Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>Sense and Action develops a systematic account of the way sensory systems like thirst, hunger, sleep drive, itch, pain, and thermoreception drive and influence human action. This is a topic that has not yet received any sustained philosophical examination. These are all sensory systems, with complex, dedicated receptor networks that keep track of bodily and environmental features. They are also strongly motivating: they play an essential role in initiating, sustaining, influencing, and terminating our actions. They do this in a flexible way that is (up to a point) subject to top-down cognitive control. Such systems play an outsized role in our daily actions, but their motivating functions remain poorly understood. The author argues that one should stop trying to understand these systems individually on a case-by-case basis and instead should adopt a more multisensory perspective wherein these systems function as an interacting group rather than as individual routes of influence. On this view, one should understand them as working together in forming what the author calls the motivational layer, a psychological stage in which sensory systems engage in competitive exchange for control over a limited set of core motivational tools—psychological processes like attention, sensory pleasure and pain, salience, motor bias, imagery, and the like—to strongly drive and influence human actions. While all of the material and arguments here are new, the book brings together, revises, and unifies much of the author’s previous work over the past decade, putting his ideas about multisensory interaction, sensory affect, and psychological integration together in service of novel, sustained account of the way the fundamental sensory systems drive and guide action.</jats:p>