Abstract
The sensorimotor theory of perceptual consciousness offers a form of enactivism in that it stresses patterns of interaction instead of any alleged internal representations of the environment. But how does it relate to forms of enactivism stressing the continuity between life and mind (and more particularly autopoiesis, autonomy, and valence)? We shall distinguish sensorimotor enactivism, which stresses perceptual capacities themselves, from autopoietic enactivism, which claims an essential connection between experience and autopoietic processes or associated background capacities. We show how autopoiesis, autonomous agency, and affective dimensions of experience may fit into sensorimotor enactivism, and we identify differences between this interpretation and autopoietic enactivism. By taking artificial consciousness as a case in point, we further sharpen the distinction between sensorimotor enactivism and autopoietic enactivism. We argue that sensorimotor enactivism forms a strong default position for an enactive account of perceptual consciousness.
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Perceptual consciousness refers to a subset of conscious experiences, including our sensory experience of the environment by vision, audition, touch, etc., and excluding experiences of thought, emotion, and feelings like hunger and pain.
As an enactive account, sensorimotor theory also contrasts with computational functionalism as familiar from the work of Clark and others (e.g. Clark 2008). An enactive sensorimotor account emphasizes capacities rather than committing to a computational account based on information processing. For criticism of a cognitivist/representationalist conception of sensorimotor theory, see Hutto (2005).
There are two senses of constitutive. In our view, perceptual consciousness (like intelligent action) is constituted by the exercise of capacities, in the sense that this is what we take conscious perception (or intelligent action) to be, or to consist in (and thus it does not consist in, say, internal representations or ghostly processes accompanying our bodily activities). There is a different sense of constitution, meaning what it is ‘materially constituted’ by. The present paper does not concern the question whether our perceptual consciousness is ‘materially constituted’ by (a subset of) autopoietic processes (and of course in living systems, the material constitution is in constant flux). Instead it concerns the question whether the exercise of autopoietic capacities is part of what perceptual consciousness consists in, such that autopoietic capacities would be necessary for spelling out what perceptual consciousness is. If autopoiesis is constitutive of perceptual consciousness in this sense, then for a (natural or artificial) system to have perceptual consciousness it is logically required that the system be an autopoietic system—a claim embraced by autopoietic enactivism but rejected by sensorimotor enactivism.
In a swampman scenario there is of course no ontogenetic explanation for experience, beyond an appeal to a cosmic accident; there’s no history in which the agent had influence on its own development. Still, when we regard experiencing as the exercise of a bodily capacity, one may give a constitutive explanation—an account of what the exercise of the capacity consists in—of the newly emerged agent’s experience. If you are uncomfortable with the far-fetched swampman scenario, note that the same would hold for robots: whether their bodily capacities are deliberately designed or emerged over a period of robotic development, we may give a constitutive explanation of capacities of interest, even if we have no knowledge of the history of the capacities. We address the issue of robotic consciousness in Sect. 5 below.
There is much of Bower and Gallagher with which we agree, such as when they point out that “sensory-motor contingencies are of no avail to the perceiving agent without motivational pull in one direction or another or a sense of the pertinent affective contingencies” (Bower and Gallagher 2013: 108). What we object to is the suggestion that affective aspects of experience must form a problem for sensorimotor enactivism. On our view, engagement with sensorimotor dependencies (the exercise of perceptual capacities) may already capture motivational and affective aspects of experience. We are unsure whether Bower and Gallagher would reject sensorimotor enactivism, and we should emphasize that their paper is not set up as a defense autopoietic enactivism.
Such an appeal to action tendencies would go significantly beyond the core of the sensorimotor approach (and thus it should not be made lightly). For example, a sensorimotor account of what it is to see a straight line appeals to facts such as that sensory stimulation does not change if one moves one’s eyes along the line (O’Regan and Noë 2001). However, attunement to such contingencies need not be expressed in any particular behaviors (behavioral expressions may be highly context-dependent), and sensorimotor theory certainly does not claim that one is inclined to move one’s eyes across straight lines! Our suggesting here is merely that the option of extending sensorimotor theory to include action tendencies should not be dismissed prematurely, and we see no reason to presuppose that an appeal to action tendencies would imply a constitutive role for autopoiesis.
A note on zombies and the living dead: One way to contrast sensorimotor enactivism and autopoietic enactivism is as follows, in the b-movie style familiar in the philosophy of mind. We could define ‘zombies’ (a different notion of zombie from the one of Chalmers 1996) as systems exercising the full range of behavioral and sensing capacities that we have, while lacking conscious experience. And we could define the ‘living dead’ as exercising the full range of behavioral and sensing capacities that we have, while lacking the autopoietic organization characteristic of life. Sensorimotor enactivism then rejects this notion of zombies, whether or not the notion of the living dead sketches a genuine possibility. Autopoietic enactivism can only reject the notion of zombies by rejecting the possibility of the living dead, for accepting the idea of the living dead would commit the autopoietic enactivist to the notion of a zombie. (On our view, in line with sensorimotor enactivism, the possibility of the living dead is an empirical issue regarding machine consciousness. However, we would claim that the idea of zombies is not an empirical issue, for we take this notion to be nonsensical.)
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Acknowledgments
We thank Sanneke de Haan, Erik Myin, David Silverman and the audience at the 2014 AISB conference at Goldsmiths, University of London for helpful discussions and critique on an earlier version of this paper. We further thank our anonymous reviewers for their excellent comments and suggestions. The work was supported by ERC advanced Grant 323674 “FEEL” of J. Kevin O’Regan.
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Degenaar, J., O’Regan, J.K. Sensorimotor Theory and Enactivism. Topoi 36, 393–407 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-015-9338-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-015-9338-z