Abstract
The goal of this paper is to illuminate the connections between agency, perception, subjectivity, space and the body. Such connections have been the subject matter of much philosophical work. For example, the importance of the body and bodily action on perception is a growth area in philosophy of mind. Nevertheless, there are some key relations that, as will become clear, have not been adequately explored. We start by examining the relation between embodiment and agency, especially the dependence of agency on perception and the dependence of perception on agency. We also consider the nature of subjectivity itself: In virtue of what do humans and animals but not rocks and pencils have genuine perceptual and agentive intentional contents? We sketch a hylomorphic account of subjects and subjectivity, which highlights connections between the conclusions argued for in the previous sections and some basic principles of teleosemantics.
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Notes
Anscombe (2000, pp. 53–54) makes essentially the same point this way: “The only description that I clearly know of what I am doing may be of something that is at a distance from me. It is not the case that I clearly know the movements I make, and the intention is just a result which I calculate and hope will follow on these movements. … But suppose ... a physiologist ... fixes up a mechanism in which something in motion can be kept level if I hold a handle and execute a pumping movement with my arm.... Now my instruction is: Keep it level, and with a bit of practice I learn to do so. My account of what I am doing is that I am keeping the thing level; I don’t consider the movement of my arm at all. I am able to give a much more exact account of what I am doing at a distance than of what my arm is doing. So my keeping the thing level is not at all something which I calculate as the effect of what I really and immediately am doing, and therefore directly know in my ‘knowledge of my own action’. In general, as Aristotle says, one does not deliberate about an acquired skill; the description of what one is doing, which one completely understands, is at a distance from the details of one’s movements, which one does not consider at all.” We are grateful to an anonymous referee for reminding us of this passage.
Of course, it is more complicated. There will be predictable external influences, additive unpredictable influences, etc. But for now, we can make the points we want to make by ignoring those complexities.
This is a simplification. Many efferent sequences yield the same result, and so to make an inverse well-defined, additional constraints need to be added (for example, minimum jerk). We won’t worry about this.
For example, in order to achieve ideal hip alignment in Virahbhadrasana I (warrior I), it helps to have practitioners engage the adductor magnus in their back leg, something most people have no selective control over. To bring this about, instructors often use the following cue: “Press your back foot into the mat and attempt to drag it to your midline.” The student has the goal of getting their foot in a certain position, where such positioning engages the adductor magus. With the right sort of practice, such a student might eventually learn to selectively activate just that muscle ‘directly’.
In actual practice, current neurofeedback machinery has more interesting interfaces than this, such as vehicles whose motion is determined by brain activity — the subject’s task is then to control the vehicle’s motion in a virtual environment.
Now, of course, once a capacity for control is in hand, a mental representation of the goal state — a representation in the same format as the corresponding perceptual representation — typically suffices. I can control my arm even if I am blindfolded and temporarily deafferented, but such control is in terms of some idea of what I want my arm to do via a representation of perceptual space or a kinesthetic image.
An interesting case is mental action, such as purposefully recalling a memory or maintaining a train of thought. There is no time to adequately address this here, but one of us (Grush) is developing the proposal discussed in this section in a more general form, and in this more general form, the subject is revealed to be a mental self as well as a bodily self, and in both cases, this is the result of learning inverses for actions — either bodily or mental actions. Any adequate discussion of this would take far too much space in the present context.
There is another parallel we won’t have time to explore. The notion of the most proximal efferent causal link, a putative raw oomph unconnected to any goal expressible in a perceptual format, is the agentive counterpart of what Sellars critiqued as the myth of the given. His idea was that the notion that there is a most proximal sensory element that has a self-justifying content is a mistake. We might say that while Sellars was debunking the idea of a self-justifying maximally proximal afferent link (a sense-impression), we are gesturing to a parallel debunking of the notion of a self-satisfying maximally proximal efferent link (will-expression). The point is consistent with, and similar to, Susan Hurley’s (1998, p. 240ff) rejection of what she calls the ‘myth of the giving’. The points aren’t precisely the same, because Hurley is concerned primarily about the need for intentional action to be conceptualized, whereas the point we are making concerns the need for intentional action to be directed at something perceivable. Of course, if one takes it that a requirement on something to be perceivable is that it be conceptual/conceptualizable, our point would entail Hurley’s.
Familiar examples of what could be described as things other than the biological body seeming like one’s body can be explained this way. When an experienced driver gets in her car, a set of inverses come into play that, to a notable degree, make the car itself the inverse intersection. It is the car’s states that are perceived (its speed, its turning angle) and controlled, not the bodily states (I don’t notice, or try to control, how much pressure my foot is putting on the pedal or the angle of my arm on the steering wheel).
If you don the sonic guide (described later in this section), you will receive sensory inputs that are caused by spatial objects arranged spatially, and yet the experience will not be as of spatial objects arranged in space. Therefore, being a perceptual state caused by spatial objects arranged spatially is not sufficient for spatial experience. Would that it were sufficient! If it were, giving blind people a fully functional distance sense would be as trivial as providing them with sensory input that is caused by spatial objects in space. But this is not trivial, and it is not trivial exactly because that causal etiology is not sufficient to induce experience with the sort of spatial purport at issue.
There have been objections about whether behavioral dispositions are suitable to do this sort of work. There are two sorts of worry here. One is that dispositions seem too variable and coarse-grained. A second is that it is not obvious that there is a principled answer to how to understand the counterfactuals. Paralyzed people can have spatial experience, after all, despite being unable to execute spatial agency in the usual sense. We follow Grush (2007) for both of these. Briefly, Grush draws a distinction between type-selecting and detail-guiding dispositions. The former dispositions have to do with whether a stimulus induces one to run vs. grasp vs. hide, for example; and the latter have to do with what specific bodily movements one will implement given a selected behavior type — if one grasps the object, does one move one’s shoulder, arm and hand like this or like that? It is these latter, detail-specifying dispositions that are claimed to be the providers of spatial purport. As for the second issue, the proposal is that the dispositions are implemented neurally in the computation of a basis function decomposition of the relevant sensory and postural signals. These will be suitable to guide behavior if implemented but need not be implemented. On this account, paralysis is irrelevant. The question, which is empirical and answerable in any given case, is whether a perceptual input produces the relevant basis function values in the relevant neural systems. If anything downstream prevents them from being used to actually execute the behavior in question, that does not affect the purport provided by their computation. See Grush (2007) for details.
Peacocke (1989, pp. 324–8) has argued against the lesson we wish to draw in this section. He asks us to imagine a spherical being that has light sensors distributed evenly over its surface, and while not able to alter its shape or propel itself, it is able to alter properties of its surface, such as color and acidity, but any such changes affect all of its surface equally. Thus, the sphere is “not capable of any spatial behaviors.” Peacocke speculates that it is consistent with this description that the being could “detect a predator at a certain distance from it [and have] the ability to change its acidity level accordingly” and even to keep track of its location on a cognitive map, and depending on its location, react differently to qualitatively identical sensory stimulation. Our reply is that it seems quite plausible that we could set up a human subject with a sensory substitution device to be analogous to the spherical being — perhaps a subject wearing a sonic guide that detects anything around the subject, delivering a sound whose pitch, tone and timbre covary with what is, in fact, the egocentric location of the stimulus. Suppose the environment is filled with objects that will deliver a shock to the subject if they tough her skin. Is there any doubt that such a subject could learn that when a sound reaches a certain pitch, a shock will be felt unless a button is pressed? We do not seem to need to attribute any spatial purport to the experience in order for this to be a perfectly good explanation of the subject’s behavior. We could do the same thing with TVSS tactile receptors — the subject might feel a vibration on the skin surface and come to learn that when the vibration reaches a certain intensity, a shock will be felt unless a button is pressed (or some other non-spatial behavior). And we can add “cognitive map” capacity as well, by allowing the subject to keep track of prior stimulation conditions in whatever way the spherical being might. The point is that unless we add some spatially relevant behavior (for example, in order for the subject to avoid the shock, he must move to the left), it seems that the attribution of spatial purport goes beyond what we have any reason to attribute to the subject. Analogous points seem to hold for the spherical being.
See also Searle (1983).
Springle’s account of perceptual instructions treats sensations or qualia as conscious sensory vehicles that express instructive contents rather than treating sensory qualia as intrinsically intentional. See also Papineau 2014.
The term “concept” here is intended only to capture the notion of a category of understanding, or a kind of Fregean sense or grasp. Springle does not use “concept” to pick out the kind of thing that only, for example, language-using humans can have, nor the kind of thing the deployment of which essentially involves predication. Action concepts are the constituents of instructions that are non-propositional insofar as they are fundamentally non-truth-conditional and non-predicative. Similarly, the term “referent” is being used simply to pick out the thing instructive representations (perceptual instructions) stand for; no additional theoretical baggage is essential to the term as we are using it.
Compare this to descriptive concepts or categories whose standards of successful deployment or application depend on a descriptive relation obtaining. A descriptive relation obtains between a referent or singular element s and predicate or attribute F (for example, “is green”) when F truly describes s.
Accusatives, or target-types, are not necessarily “physical kinds.” The physical properties in virtue of which the sensory system can causally respond to them are biologically important as enabling selective responses to them, but they are rarely the physical properties (for example, those in virtue of which something is edible and nutritious for some kind of creature) that are the properties that mattered for content selection. The properties that correspond to accusative or target-types are mostly relational properties, that is, they concern end-related interactions between properties in the world and properties of the perceiver (for example, what is edible and nutritious for it) (Akins 1996). Natural kind properties are relevant relative to the biological nature of perceivers. That said, natural kind properties of accusatives that enable sensory sensitivity to or detection of them (for example, the capacity to reflect certain wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation) explain, to some extent, the nature of the sensory organs and representational vehicles, that is, neurons and their connections and the corresponding sensations (conscious vehicles), so these properties are part of what explains that in virtue of which sensory systems have the potential to produce intentional states and relationally part of what explains the way sensations become organized to constitute perceptions (perceptual instructions) and their phenomenology. See also O’Connor (2014).
See also Pavese (2015, 2017, forthcoming).
We do not mean to suggest that this is sufficient to account for the way humans can reflectively and deliberatively make decisions. We think that this is importantly different but that it is compatible with this more general account of animal decision making. Springle plans to discuss the relationship between human and this conception of non-human animal decision making in more detail in future work.
Force is also explained by aspects of selection history together with the intensity of occurrent stimuli.
We wish to acknowledge the significant overlap between the views we express in this paper and the views Susan Hurley develops in her tremendously insightful “Consciousness In Action” (1998). There are strong affinities between our approach to and take on the relationship between perception, action, and subjectivity, and many points she makes. There is not space to adequately illustrate the ways in which our work here and Hurley’s diverge. But one important point of departure is our emphasis on the nature of perceptual content, and especially spatial content.
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Grush, R., Springle, A. Agency, perception, space and subjectivity. Phenom Cogn Sci 18, 799–818 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-018-9582-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-018-9582-y