Perceiving space is knowing where things are in the world. Or is it?

I am sitting in my living room, and there are big windows on a courtyard. The windows are sound-proof and so if I open just one, acoustical waves mostly enter the room through that window. Now someone enters the courtyard on the right, walks across it and arrives at the door on the left. If I close my eyes, I know that the person is walking from right to left. However, what I hear is the sound of someone walking, always coming from the same direction, that of the window. If someone asks me where the person is at a given moment time, I could point to the more or less correct direction, by inference. But this is not what I perceive. I always perceive the sound coming from the same direction. There is a difference between perceiving (phenomenological) and knowing (conceptual). And there is a difference between phenomenology and behavior.

Another striking example is referred pain. Referred pain is a pain that one feels at a location away from the cause of the injury. For example, in a heart attack, one may feel pain in the arm rather than in the chest. This is a known phenomenon and if you know it, you may correctly identify the location of injury in the heart when you feel pain in the arm. But it doesn't change the fact that you feel pain in the arm. You may entirely convince yourself that the injury is in the heart, and all your behavior might be consistent with that belief, but still you will feel the pain in the arm.

There are several interesting conclusions we can draw from these remarks. First, perception is not entirely reducible to behavior. Here we are touching the hard problem of consciousness (qualia): you could observe a cat turning its head to a sound source and you would think that the cat perceives that the sound came from the source, but in reality you don't know. Maybe the cat perceives it somewhere else but it corrects its movement because it knows its perception tends to be biased. With humans, you could perhaps distinguish between these possibilities because humans speak. But without this option, a purely functionalist approach to perception (in terms of relationships between sensory stimuli and behavior) misses part of the phenomenon.

Second, inference is not the same as perception. Spatial perception is not just the process of inferring where something is from sensory inputs. There is also the experience of perception, which is not captured by the objectivist view.