Perception, Action, and Experience: Retying the Golden Braid

Intuitively, our mental life involves, as Andy Clark evocatively puts it, “a seamless unfolding of perception, action and experience: a golden braid in which each element twines intimately with the rest.” Cognitive science is widely held to have decisively unraveled these strands, inspiring instead a vision of disunity and dissociation. For instance, striking studies of patients with focal brain damage apparently reveal complex actions entirely unaccompanied by conscious experience. Against this, I argue that such apparent disunity is quite consistent with a naïve and unified picture of our mental lives.

Ian Phillips is currently Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Brain Sciences at Johns Hopkins University, where he is cross-appointed in the William H. Miller, III Department of Philosophy and the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences. Previously, he has taught at Princeton, Oxford, and University College London (where he obtained his PhD). He is the recipient of various awards, most notably: the Lebowitz Prize for philosophical achievement and contribution (with Ned Block), a Philip Leverhulme Prize, and the ASSC William James Prize for contributions to the scientific study of consciousness. His primary research interests include the nature of perception; the science of consciousness; and our experience of time.

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