Self-location in perceptual experience: A top-down account

Abstract

Perceptual experience is self-locating. This claim aligns with our intuitions and is the dominant view in philosophy. To defend the claim, some philosophers have advanced perspectival accounts and others have advanced agentive accounts. Here, I explore tensions between the two accounts and propose a novel, integrative account: the top-down view, which defends that visual experience is self-locating in virtue of cognitive maps that modulate visual processing in a top-down fashion. I assess recent neuroscientific evidence of spatial modulation in the visual cortex and show how it turns existing notions of self-location upside-down, shifting the focus from bottom-up to top-down processes.