ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses many so-called perceptual phenomena actually reveal nothing about the characteristics of the mind-brain system beyond the bare fact that it is sensitive to the parameters and properties of the causal agent. The information coming through the senses, although some external force or process may have transformed it, is then processed by the brain in a more or less informationally passive, but from all points of view, veridical way. The brain, almost of necessity, according to Rene Descartes and others had to have some a priori cognitive capabilities to "bootstrap" subsequent logical processes. Realisms have been traditionally been the antagonists of idealisms as well as, to a considerable degree, dualistic notions of mind and brain. A number of perceptual psychologists also can be characterized as being in the rationalist, mediated, endogenous camp. It is unlikely that the boundary between endogenous and exogenous processes is going to be a sharp one.
