Abstract

It has been argued that if dreams are genuine conscious experiences that are constituted solely by neural processes, then sensorimotor enactivism cannot pass as a general theory of consciousness. However, the existence of brain-bound dreams would not eliminate the possibility of sensorimotor enactivism being true about veridical perceptual experiences. Nevertheless, it can be argued that the existence of brain-bound dreams would undermine the main motivation and weaken the explanatory appeal of sensorimotor enactivism about perceptual experiences. For if dreams are fully brain-bound then it cannot be the case that brains are incapable of generating the phenomenal features that are explanatorily relevant for sensorimotor enactivists. Hence it remains a plausible hypothesis -- regardless of all the apparent explanatory success of sensorimotor enactivism --- that a future brain-bound account of dreams entails also an illuminating brain-bound account of perceptual experiences.