Manzotti, R. (2006). An alternative view of conscious perception. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 13(6), 45-79.
[Abstract]I present a view of conscious perception that supposes a processual unity between the activity in the brain and the perceived event in the external world. I use the rainbow to provide a first example, and subsequently extend the same rationale to more complex examples such as perception of objects, faces and movements. I use a process-based approach as an explanation of ordinary perception and other variants, such as illusions, memory, dreams and mental imagery. This approach provides new insights into the problem of conscious representation in the brain and phenomenal consciousness. It is a form of anti-cranialism different from but related to other kinds of externalism.
[Citing Place (1956)]
Citing Place (1956) in context (citations start with an asterisk *):
Section 1. Unity Between the Perceived and the Perceiver
* However, as soon as the separation between functional and phenomenal properties is assumed, a problem arises. Why should a functional structure have a phenomenal side? As far as we know, in the brain there is nothing like the content of our phenomenal experiences. ‘If consciousness is a brain process …, how could my conscious experience of my grandmother have these features — such as the colour of her eyes —that no brain process could have?’(Tonneau, 2004; Place, 1956). When a subject tastes the flavour of a piece of chocolate, in his/her brain there is nothing with the property of that flavour. On the contrary there are neural patterns with completely different properties. Why should the latter be experienced as the former? Nobody knows. Furthermore, nobody knows how phenomenal experience, supposedly emergent from neural patterns functionally linked with external objects, is related with the physical properties of the piece of chocolate.