7.27.2
7.2 ---- CouplingCouplingCouplingCoupling andandand KnowingandKnowing inKnowingKnowingininin TemporalTemporalTemporal ExperienceTemporalExperienceExperienceExperience
The argument over temporal experience speaks to a broader tension within the sensorimotor account. As many commentators have noted, the approach sometimes appears to stipulate that the temporally-extended bodily exercise of sensorimotor skill is required; at other times, it apparently suffices that the perceiver possesses sensorimotor skill. Aizawa (2010) describes these as ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ versions of the theory. Noë’s discussion of temporal experience betrays a similar tension: while its main claim is that the experience of duration is explained by your non-bodily understanding of what you are hearing, it indicates a quite different line of response when it argues that hearing the note involves, in any case, a temporally-extended coupling with the environment. The tension is particularly stark in the case of event perception, because it is hard to see why temporal experience should be explained both by understanding and sensorimotor coupling. In the original story about object perception, sensorimotor knowledge is sometimes glossed as knowing how to act, for example when O&N suggest sensorimotor knowledge is comprised of “action recipes” (p. 945) or when Noë says: “[t]o experience [an object] as on the left is to experience it as necessitating [...] various possibilities of sense-affecting movements” (2004, pp. 87–88). Here, we can readily grasp that perception might involve, vitally, a temporally-extended process of bodily coupling, itself
featuring Sensorimotor Understanding. By contrast, your knowledge of where the opera singer’s note is coming from may be implicit, but there is no obvious way in which it is practical, or geared toward action, as sensorimotor mastery might be. If it is not practical, but, as Noë suggests, more like linguistic comprehension, then it is hard to see why possessing or exercising this knowledge should entail, in any interesting sense, a coupling with the environment rather than just a representing of the environment. The sensorimotor theorist, in the temporal case, no longer has an obvious response to the theorist who maintains that neural states or structures alone are the interesting, indeed constitutive, features underlying conscious perceptual experience.
This threatens to undermine the sensorimotor theory, as it means the ‘weak’ variant, on the current account of temporal experience, can no longer sustain any of the theory’s main tenets. Vehicle externalism or ECM is ruled out, since bodily movement is not required for perceptual experience. Sensorimotor Understanding, SMCs and presence-as-access only give an incomplete account of perceptual experience because they account only for object experience, not temporal experience. The sensorimotor theorist could respond that although event perception is non-sensorimotor, it depends for its existence on object perception, which is sensorimotor. Conceding this much, however, gives the opponent room to deny that perception is intrinsically sensorimotor at all: Clark (2008), as we have seen, claims that perception is a matter of sensorimotor summarising – the extraction of information about sensorimotor contingencies, along with other information, for the construction of representations that are not themselves finely sensitive to the sensory effects of possible movements.
Moreover, the distinction made by Noë between events and objects seems tenuous. Noë (2006) says “objects [unlike events] are timeless in that they exist whole and complete at a moment in time” (p. 28). The implication is that it is therefore reasonable to suppose that
perception
of objects and events are different matters. On this view, perception of a moving object would seemingly be a matter of perceiving the object (sensorimotor) and perceiving its trajectory, an event (non-sensorimotor). However, if you perceive an unmoving, unchanging object, and perceive it to be constant, you expect that it existed moments before, and that it will continue to exist moments into the future. As a result, it is not enough to tack on somekind of non-sensorimotor perception just for some instances. The non-sensorimotor element would apply to all instances of perception.
The opera singer example is a little misleading in this respect, because the phenomenal experience of the note's temporal duration seems like an optional extra, a side issue to the perception of immediately audible qualities like pitch, loudness, and so forth. Temporal aspects to perception are not usually like this. When you cross a busy road, or catch a ball, the perception of objects as still or in motion is no side issue, but central to your engagement with them. For this reason I think it is better to hold that object and event perception are not different types. The fuzziness of the distinction between object and event perception provides another reason to prefer a unified picture for objects
and
events, and conceding that events are not perceived in sensorimotor fashion provides a reason to believe that objects are not perceived in such a fashion either. This is one reason why I will argue presently that a unified sensorimotor model can be offered for both.The best solution, I suggest, is to drop Noë’s analogy with linguistic understanding and stick, instead, to an extensionalist story, which says that event experience is explained by a particular kind of temporally-extended coupling with the environment. This requires adopting the ‘strong’ sensorimotor theory, in the sense defined above, and accords with my suggestion in chapter 4 that Sensorimotor Understanding is a criterion that temporally-extended engagements must meet, rather than an entity that enables the appropriate engagements to take place. The mere possession of sensorimotor skill would not be sufficient to explain the experience of duration, since duration is not a matter of sensorimotor contingency. However, the bodily exercise of Sensorimotor Understanding takes time anyway: so, if we assume the content of experience temporally tracks the vehicle, the experience of duration comes for free. This suggestion is not merely a get out clause, but fits the phenomenology – the experience of trajectory – aptly described by Noë. It explains why your experience, now, of the opera singer’s note sounds like it is part of something temporally-extended.