Thought without Representation

TLDR: In this paper, it was argued that the most primitive knowledge about ourselves lacks any such a component: basic self-knowledge is intrinsically selfless, and that it can be inferred from the distance and direction of the object in front of us.

Abstract: I see a cup of coffee in front of me. I reach out, pick it up, and drink from it. I must then have learned how far the cup wasfrom me, and in what direction, for it is the position of the cup relative to me, and not its absolute position, that determines how I need to move my arm. But how can this be? I am not in the field of vision: no component of my visual experience is a perception of me. How then can this experience provide me with information about how objects are related to me? One might suppose that while no component of my perception is of me, some component of the knowledge to which it gives rise must be. Perhaps I am able to infer where the cup is from me, because I know how things look, when they are a certain distance and direction from me. Without a component standing for me, how could this knowledge guide my action, so that it is suited to the distance the cup is from me? But some philosophers think that our most primitive knowledge about ourselves lacks any such component: basic self-knowledge is intrinsically selfless. Something like this was presumably behind Lichtenberg's remark, that Descartes should have said 'It thinks' rather than 'I think'. And according to Moore, Wittgenstein approved of Lichtenberg's remark: