Research Program / Claims / distortion-5
Physical perception is an approximate psychological-level version of inner events, not an exact copy.
物理感知是内在事件的心理层面近似版本，而非精确复制。
Concept distortion · Domain Extended Perception and Consciousness Transduction · ontological claim · 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
100 adults participate in cross-over experiments involving mental imagery, expectancy cues, and actual visual stimuli, with MEG or fMRI recording and continuous direction reports, 3 sessions each, project duration 12 months; compare out-of-sample predictive performance of external stimulus encoding, internal template, and weighted combination models. This paradigm can quantify approximate representation; however, if 'inner events' refers to non-neural sources, an independent measurement beyond perceptual reports must be provided.
Suggested paper title
Internal Templates and External Input in the Construction of Visual Percepts
What it would overturn
Approximate representation alone does not overturn mainstream theory; only proof that perceptual sources are independent of sensory input and neural generative activity would challenge the assumption that perceptual content is jointly formed by these activities.
Candidate labs / funders
Peter Kok，University College London 的 Visual Perception Team; Floris P. de Lange，Radboud University 的 Predictive Brain Lab
Specificity of Seth's formulation
'Perception is not an exact copy' is compatible with modern perception theory; 'copying of inner events' adds an ontological commitment without providing unique empirical predictions.
Note
One must distinguish neural representation, subjective experience, and the original text's inner events; equating them directly would make the claim tautologically supported rather than experimentally validated.
Evidence (1, DOI-verified via Crossref)
Cite: Future Mind Institute, Seth Material Research Agenda, claim distortion-5, https://www.seth.org.cn/en/research/claims/distortion-5