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Sensing, objects, and awareness: Reply to commentators

I am very grateful to my commentators for their interest and their careful attention to A Theory of Sentience. It is particularly gratifying to find other philosophers attracted to the murky domain of pre-attentive sensory processing, an obscure place where exciting stuff happens. I can by no means answer all of their objections or counter-arguments, and some of the problems noted derive from failures in my original exposition. But a theory is a success if it helps spur the creation of better successors. By those lights this one seems to be succeeding admirably. Would that every author could receive such commentaries! Two themes resound through the commentaries, and I will focus most of my efforts on them. The first is the relation between sensory feature-placing and the perception of objects; the second the relation between feature-placing and our conscious perceptual experience. Cohen and Matthen lodge numerous objections under the first heading; Rey and Levine post most of theirs under the second one. Of course each author also adds objections unique to themselves, and I shall address as many as can be fit into the space-time region allotted to this reply.