Toward a Metafunctional Theory of Perception: Recursive Triadic Architecture, Neural Metabinding, and Perceptual Worldhood

Abstract

Perception remains conceptually elusive despite advances in predictive processing, multisensory integration, and large-scale network dynamics. This article develops the Metafunctional Theory of Perception (MTP), an integrative, neurophenomenologically constrained framework within the broader Brain Metafunction Framework. The MTP treats world disclosure as the governing function of perception, perceptual worldhood as its central explanatory construct and phenomenological outcome, neural metabinding as its core integrative process, and a recursive triadic architecture as its structural model. This architecture comprises the Afferent Loop of Perception, higher-order neural metabinding, and the Efferent Loop of Perception. Although its explanatory target is conscious perceptual worldhood, its organization depends extensively on nonconscious and prereflective sensory, embodied, attentional, mnemonic, affective, predictive, and action-related processes. The framework brings predictive processing, embodied and enactive cognition, ecological psychology, phenomenology, clinical neurology, and systems neuroscience into relation around the question of how distributed cortical–subcortical, bodily, and organism–world processes support coherent, externalized, embodied, and meaningful perceptual experience. Clinical and boundary phenomena—including phantom limb experiences, Charles Bonnet syndrome, Anton’s syndrome, blindsight, hemispatial neglect, Balint’s syndrome, hallucinations, depersonalization and derealization, and dreaming—serve as test cases for selective disruption and reorganization of the proposed architecture. The MTP generates empirically tractable predictions concerning sensory differentiation, integrative coherence, externalization, embodiment, participatory presence, network dynamics, and interventional outcomes. Status: Preprint, Version 1.0. This manuscript has not undergone formal peer review. It is Paper 1 of the Brain Metafunction Framework Open Preprint Series.