Iuliia Pliushch objects to my distinction between perceptions and feelings. The claim that “feelings do not have a direct sensory access to the world”, she says, relies on a meaning of "direct" that is not compatible with the view defended by predictive coding theorists, where “directness is an absence of the evidentiary boundary” (Pliushch this collection, p. 5). Being direct, then, if I understand this sentence correctly, means to lack independent evidence about the world of the kind that perception could bring. Although predictive coding offers a stimulating scheme for understanding mental function, it is open to interpretation and controversy. The functional hypothesis that perceiving and feeling are both indirect will appear highly counter-intuitive to many psychologists and philosophers.
As far as my article is concerned, I have defended the view that feelings are directly related to an opportunity, in the sense that they represent it in an immediate way, a view that has been defended by most affordance theorists. This is compatible with the claim that their informational pathway is derived from perception or memory. What may appear puzzling in my proposal is that an affordance is neither directly perceived nor inferred. It is directly sensed, which requires a different kind of ability. In section 5.1, I have proposed to distinguish associations from inferences, which is relevant to the present discussion. The kind of trigger for feelings are cues elicited in a currently active context, not inferences. These cues are delivered by sensory perception or by memory, but dealt with in a separate subsystem.