Grief’s impact on sensorimotor expectations: an account of non-veridical bereavement experiences

The philosophy of grief has directed little attention to bereavement’s impact on perceptual experience. However, misperceptions, hallucinations and other anomalous experiences are strikingly common following the death of a loved one. Such experiences range from misperceiving a stranger to be the deceased, to phantom sights, sounds and smells, to nebulous quasi-sensory experiences of the loved one’s presence. This paper draws upon the enactive sensorimotor theory of perception to offer a phenomenologically sensitive and empirically informed account of these experiences. It argues that they can be understood as deriving from disruption to both sensorimotor expectations and perceived opportunities for action, stemming from the upheaval of bereavement. Different facets of the enactive sensorimotor approach can help to explain different types of post-bereavement perceptual experience. Post-bereavement misperceptions can be accounted for through the way that alterations to sensorimotor expectations can result in atypical ‘amodal completion’, while bereavement hallucinations can be understood as ‘appearances’ that fail to form part of the usual patterns of sensorimotor contingency. Quasi-sensory experiences of the presence of the deceased can be understood as resulting from changes to perceived affordances. This paper aims to demonstrate the explanatory value of key aspects of the sensorimotor approach by highlighting how they can help to explain the phenomenology of post-bereavement experiences. However, it also illuminates certain areas in which the sensorimotor approach ought to be supplemented, especially if it is to account for tight connections between perception, affect, and intersubjectivity that are salient in grief.

Sensorimotor agency

An enactive sensorimotor approach to perception places the agent at the center of the engagements that constitute a perceptual act. The notion of agency required, however, cannot be based solely on an organism’s biological well-being. Interests beyond mere survival guide many activities that animals with rich sensorimotor lives engage in. It is proposed that the processes that individuate a sensorimotor agent are the very acts that it performs, and that a network of precarious but mutually stabilizing sensorimotor schemes can satisfy the conditions of agency. Compatibility is demonstrated with dynamical approaches to behavioral development, as well as with psychological theories that support the view of a networked behavioral organization. The interdependence of agency at the organismic, sensorimotor, and social levels is discussed, as well as the relevance of sensorimotor agency, to understand the inherent meaningfulness of perception for the perceiver, as well as her subjectivity.

Structures of sensorimotor engagement

The idea of lawful relations between sensory and motor patterns, or sensorimotor contingencies (SMCs), lies at the heart of sensorimotor approaches to perception. Yet despite the concept’s importance, surprisingly few attempts have been made to define it formally. On closer inspection, the notion admits different interpretations. In this chapter, a dynamical formalization of agent–environment interaction serves as the starting point to identify four kinds of SMCs, which are defined in operational terms. These are the notions of sensorimotor environment (open-loop motor-induced sensory variations), sensorimotor habitat (closed-loop sensorimotor trajectories), sensorimotor coordination (reliable sensorimotor patterns playing a functional role), and sensorimotor scheme (normative organization of sensorimotor coordination events). The definitions are put to the test in a simple simulated object-discrimination task and their effect on the conceptual development and empirical, as well as model-based testing of the claims of the sensorimotor approach is discussed.

Representational pull, enactive escape velocity

Two different paths have been taken by researchers who argue that embodiment is crucial for understanding the mind. The first path is embodied functionalism, essentially the claim that traditional cognitivism needs to take into account the lessons of cognitive linguistics, dynamical systems explanations, and autonomous robotics seriously, so as to include bodily structures and processes in accounts of cognition. However, what it means to be a cognitive system remains unchanged and ruled by the computer metaphor. The other path rejects this metaphor and proposes that the self-organizing living body is constitutive of what it is to be a mind. This path, represented by enactivism, is not committed to a representational view of the mind, but rather understands it as an emergent, relational, world-involving phenomenon. The sensorimotor approach to perception may be interpreted in these terms; however, this approach requires a nonrepresentational account of sensorimotor mastery and a theory of agency.

The missing theory of agency

The sensorimotor approach emphasizes the significance of action as a determinant of perception, implicitly assuming an agent who engages in intentional actions serving his own interest. It has yet to concern itself with the origin of the norms guiding the agent’s behavior or with a definition of what an agent even is. The chapter examines how the enactive approach can fill this gap. It promotes a theory of agency grounded in the organizational properties of living systems and identifies three requirements—self-individuation, interactional asymmetry, and normativity—that are individually necessary and jointly sufficient to determine whether a system is an agent. The usefulness of the theory is tested by examining whether different systems satisfy these conditions. The chapter contributes to the conceptual clarification of the sensorimotor approach by showing how the notion of agency leads to an understanding of an organism’s sensors and effectors that goes beyond arbitrary anatomical distinctions.

The sense of agency

It has been recognized that the sensorimotor approach needs to be extended to account for not only the pragmatic aspects of perception but also the subjective phenomenology that characterizes experiences of the world and the self. In this chapter, the notion is proposed that sensorimotor agency can serve as the basis for a non-representational, world-involving theory of how agents perceive themselves as being the authors and in control of their actions. Both intentional and movement-related aspects in the phenomenology of agency experience are linked to processes of sensorimotor scheme selection and enactment in a self-sustaining network of interdependent sensorimotor schemes. The proposal is contrasted with traditional computational models in the context of various cases of pathological agency experience, and the ontological status of the sense of agency it implies is clarified in comparison with philosophical alternatives that deny its distinct experiential character.

Sensorimotor Life

This book elaborates a series of contributions to a non–representational theory of action and perception. It is based on current theoretical developments in the enactive approach to life and mind. These enactive ideas are applied and extended to provide a theoretically rich, naturalistic account of sensorimotor meaning and agency. This account supplies non–representational extensions to the sensorimotor approach to perceptual experience based on the notion of the living body as a self–organizing dynamic system in coupling with the environment. The enactive perspective entails the use of world–involving explanations, in which processes external to an agent co–constitute mental phenomena in ways that cannot be reduced to the supply of information for internal processing. These contributions to sensorimotor theories are a dynamical–systems description of different types of sensorimotor regularities or sensorimotor contingencies, a dynamical interpretation of Piaget's theory of equilibration to ground the concept of sensorimotor mastery, and a theory of agency as organized networks of sensorimotor schemes, with its implications for sensorimotor subjectivity. New tools are provided for examining the organization, development, and operation of networks of sensorimotor schemes that compose regional activities and genres of action with their own situated norms. This permits the exploration of new explanations for the phenomenology of agency experience that are favorably contrasted with traditional computational approaches and lead to new empirical predictions. From these proposals, capabilities once beyond the reach of enactive explanations, such as the possibility of virtual actions and the adoption of socially mediated abstract perceptual attitudes, can be addressed.