Enactive Consciousness: Perception, Intersubjectivity and Empathy,
Seventh Annual Conference of the Consciousness and Experiential Psychology Section of the British Psychological Society,
St Anne's College, Oxford, June 2003.

Reviewed by Robert Pepperell

pepperell@ntlworld.com

The debate referred to in the review of Potential Images about the extent to which responsibility for generating meaning lies with the viewer or the artwork is paralleled to some extent in a contemporary controversy in consciousness studies (see LDR July 2003). In consciousness studies the tension lies between those who regard phenomenal experience as the consequence of activity in the brain, or part thereof, and those who prefer to regard consciousness as the distributed effect of a number of coordinated processes, including physical actions and environmental circumstances.

The Seventh Annual Conference of the Consciousness and Experiential Psychology section of the British Psychological Society addressed itself to what are termed 'enactive' and 'empathetic' views of subjective experience. The enactive approach in cognitive science challenges the more widespread internalist view, stressing instead the role of embodied action in generating perception. What this means in practice is that perceptual awareness is seen to rest on a range of sensorimotor contingencies such as movement, weight and tactility. For the enactive theorist the lived experience of any perceptual event inheres less in the inner mental state of the subject than in their negotiation with the physical domain. So, to take an example that was used, the "there-ness" or "redness" of a ripe tomato is a consequence of both its physical properties and our capacity for action in relation to it. This enactive approach has been set out recently in a series of papers, notably by J. K. O'Regan and Alva Noë, both of whom advocated (and defended) the stance at the conference. 

The other main theme addressed by a number of presenters was empathy, or intersubjectivity; that is, the impact  our sense of others has on our sense of self. Susan Hurley of Warwick University gave a fascinating overview of recent research being conducted across a number of disciplinary boundaries into imitation. Developing what she calls the "shared circuits" hypothesis, she presented a schema that correlated various motor, sensory and neural functions to show how our sense of the first and third person emerges through a "shared information space". The implication of this, and other work, was that inner subjective experience coextends with our knowledge of the subjective experiences of others. The claim was made by another speaker, for example, that self-knowledge is contingent on knowledge of how others see us, how we see others seeing us, how others see us seeing them, and so on.

What was apparent from the presentations, and the discussions they provoked, was an emerging consensus in some areas of inquiry about the embodied or situated nature of conscious experience. Although the enactive approach is not without its problems (the role of stored experience in generating the perceptual presence of objects being one) it marks a clear turn in consciousness studies towards the view that reality is constituted by both environmental activity and the agency of the sentient being, rather than one or the other.

The intense cross-disciplinary dialogue, combined with the conducive surroundings of St Anne's College and the efficiency of the organising committee combined to make this conference productive, stimulating and pleasurable. Further information can be found at http://www.warwick.ac.uk/cep/latest_conference.html