Does the approach need a leap of faith?

At the beginning of the 20th Century, people felt that life was a mysterious thing which we were somehow infused with, and they could not conceive how this mystery could be explained by mechanistic, physico-chemical processes.

Today we no longer believe it is necessary to appeal to any magical processes to account for life. We have made a leap of faith. We believe that "life" is a word that refers to a number of capacities that living organisms possess. Each of these capacities can be explained without appeal to any magic.

The situation is similar for consciousness. The sensorimotor approach suggests a way of accounting for the particular quality of sensory experience: how it is different from other mental activities, how the qualities differ within and between sensory modalities. It claims that "consciousness" is a word that refers to a number of capacities that certain organisms possess. Each of these capacities can be explained without appeal to magic.

We need to make a leap of faith.

The leap is hard to make, because we really do feel things. But the sensorimotor approach accounts for why we really do feel things, for example when we write our professional resumes, and what those things feel like. The approach says that we feel things because it really is true that the entities that we refer to when we use the word "we" engage in certain very particular forms of interaction (namely sensorimotor skills with corporality and alerting capacity) when they have experiences, and those experiences therefore have a very particular "felt" quality.

But of course it is difficult to swallow our pride and admit that we merely are machines.