Theoretical analysis models subjective experience through shared sensory and cognitive mechanisms, demonstrating how genuine perceptions, illusions, and hallucinations share a common architecture.
This paper introduces a unified framework for the philosophy of perception that systematically integrates bottom-up sensory constraints with top-down cognitive processes. By establishing a shared structural architecture for all subjective experiences, the present framework demonstrates how genuine perceptions, illusions, and hallucinations can be derived from the same underlying mechanism. Ultimately, this approach moves beyond traditional passive causal models of perception, offering an explanatory system that bridges analytic philosophy of mind with contemporary cognitive science. The present framework is established on trivial first principles, and allows not only for a consistent taxonomy of subjective experiences but also for the identification of two types of perceptual and non-perceptual hallucinations.
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Ali Safaei (2026) studied this question.