An account of color without a subject?

Ecological Psychology and Enaction Theory: Divergent Groundings

Both ecological psychology and enaction theory offer an alternative to long-standing theoretical approaches to perception that invoke post-perceptual supplemental processes or structures, e.g., mental representations, to account for perceptual phenomena. They both do so by taking actions by the individual to be essential for an account of perception and cognition. The question that this paper attempts to address is whether ecological psychology and enaction theory can be integrated into a stronger non-representational alternative to perception than either one can offer on its own. Doing so is only possible if most of the basic tenets and concepts of ecological psychology and enaction theory are compatible. Based on an examination of the role that sensations play within each approach; the manner in which each treats the concept of information; and how each conceptualizes an organism’s boundaries, it is concluded that a synthesis of the two approaches is not possible. Particular attention is paid to the concept of sensations, the limitations of which were an impetus for the development of ecological psychology.

Reincarnating the Identity Theory

The mind/brain identity theory is often thought to be of historical interest only, as it has allegedly been swept away by functionalism. After clarifying why and how the notion of identity implies that there is no genuine problem of explaining how the mental derives from something else, we point out that the identity theory is not necessarily a mind/brain identity theory. In fact, we propose an updated form of identity theory, or embodied identity theory, in which the identities concern not experiences and brain phenomena, but experiences and organism-environment interactions. Such an embodied identity theory retains the main ontological insight of its parent theory, and by invoking organism-environment interactions, it has powerful resources to motivate why the relevant identities hold, without posing further unsolvable problems. We argue that the classical multiple realization argument against identity theory is built on not recognizing that the main claim of the identity theory concerns the relation between experience and descriptions of experience, instead of being about relations between different descriptions of experience and we show how an embodied identity theory provides an appropriate platform for making this argument. We emphasize that the embodied identity theory we propose is not ontologically reductive, and does not disregard experience.

Skill, corporality and alerting capacity in an account of sensory consciousness

We suggest that within a skill-based, sensorimotor approach to sensory consciousness, two measurable properties of perceivers' interaction with the environment, "corporality" and "alerting capacity", explain why sensory stimulation is experienced as having a "sensory feel", unlike thoughts or memories. We propose that the notions of "corporality" and "alerting capacity" make possible the construction of a "phenomenality plot", which charts in a principled way the degree to which conscious phenomena are experienced as having a sensory quality.