Cognitive Complexity and the Sensorimotor Frontier
Abstract
What is the relation between perceptual experience and the suite
of sensorimotor skills that enable us to act in the very world we perceive? The
relation, according to ‘sensorimotor models’ (O’Regan and Noe¨ 2001, Noe¨
2004) is tight indeed. Perceptual experience, on these accounts, is enacted via
skilled sensorimotor activity, and gains its content and character courtesy of
our knowledge of the relations between (typically) movement and sensory
stimulation. I shall argue that this formulation is too extreme, and that it
fails to accommodate the substantial firewalls, dis-integrations, and specialpurpose
streamings that form the massed strata of human cognition. In
particular, such strong sensorimotor models threaten to obscure the
computationally potent insensitivity of key information-processing events to
the full subtleties of embodied cycles of sensing and moving.