A Theory of Sentience

Austen Clark

"Drawing on the findings of current neuroscience, Clark proposes and defends the hypothesis that various modalities of sensation share a generic form that he calls 'feature-placing'. Sensing proceeds by picking out place-times in or around the body of the sentient organism, and characterizing qualities (features) that appear at those place-time. Such feature-placing is a primitive kind - probably the most primitive kind - of mental representation. Once its peculiarities are understood, many of the puzzles about the intentionality of sensation, and the phenomena that lead some to label it 'pseudo-intentional', can be resolved. The hypothesis casts light on other troublesome phenomena, including the varieties of illusion, the problem of projection, the notion of a visual field, the location of after-images, the existence of sense-data, and the role of perceptual demonstratives. A...

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