Being You: A New Science of Consciousness

by Anil Seth

the story gets going with the German physicist and physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz. In the late nineteenth century, among a string of influential contributions, Helmholtz proposed the idea of perception as a process of “unconscious inference.” The contents of perception, he argued, are not given by sensory signals themselves but have to be inferred by combining these signals with the brain’s expectations or beliefs about their causes. In calling this process “unconscious,” Helmholtz understood that we are not aware of the mechanisms by which perceptual inferences happen, only of the results. Perceptual judgments—his “unconscious inferences”—keep track of their causes in the world by continually and actively updating perceptual best guesses as new sensory data arrive. Helmholtz saw himself as providing a scientific version of Kant’s insight that perception cannot allow us to know things in the world directly—that we can infer only that things are there, behind the sensory veil.