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.