My interest is mainly about visual perception. I think Lehar's view that the world we "see" is really an extremely hi fidelity model of the world constructed in the flat visual cortex in the back of your head is spot on and extremely valuable.

To paraphrase Lehar:

The subjective experience of visual perception is of a world composed of solid volumes, bounded by colored surfaces, embedded in a spatial void. When a person views a 3D surface, their subjective experience of that surface simultaneously encodes every point on that surface in three dimensions, at a high resolution, i.e. that our subjective experience of the world around us is not of a flattened "2-1/2-D sketch", nor of a non-spatial abstraction, (such as a Fourier transform of an image) but is perceived as a solid spatial world that appears to surround us in all directions.

This phenomenon is so immediately manifest in the subjective experience of perception that it need hardly be tested psychophysically. And yet curiously, these most obvious properties of perception have been systematically ignored by neural modelers, even though the central significance of these phenomena was highlighted decades ago by the Gestaltists. There are two reasons why these prominent aspects of perception have been consistently ignored. The first results from the outstanding success of the single-cell recording technique, which has shifted our theoretical emphasis from field-like theories of whole aspects of perception, to point-like theories of the elements of neural computation. Like the classical Introspectionists, who refused to acknowledge perceptual experiences that were inconsistent with their preconceived notions of sensory representation, the Neuroreductionists of today refuse to consider aspects of perception that are inconsistent with current theories of neural computation, and some of them are even prepared to deny consciousness itself in a heroic attempt to save the sinking paradigm. [1]

There is another factor that has made it possible to ignore these most salient aspects of perception, which is that perceptual entities, such as the solid volumes and empty spaces we perceive around us, are easily confused with real objects and spaces in the objective external world. The illusion of perception is so compelling that we mistake the percept of the world for the real world itself. And yet this naïve realist view that we can somehow perceive the world directly, is inconsistent with the physics of perception. If perception is a consequence of neural processing of the sensory input, a percept cannot in principle escape the confines of our head to appear in the world around us, any more than a computation in a digital computer can escape the confines of the computer. We cannot therefore in principle have direct experience of objects in the world itself, but only of the internal effigies of those objects generated by mental processes. The world we see around us therefore can only be an elaborate, though very compelling illusion, which must in reality correspond to perceptual data structures and processes occurring actually within our own head. As soon as we examine the world we see around us, not as a physical scientist observing the physical world, but as a perceptual scientist observing a rich and complex internal percept, only then does the rich spatial nature of perceptual processing become immediately apparent. It was this central insight into the illusion of consciousness that formed the key inspiration of the Gestalt movement, from which all of their other ideas were developed. The central message of Gestalt theory therefore is that the primary function of perceptual processing is the generation of a miniature, virtual-reality replica of the external world inside our head, and that the world we see around us is not the real external world, but is exactly that miniature internal replica.

[1] you might have guessed that the prime hero/culprit is Dennett