Haley Brigitte Gill

Is all consciousness ultimately perceptual in nature? Many have thought so, and for good reason: if this is not the case, then popular reductive representationalist theories of consciousness are false. Enter reductive sensory views. These views attempt to reduce cognitive, affective, and agentive phenomenology to the phenomenology of familiar sensory modalities, such as sight, hearing, touch, proprioception, and so on. In this paper, I offer a novel argument against reductive sensory views of agentive phenomenology. The idea is something like this: with some notable exceptions, the literature has tended to focus on the phenomenology of controlled bodily movement. But moving our bodies is not the only thing we do as agents. We also, for example, reason, imagine, focus, and resist temptation. These are controlled mental events, and as others have noted, a complete theory of what it’s like to act as an agent ought to account for the phenomenology of mental actions as well as bodily actions. To make my case, I focus on a specific, common example of a deficit in agentive phenomenology that has been underappreciated in the literature on mental action–the feeling of lacking control over eating urges. This feeling is well-documented, and characterizes binge eating episodes as well as the eating disorders of which binge eating is a symptom. I argue that even if reductive sensory theories can account for the feeling of lacking control over bodily movement, they lack the resources to account for the feeling of lacking control over urges. In the end, perceptual reductionism about agentive phenomenology is out, and the implications for reductive representationalist theories of consciousness are grim.