Hurley’s Sensorimotor Loops and Embodied Interaction

Susan Hurley, a philosopher known for her interdisciplinary approach to mind and cognition, contributed to philosophy of mind and consciousness studies through her dynamical systems approach and her critique of traditional input-output models of cognition. She challenged the traditional “sandwich model” of cognition, which separates perception (input), cognition (central processing), and action (output). In her view, this model artificially separates what are in fact deeply interdependent processes.

She argues that perception and action are not just inputs and outputs but dynamically interwoven components of cognition. This would mean that consciousness is not merely the result of internal representations processed in isolation but emerges from sensorimotor loops between perception and action and embodied interaction with the world (Hurley, 1998).

Dynamical Systems and Extended Mind

As such, Hurley explores how information flows in both directions (e.g., action affects perception), which challenges linear models of conscious processing. She highlights complex feedback loops and argues that control systems theory and dynamical systems provide better models for understanding consciousness than static computational models (Hurley, 1998).

Hurley sees consciousness as deeply embedded in action and context, not as a static inner theater. She argues that understanding consciousness requires recognizing the co-constitutive nature of perception, cognition, and action. She assesses “the role of agency in the unity of a conscious perspective,” and argues that “perception and action are more deeply interdependent than we usually assume.” She considers “how this interdependence of perceptual experience and agency at the personal level (of mental contents and norms) may emerge from the subpersonal level (of underlying causal processes and complex dynamic feedback systems).”

Her two-level view is said to have wide implications for self-consciousness, the modularity of mind, and the relations of mind to world. “The self no longer lurks hidden somewhere between perceptual input and behavioral output, but reappears out in the open, embodied and embedded in its environment” (Hurley, 1998).

Hurley was an early proponent of “vehicle externalism”—the idea that the vehicles of mental content (not just the content itself) can extend beyond the brain into the body and environment. For consciousness, this would mean that it is not confined to internal representations inside the brain but may be distributed across brain, body, and environment.

In sum, while Hurley's theory of consciousness is less a classical “theory” in the narrow sense, she reconceptualized how consciousness arises from dynamic, interactive processes involving the body and environment. Her ways of thinking paved the way for later developments in theories of consciousness: enactivism, embodied cognition, extended mind theories, and neurophenomenology.