I often listen to the talks from The Royal Institute, sometimes while driving, like a podcast. A recent one in my playlist was a re-discovered talk by Anil Seth, “Is Reality a Controlled Hallucination?” – I remember his talk at TED four or five years back.
We think perception is a process of reading out sensory signals. it seems as though the world pours itself into our minds through the transparent windows of our senses. While it’s actually the other way around: What we perceive is coming inside-out, and the sensory data is just keeping our perceptual best guesses in check.
if hallucination is an uncontrolled perception (balance between predictions and prediction errors is gone) then perception is a controlled hallucination.
Anil Seth
