Together-Knowing A Sensorimotor Social Perspective on Consciousness

Abstract

While many theories focus on consciousness as a feature of individual brains, some instead situate it in a social context as an adaptation for the cognitive demands of human group life. Though these social approaches to consciousness provide an evolutionarily compelling and parsimonious account of its origins, it is less clear how the social basis of consciousness affects the phenomenological details of everyday experience. In this paper, I address this gap by merging the social theories with sensorimotor accounts of perceptual experience, arguing that certain core qualitative features of consciousness arise from joint action with others. This allows us to shift our perspective on consciousness by understanding how our phenomenology is permeated by our social interactions, and ultimately how consciousness may be the specific experience of an organism adapted for joint action.