“Instead of calling hallucination a false external perception, we must call external perception a true [or ‘controlled’] hallucination.” (Hippolyte Taine 1870.) Taine was a philosophically naive theorist of the 'inner phantom’. His 2 volume “On Intelligence” repeatedly 1/7

proclaims his belief that hallucinatory 'phantoms’ obtain during all of veridical perception, illusion, or (what we'd normally call) hallucination. His ‘proof’ is the following absurd petitio principii: “In order to establish that external perception, even when accurate, is 2/7

an hallucination, it is sufficient to observe that its first phase is a sensation. – In fact, a sensation, and notably a tactile or visual sensation, engenders, by its presence alone, an internal phantom which appears as an external object. … Hence we see that the objects we 3/7

touch, see, or perceive by any one of our senses, are nothing more than semblances or phantoms precisely similar to those which arise in the mind of a hypnotised person, a dreamer, a person labouring under hallucinations, or afflicted by subjective sensations.” Taine’s 4/7

contemporary Hermann von Helmholtz developed a similar (mis)conception of the relation of sensory stimulation to perception; recent inheritors of this include Gregory, Marr, Frith, Friston & Corlett. Such a conception ties together two equally confused pictures. One relates 5/7

mind to body by placing experience as a final inner stage of neurological processing (rather than as involving all relevant components of an organism’s sensorimotoric engagement with its world). The other tasks the brain with inwardly reconstructing (hypothesising, 6/7

picturing, unconsciously inferring) what must have been the outer causes either of the ‘inner experiences' or of the sense organs’ stimulation (rather than with maintaining a tightly coupled, robust, sensorimotorically realised, grip on the world). 7/7