Subjective experience

…the challenges of developing laws for subjective experience.

Over the past thirty years or so, cognitive neuroscience has made spectacular progress understanding the biological mechanisms of consciousness. Consciousness science, as this field is now sometimes called, was not only inexistent thirty years ago, but its very name seemed like an oxymoron: how can there be a science of consciousness? And yet, despite this scepticism, we are now equipped with a rich set of sophisticated behavioural paradigms, with an impressive array of techniques making it possible to see the brain in action, and with an ever-growing collection of theories and speculations ab

Anil Seth discusses the scientific study of subjective experience and why perception can be described as controlled hallucination. He and Steven Strogatz consider the visual ambiguity of the dress, the relationship between brain activity and conscious experience, and public participation in mapping the diversity of human perception.

…However, an understanding of the subjective, qualitative aspects of perception remains elusive: qualia, or the personal, intrinsic properties of phenomenal awareness, have remained out of reach of these computational analytic insights. Here, I propose that metac