Being You: A New Science of Consciousness

by Anil Seth

Does this mean that the chair’s redness has moved from being “out there” in the world to “in here” inside the brain? In one sense the answer is clearly no. There’s no red in the brain in the naive sense of there being some kind of red pigment—or “figment”—inside the head, to be inspected by a miniature video camera which feeds its output into yet another visual system which itself has a mini camera inside it . . . and so on. To assume that a perceived property of the outside world (redness) has to be somehow re-instantiated in the brain, in order for perception to happen, is to fall foul of what the philosopher Daniel Dennett has called the fallacy of “double transduction.” According to this fallacy, an external “redness” is transduced by the retina into patterns of electrical activity, which then have to be reconstituted—transduced again—into an internal “redness.” As Dennett points out, this kind of reasoning explains nothing. The only sense in which one could locate redness “in the brain” is simply because that’s where the mechanisms underlying perceptual experience are to be found. These mechanisms are, of course, not red.