Book Review: Contemporary Sensorimotor Theory

摘要

Consciousness, with its irreducible subjective character, was almost exclusively a philosophical topicuntil relatively recently. Today, however, the problem of explaining the felt quality of experience hasalso become relevant to science and engineering, including robotics and AI: “What would we have tobuild into a robot so that it really felt the touch of a finger, the redness of red, or the hurt of a pain?”(O’Regan, 2014, p. 23). Yet a practical response still requires an adequate theory of consciousness,which brings us back to the hard problem: how can we account, from a scientific point of view, for thephenomenological character of experience? Over a decade ago, O’Regan and No? (2001) proposeda new approach to these questions, the so-called sensorimotor approach to perceptual experience.How far has this approach come and what are its outstanding challenges? The volume ContemporarySensorimotor Theory, edited by Bishop and Martin, takes stock of the current state of the field.