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Action in Perception
Alva Noë's 2004 book, the foundational text of his enactive approach — the work that established the thesis that perceiving is something we do, not something that happens to us, and that sensorimotor skill is constitutive of perceptual experience.
Action in Perception (MIT Press, 2004) is the work in which Alva Noë systematically developed the enactive theory of perception he had begun to articulate with J. Kevin O'Regan in their 2001 sensorimotor contingencies paper. The book argues that perception is not a process of constructing internal representations of a pre-given world but a skilled activity of active exploration governed by practical sensorimotor knowledge. The book became a founding document of the enactive approach alongside Varela, Thompson, and Rosch's The Embodied Mind (1991), and its arguments remain central to the current dispute between computational and enactive approaches to cognition — and, by extension, to what AI is and is not doing.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The book takes as its opening target the representationalist orthodoxy in vision science — the view, developed by David Marr and others, that visual experience is produced by the brain's construction of increasingly sophisticated