Abstract

In a Bayesian brain, every perceptual decision will take into account internal priors as well as new incoming evidence. A reality monitoring system—eventually providing the agent with a subjective sense of reality avoids them being confused about whether our experience is perceptual or imagined. Yet not all confusions we experience mean that we wonder whether we may be imagining: some confused experiences feel clearly perceptual but still feel not right. What happens in such confused perceptions, and can the Bayesian brain explain this kind of confusion? In this paper, we offer a characterisation of perceptual confusion and argue that it requires our subjective sense of reality to be a composite of several subjective markers, including a categorical one that can clearly identify an experience as perceptual and connect us to reality. Our composite account makes new predictions regarding the robustness, the non-linear development and the possible breakdowns of the sense of reality in perception.