Symposium – call for papers
Consciousness without inner models: A sensorimotor account of what is going on in our heads
To be held at the AISB conference (Goldsmiths, University of London, 1-4 April 2014).
There has been much criticism over the years of the idea that conscious experience depends on inner representational models of the environment. Enactive accounts (e.g. Thompson 2007) and the sensorimotor account more particularly (O’Regan & Noë 2001; O’Regan 2011) have prominently criticized the reliance on inner models and they have offered an alternative way of thinking about experience. The idea of sensorimotor approaches is that experience involves the perceiver’s attunement to the way in which sensory stimulation depends on action. But how then should we conceive of what happens in the agent’s head to allow for this attunement? In this symposium we focus on two questions. First, how does an enactive sensorimotor theory offer guidance for the interpretation of neurophysiological findings? Second, how are its predictions about neural processes different from the predictions of representationalist accounts?
Call for papers:
Abstracts of 700-1000 words, prepared for blind reviewing, can be submitted to Jan Degenaar at: Degenaar.jan [at] gmail [dot] com. Please include “Sensorimotor Symposium” in the subject line. Talks will be 30 minutes including discussion. Notifications of acceptance will be sent before the end of February.
Submission deadline: 3 January 2014.
Symposium organizers: Jan Degenaar and J.Kevin O’Regan
