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Visually guided action: the 'directive' content of visual experience. The phenomena of blindsight and other vision-action dissociations are usually taken to be phenomena of consciousness. It has been argued that since visually guided actions may be intact in the absence of visual experience, these dissociations show that visually guided actions are not guided by visual experience but by unconscious visual processes. Visual experiences are usually taken to have representational content of a kind I label ‘presentational'. I argue that the control of action in general requires states with what I label ‘directive' representational content, and hence that actions can be guided by visual experiences only if visual experiences have directive content. I show that the hypothesis that visual experiences have two kinds of content can explain the vision-action dissociations without appealing to consciousness and suggest that there is something that it is like to have an experience with directive content. I conclude that visual experience can guide action, and that blindsight is not a phenomenon of consciousness. |
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