Research Program / Claims / distortion-1

Without distortion, you cannot consciously perceive data.

没有扭曲，你就无法有意识地感知数据。

Concept distortion · Domain Extended Perception and Consciousness Transduction · mechanism · interface 3/3 · testability 3/3 · status untested · ★ fundable

This program treats the Seth Material as a source of hypotheses, not as doctrine to be validated. Lead dossiers are AI-compiled from the corpus with a book-and-session citation after every statement; literature reviews are AI web-search summaries whose references were all DOI-verified against Crossref; the agenda draft is an AI synthesis. None of it is Seth's original text, and none of it represents scientific consensus. English fields are machine-translated; the Chinese text is authoritative.

Seth sources (book §session)
Adjudicating experiment
Pre-registered orientation discrimination experiment with 120 adults, crossing cue validity, stimulus signal-to-noise ratio, and report requirements, recording 128-channel EEG, eye movements, accuracy, and confidence; 60 of them receive a crossover TMS over the frontal lobe vs. sham, with 3 visits each, project duration ~12 months. Compare models of sensory encoding changes, decision criterion changes, and reporting bias; pre-specify an equivalence bound for negligible bias. If conscious clarity with bias falling within the equivalence interval, it would refute the operationalized 'necessity of bias,' but cannot prove absolute zero distortion.
Suggested paper title
Is Perceptual Bias Necessary for Conscious Vision? A Preregistered EEG and TMS Study
What it would overturn
If systematic bias is proven to be a necessary condition for consciousness, it would modify the hypothesis that 'conscious perception can occur without systematic bias within the precision of established measurement.'
Candidate labs / funders
Floris P. de Lange，Radboud University 的 Predictive Brain Lab; Peter Kok，University College London 的 Visual Perception Team
Specificity of Seth's formulation
'No distortion, no consciousness' is stronger than 'expectations influence perception,' but does not define the indicator, threshold, or scope of distortion, so no directly comparable quantitative prediction exists.
Note
The overall statement is assessed as written; 'untested' means this search found no direct test, not that no one has studied it; cited adjacent evidence does not constitute validation of Seth theory, sample sizes are planned magnitudes requiring formal power analysis; frontal EEG electrode effects cannot be directly localized as frontal predictive signals.
Evidence (3, DOI-verified via Crossref)

Cite: Future Mind Institute, Seth Material Research Agenda, claim distortion-1, https://www.seth.org.cn/en/research/claims/distortion-1