Challis Hodge’s UXblog

Experience Is Not Something We Feel But Something We Do
A Principled Way of Explaining Sensory Phenomenology, With Change Blindness and Other Empirical Consequences

“Any theory of experience which postulates that brain mechanisms generate “raw feel” encounters the impassable “explanatory gap” separating physics from phenomenology.

A way round the problem is to postulate that experience is not something we feel, but something we do: a kind of give-and-take with the environment, analogous to the “feel” of driving a car. One consequence of such a “sensorimotor” theory of experience is that it provides a way of explaining the differences between seeing, hearing, touch, etc., which is more principled and has more explanatory power than M�ller’s notion of “specific nerve energy” or its modern counterpart, the notion of sensory pathways or cortical areas. The feasibility of sensory substitution is an empirically verifiable implication of this approach.

As applied to visual perception, a consequence of the sensorimotor approach is the idea that seeing does not consist in the creation of a “re-”presentation of the world inside the brain, but rather in knowledge that the outside world is immediately accessible through a flick of the eye or of attention, like an “outside memory”. The world-as-an-outside-memory idea has empirically verifiable consequences in the phenomenon of Change Blindness, among others.” Read the paper here.