Explaining seeing? Disentangling qualia from perceptual organization

Abstract

Visual perception and integration seem to play an essential role in our conscious phenomenology. Relatively local neural processing of reentrant nature may explain several visual integration processes (feature binding or figure–ground segregation, object recognition, inference, competition), even without attention or cognitive control. Based on the above statements, should the neural signatures of visual integration (via reentrant process) be non‐reportable phenomenological qualia? We argue that qualia are not required to understand this perceptual organization.