The first point to make is that the key to the whole procedure will be

presents
Points of View 191
no ontogenetic difficulties, since the capacity to feel sensations is innate
and certainly present long before birth. There is no need to explain how
the capacity to feel sensations arises in the developing individual.11 I have
also discussed how positing a primitive feeling of familiarity can help with
understanding the transition from intentional behavior without conscious
recognitional abilities to intentional behavior that does incorporate conscious
recognitional abilities. The real problems come with the transition
from basic sentience to intentional behaviour. How can this transition
take place?
The first point to make is that the key to the whole procedure will be
provided by associations between stimuli and sensations. A vital part of
the evolutionary purpose of the capacity to feel sensations must presumably
be to make it possible for organisms to learn from their environment.
In its most basic form, this will take the form of correlations between
painful stimuli and harmful sensations and corresponding correlations
between pleasurable stimuli and beneficial sensations. The mechanisms
that allow such correlations to emerge support the basic form of learning:
learning that enables the organism to avoid things that are harmful to it
while actively pursuing things that are beneficial to it. At this level we are,
of course, dealing with stimulus-response behavior and the question is,
how and why does stimulus-response behavior develop into behavior
showing the flexibility and plasticity characteristic of intentional behavior?
The answer I tentatively offer is that intentional behavior emerges
when the number of stimulus-response correlations potentially relevant
to any given action becomes so great that the need arises to choose between
a range of possible responses to a given situation. The real point
about intentional behavior is that a creature behaving intentionally behaves
in a way that it need not have (which is why one important criterion
for intentional behavior is whether or not there is a lawlike correlation
between environmental stimulus and behavioral response). It is plausible
to see this sort of situation arising because there are so many ways in
which the creature could have behaved. The most primitive form of intentional
action surely arises when a decision procedure emerges for deciding
between competing possible courses of action, each of which may itself
have a nonintentional ancestry. Intentional behavior should be understood
at least in part as a response to a computational problem.
192 Chapter 7
8
Navigation and Spatial Reasoning
Previous chapters have uncovered some of the basic elements of primitive
self-consciousness. In chapter 5, I used ecological theories of perception
to show how nonconceptual first-person contents can feature in the
structure of perception, particularly visual perception. Chapter 6 explored
conscious somatic proprioception as a comparable source of
self-specifying contents. Both of these are ground-level forms of selfconsciousness
in the sense that, although they are not on their own sufficient
to warrant the ascription of self-consciousness in anything but a
derivative sense, they will be crucial building blocks in states that are
properly described as self-conscious. In chapter 7, I began to show how
one works up to self-conscious states by developing the notion of experience
that reflects a nonconceptual point of view on the world, understanding
this to involve taking a particular route through space-time in
such a way that one’s perception of the world is informed by an awareness
that one is taking such a route. I have so far examined only one aspect of
what it is to have a nonconceptual point of view on the world, namely,
that it must involve conscious or explicit memory as a condition of conscious
place recognition. This chapter will complete the account.
8.1 From Place Recognition to a Nonconceptual Point of View:
Navigation and Spatial Awareness
At the heart of the notion of a nonconceptual point of view is registration
of the nonsolipsistic distinction between experience and what is experienced.
A minimal requirement of being able to make such a distinction is
that what is being experienced should be grasped as having an existence independent
of any particular apprehension of it. This in turn requires recognition
that what is experienced exists at times other than the particular
occasion on which it is apprehended. This is where conscious memory
deployed in recognition enters the picture, as a basic way of recognizing
this independent existence, because recognizing something involves correlating
past and present experience of that object. I then suggested that
recognizing places in terms of features present at those places is the most
basic way in which this can be carried out. This already takes us beyond
the account given of somatic proprioception and beyond Gibson’s account
of first-person contents gained through the pick-up of self-specifying information,
but it still leaves us short of the notion of a nonconceptual
point of view on the world for reasons that will emerge in this section.
Although conscious place recognition has been offered as a way of registering
the distinction between subjective experience and what it is experience
of, it is not yet clear that we have an account of place recognition
rich enough for the job. In the previous chapter, place recognition was
explained through the recognition of features or objects* at particular
places. This indirect way of thinking about places needs to be distinguished
from the more direct way of thinking about places that registers
that they are places. Only the second of these ways manifests what can
properly be described as an understanding of space, because understanding
the nature of space involves understanding that a network of spatial
relations holds between places independently of the spatial relations that
hold at any given time between the various objects* or features found at
those places. It is potentially misleading to say, as many philosophers have
said, that space is a single system of spatial relations. Certainly, there is
only a single system of spatial relations in the sense that all places are
interconnected, that is, in the sense that there cannot be two or more
spaces that are spatially insulated from each other. Nonetheless, for practical
purposes, there are two importantly different types of spatial relations.
There is the static and relatively unchanging system of spatial
relations holding between places, and there is the highly changeable system
of spatial relations holding between things always located at a particular
place but not always at the same place.
The essence of navigation, and spatial thought in general, is bringing
these two types of spatial relations into harmony—being able to calcu-