between saccades is not a picture of the
  world, but the information needed for further explo-
  ration. A study by Karn and Hayhoe (2000) confirmed
  that spatial information required to control eye
  movements is retained across saccades. Could this
  be sufficient to give an illusion of continuity and
  stability?
  This theory is radically counter-intuitive, not least
  because seeing does not feel like manipulating tem-
  porary aspects of the world that then disappear, but
  O’Regan likens it to the light inside your fridge. Every
  time you open the door the light is on. Then you
  close it and wonder whether it’s still on. So you open
  it and look again. It’s still on. So it is with the world:
  it is always there when you look, so it’s easy to think
  you have a constant detailed representation of it.

Sensorimotor theory is dramatically different from

most existing theories of perception, but is closely

related to theories of embodied or enactive cogni-

tion (Chapter 8). It is similar to the idea of perception

as a kind of ‘reaching out’ (Humphrey, 1992, 2006),

to theories stressing the interdependence of percep-

tion and action (Hurley, 1998), to J. J. Gibson’s (1979)

ecological approach to perception, and further back

to Merleau-Ponty’s idea that ‘consciousness is noth-

ing other than the dialectic of milieu and action’

(1942/1965, pp. 168–169). Seeing does not mean

building representations of the world that can then

be acted upon; rather, seeing, attending, and experi-

encing are all kinds of action.

‘seeing is a way of acting

[. . .] of exploring the

environment’

(O’Regan and Noë, 2001,
p. 939)

‘sensations are

representations of

something we do’

(Humphrey, 2016, p. 117)

seeInG oR BLInD? A tHoUGHt

exPeRIment to test

sensoRImotoR tHeoRY

According to o’Regan and noë’s (2001, p.

1020) sensorimotor theory, ‘perception is

constituted by mastery of sensorimotor con-

tingencies’. seeing means manipulating the

contingencies between action and input, such

as moving one’s eyes and getting changed

visual input. A thought experiment suggests

a bizarre consequence of this theory.

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3.2

FIGURE 3.10A • Alva at start