Research Program / Claims / outer-senses-3

The outer senses primarily process camouflage patterns, in contrast to the inner senses that process inner reality; the outer senses focus only on the relationship between the body and the camouflage environment, while the inner senses continuously and directly know the body itself.

外感官主要处理伪装模式，与处理内在实相的内感官相对；外感官只关注身体与伪装环境的关系，内感官则持续直接了解身体本身。

Concept outer senses · 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)
  • dreams-projections §2
Adjudicating experiment
For issue 1, recruit 100–150 people and orthogonally manipulate visual stimulus predictability, sensory noise, and attention, while adding a respiratory-resistance discrimination task. About 80 complete fMRI; compare leave-out prediction performance of predictive coding, adaptation, and attention-gain models. Measure model parameters and connectivity in the visual hierarchy and insula; duration 18–24 months. To test active inference, add active sampling and passive yoked-replay conditions; merely observing overlap between prediction error and sensory-area activation is insufficient to adjudicate between models.
Suggested paper title
Hierarchical Prediction Errors Across Exteroceptive and Interoceptive Processing: A Pre-registered fMRI Model Comparison
What it would overturn
Ordinary predictive-processing results do not require overturning mainstream hypotheses; only demonstrating that bodily knowledge can bypass afferent signals and neural inference would revise the hypothesis that interoception depends on neural signal processing.
Candidate labs / funders
Peter Kok（伦敦大学学院，Visual Perception Team）; Floris P. de Lange（拉德堡德大学，知觉与预测研究）; Sarah N. Garfinkel（身体信号与元认知研究）
Specificity of Seth's formulation
'Camouflage patterns' could be weakened to internal generative models, but that is the researchers' redefinition; the original text gives no parameters or predictions distinct from predictive processing.
Note
Prediction error is the difference between model prediction and input, not the entire perceptual representation, and certainly not evidence of external falseness. For related teams, see [UCL Visual Perception Group](https://www.in.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/visual-perception).
Evidence (3, DOI-verified via Crossref)
  • How Do Expectations Shape Perception? — Floris P. de Lange；Micha Heilbron；Peter Kok (2018), Trends in Cognitive Sciences
    综述支持预期影响感觉加工，但预期效应的具体计算实现仍需区分；没有将预测误差等同于“伪装”。[论文](https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/10056291/)
  • Interoception and Mental Health: A Roadmap — Sahib S. Khalsa等 (2018), Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging
    内感受指神经系统感知、解释和整合身体内部信号，涵盖有意识与无意识过程，不等于脱离神经系统的直接认识。[论文](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6054486/)
  • Knowing your own heart: distinguishing interoceptive accuracy from interoceptive awareness — Sarah N. Garfinkel；Anil K. Seth；Adam B. Barrett；Keisuke Suzuki；Hugo D. Critchley (2015), Biological Psychology
    80人研究显示身体信号检测准确性、主观敏感性与元认知可分离，不支持把主观内感受当作无误的身体知识。[论文](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25451381/)

Cite: Future Mind Institute, Seth Material Research Agenda, claim outer-senses-3, https://www.seth.org.cn/en/research/claims/outer-senses-3