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Tallis in Wonderland

Perception as a Controlled Hallucination

Raymond Tallis argues against calling everyday experience a ‘hallucination’.

Over the festive season, in the intervals between eating, drinking, Covid-secure socializing, and giving and receiving gifts, I read Anil Seth’s Being You: A New Science of Consciousness (2021). Beautifully written, with its wonderful erudition worn lightly, it is a must-read. It gathers up in one relatively short book the strongest possible case for believing that we are getting closer to understanding “how the various properties of consciousness depend on, and relate to, the operations of the neural wetware inside our heads” (p.5). Yet after reading Being You, the reader may see why ‘the strongest possible case’ falls well short of being strong enough.

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