Why Red Doesn’t Sound Like a Bell: Understanding the Feel of Consciousness. By Kevin O’Regan. Published in June 2011 by Oxford University Press.
An account of the nature of consciousness based on recent discoveries in neuroscience, especially in the study of mechanisms of attention allocation. Makes a persuasive case that the subjective sensations generated by different sense modalities are grounded in the motor capacities we deploy for exploring the world. Contrary to a widespread illusion about sense perception, we do not experience the world as a simultaneous panorama; instead our brain fills in the many gaps in our sense perception because it can explore the external world to verify the hypotheses it makes when filling in. This is a very original and important contribution to the philosophical understanding of consciousness that undermines traditional claims about the incorrigibility of subjective experience; far from being incorrigible, subjective experience is frequently thoroughly deluded about its own nature. Buy here.