Consciousness in Action

In this text, Susan Hurley sheds light on consciousness by examining its relationships to action from various angles. She asseses the role of agency in the unity of a conscious perspective, and argues that perception and action are more deeply interdependent than is often assumed. A standard view conceives perception as input from world to mind and action as output from mind to world, with the serious business of thought in between. Hurley criticizes this picture, and considers how the interdependece of perceptual experience and agency at the personal level (of mental contents and norms) may emerge from the sub-personal level (of underlying causal processes and complex dynamic feedback systems). Her two-level view has wide implications, for topics that include self-consciousness, the modularity of the mind, and the relations of mind to world. The self no longer lurks hidden somewhere between perceptual input and behavioural output, but reappears out in the open, embodied and embedded in its environment. Hurley traces these themes from Kantian and Wittgensteinian arguments through to work in neuropsychology and in dynamic systems approaches to the mind, providing a bridge from mainstream philosophy to work in other disciplines.