It is a common assumption in philosophy and the cognitive sciences that information processing involving conscious, personal-level representations is required for spontaneous, deliberate action. If so, is it a distinctive feature of such representations that they are needed for spontaneous actions?
To motivate an affirmative answer, theorists often invoke ‘blind-sight’, a pathological condition in which subjects are, due to damage to the primary visual cortex, partially blind but still able, when persuaded by, e.g., the experimenter, to direct appropriate behaviour toward target-objects placed in their blind-field (scotoma); all of which, they deny seeing (Weiskrantz 2009). For instance, a blind-sight patient might reach for an object at the right place and with her hand pre-shaped in the right way yet be surprised at her own success when getting hold of the object. This is often explained by holding that the patient represents the object, but does so only unconsciously (see Wallhagen 2007, for an interesting opposing view).
Crucially, individuals with the condition won’t reach for an object unless they are prompted to do so by the experimenter. In a study with primates, for instance, when food was put in the visual field of a food-deprived ‘blind-sighted’ monkey, the monkey made no attempt to reach for or approach it (Cowey and Weiskrantz 1963). The point that blind-sight subjects need to be coaxed to interact with the objects in their visual field is often taken to suggest that in order to be able to spontaneously interact with objects in one’s vicinity, one needs to entertain conscious representations about the objects (Bayne 2013).
But consider, for instance, so-called ‘split-brain’ patients (Gazzaniga 2000). These are subjects whose two brain hemispheres have been separated. They too tend to deny seeing stimuli presented in their left visual field. In this respect, they are similar to people with blind-sight. Yet, unlike them, split-brain patients nonetheless use representations of the objects presented in their left visual field spontaneously and rationally (Gazzaniga 2000; Shea and Bayne 2010), e.g., to draw or choose an object that they are asked about.
The split-brain data might be taken to suggest that spontaneous interactions with objects are possible without conscious, personal-level representations of the objects. Or it might be maintained that since spontaneous actions are involved, so are conscious, personal-level representations about the objects with which the split-brain patient interacts. It’s not obvious how to adjudicate the matter.