Sensation depends on which nerve is stimulated rather than on what stimulates it, so experience is a construction of the system.
Müller's 1835 doctrine. Pressing the eyeball produces light because the optic nerve reports light regardless of what stimulated it. Experience is a construction of the system, not a transcript of the world.
In practice
- A patient with an amputated leg feels it ache, because the pathway reports a leg whatever is at the far end of it.
- A pilot's spatial disorientation in cloud is the vestibular system reporting confidently on inputs it was not built to interpret.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Psychology & Behavior
- Essay
- Theories of the mind, from the lab to the bookshop