Chapitre 8. La perception de l’espace, identification d’une faculté sensori-motrice ?

Sensations pose a longstanding quandary to science : namely the problem of explaining phenomenal experience from physical principles. The dominant view today is that sensations are determined by properties of cortical representations, e. g. the feeling of redness would he defined by neuronal specifics. On the other hand, the sensorimotor approach argues that sensations are determined by properties of the laws that constrain organisms’ interaction with their environment. This suggests that in biological organisms, the perceived structure of reality, in particular the notions of body, environment, space, object, and attribute, could be a consequence of an effort on the part of brains to account for the dependency between their inputs and their outputs in terms of a small number of parameters. To validate this idea, we present a procedure whereby the brain of a (simulated) organism with arbitrary input and output connectivity can deduce the rigid group of the space underlying its input-output relationship, that is the dimension and the geometrical structure of what the organism will call physical space