Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-8ctnn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-01-05T15:18:55.573Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Virtual action: O'Regan & Noë meet Bergson

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 June 2005

Stephen E. Robbins
Stephen E. Robbins*
Affiliation:
Center for Advanced Product Engineering, Metavante Corporation, Milwaukee, WI53224
*
[email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract:

Bergson, writing in 1896, anticipated “sensorimotor contingencies” under the concept that perception is “virtual action.” But to explain the external image, he embedded this concept in a holographic framework where time-motion is an indivisible and the relation of subject/object is in terms of time. The target article's account of qualitative visual experience falls short for lack of this larger framework.

[Objects] send back, then, to my body, as would a mirror, their eventual influence; they take rank in an order corresponding to the growing or decreasing powers of my body. The objects which surround my body reflect its possible action upon them.

– Henri Bergson (1896/1912, pp. 6–7)

Type
Continuing Commentary
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 27 , Issue 6 , December 2004 , pp. 906 - 907
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2004

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

Commentary onO'Regan & Noë (2001). A sensorimotor account of vision and visual consciousness. BBS 24(5):939–1031.