"Sensation is not the conduction of a quality or state of external bodies to consciousness, but the conduction of a quality or state of our nerves to consciousness, excited by an external cause"
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Muller is quietly detonating the commonsense fantasy that perception is a clean delivery service: world goes in, mind receives it, done. His sentence flips the direction of authority. Sensation, he insists, is not the external object arriving intact in consciousness; it is the nervous system reporting on its own condition after being prodded by the world. The external cause matters, but it doesn’t get the last word. Your experience is, first and always, a readout of your wiring.
That framing is the intellectual seed of modern neuroscience and, just as importantly, modern skepticism about “seeing is believing.” Muller’s point anticipates the doctrine of specific nerve energies: stimulate the optic nerve any way you like - light, pressure, electrical current - and you get vision-like experience because it’s the optic nerve talking. The subtext is bracing: perception is not a window; it’s an instrument panel. Consciousness doesn’t meet the thing-in-itself; it meets the body’s interpretation of a disturbance.
Placed in the early-to-mid 19th century, this is a decisive break from older philosophical habits that treated the senses as semi-transparent channels to reality. Muller writes at the moment physiology is becoming experimental, mechanical, and willing to demote intuition. The rhetorical move is clinical but radical: he relocates “quality” from the object to the organism. In one stroke, color, sound, even pain become less like properties out there and more like negotiated outputs of a biological system. That’s not relativism for its own sake; it’s a power grab for method, insisting that to understand mind you start with nerves, not metaphysics.
That framing is the intellectual seed of modern neuroscience and, just as importantly, modern skepticism about “seeing is believing.” Muller’s point anticipates the doctrine of specific nerve energies: stimulate the optic nerve any way you like - light, pressure, electrical current - and you get vision-like experience because it’s the optic nerve talking. The subtext is bracing: perception is not a window; it’s an instrument panel. Consciousness doesn’t meet the thing-in-itself; it meets the body’s interpretation of a disturbance.
Placed in the early-to-mid 19th century, this is a decisive break from older philosophical habits that treated the senses as semi-transparent channels to reality. Muller writes at the moment physiology is becoming experimental, mechanical, and willing to demote intuition. The rhetorical move is clinical but radical: he relocates “quality” from the object to the organism. In one stroke, color, sound, even pain become less like properties out there and more like negotiated outputs of a biological system. That’s not relativism for its own sake; it’s a power grab for method, insisting that to understand mind you start with nerves, not metaphysics.
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| Topic | Science |
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