Is Consciousness an Illusion?
I’ve spent the last couple of years hosting the YouTube Channel Mind Chat with Keith Frankish, who is an illusionist about consciousness. An illusionist is someone who thinks that the so-called ‘hard problem of consciousness’ is rooted in a radically incorrect conception of consciousness, and that once we reject that incorrect conception of consciousness, the problem goes away. Whether this amount to denying the existence of ‘consciousness’ will depend on what exactly one means by ‘consciousness.’ Illusionists are at least committed to denying the existence of consciousness as it is conceived of by many philosophers, and perhaps also by much of the public.
I used to find this view bonkers. But I love getting in the head of people I radically disagree with, struggling to see the world out of their eyes, and I now think illusionism a genuine possibility. Having said that, I still don’t think there’s much reason to think illusionism is true. In what follows, I’ll explain why I think illusionism might be true and why I think it probably isn’t.
Sometimes we can know things through reflecting on our concepts. The fact that all bachelors are unmarried is the hackneyed example. When I reflect carefully on my concept of pain, it seems just totally obvious that for someone to ‘feel pain’ doesn’t consist in facts about that person’s behaviour, or the behaviour of their internal parts. There could be a really complicated robot which behaves just like me, and has parts that behave all the same ways my parts do, e.g. instigating avoidance behaviour when it’s damaged, but which is just an unfeeling mechanism. This seems as evident to me when reflecting on my concept of ‘feeling pain’ as the impossibility of married bachelors seems when reflecting on the concept of ‘bachelor.’
But maybe natural selection has brain washed me to think that pain is something more than mere behavioural functioning. In 1984, Winston Smith gets brain washed into thinking that 2+2=5. Perhaps natural selection has likewise tricked me into thinking the falsehood that ‘pain is more than mere behavioural functioning’ is an undeniable conceptual truth. That seems to be a possibility I can’t rule out for certain.
This, then, is the first thing I think illusionists should say:
The First Illusion: The only kind of consciousness that exists is what we might call ‘functional consciousness,’ where to be functionally conscious is a matter of how a system and its parts behave (or are disposed to behave). But natural selection has brain washed us into thinking our functional consciousness is something more than functional consciousness. We can’t help thinking the water is really wine.
That’s not enough though. The next problem is that our conscious experiences seems to be populated by qualities – colours, sounds, smells, tastes – that can’t be fully accounted for in the purely quantitative vocabulary of physical science. Of course, there’s a huge debate here: some materialists think you can explain these qualities in the terms of physical science, a view I’ll explore in later posts. But illusionists like Keith and anti-materialists like myself tend to agree that these subjective qualities resist physical explanation, and so I’ll take this for granted for now.
In his paper ‘Galileo’s Real Error’ (published in Is Consciousness Everywhere?, which is a collection of essays by philosophers, scientists and spiritual thinkers responding to my work), Keith suggests that illusionists can avoid the ‘hard problem’ worries by holding that the qualities we seem to encounter in our experience don’t really exist but are merely represented by the mind. The fact that the novels of J. K. Rowling represent magic doesn’t lead to challenges for our current scientific paradigm. So long as a weird phenomenon is merely represented to exist, as opposed to actually existing, we don’t have a problem.
I don’t think this move gets rid of the problem. I argued in my reply to Keith that if physical science can’t fully explain the redish quality of experience, then nor can it fully explain the representation of that redish quality. For in either case, we’d have to fully articulate that redish quality in the purely quantitative vocabulary of physical science, which both Keith and I agree can’t be done (for more detail, scroll down to my reply to Keith in this).
For these reasons, I think an illusionist has to say the following:
The Second Illusion: When I attend to my red experience, not only is there no red quality in existence, there is no red quality even represented. Rather, I am subject to the illusion that a definite quality is being represented. As in the pain case, it seems manifestly obvious that my conscious experience is at least representing a definite quality. But, again, maybe natural selection has tricked me into thinking a falsehood is obviously true.
These illusionist claims could be true but I’m 95% confident that they’re false. Why am I so sure?
All you can do in philosophy is to start with what seems most evident. The claims the illusionist denies are not certain, but they seem more evident than the reality of the external world. They could be illusions, but in the same way that I could be in the Matrix or 2+2 could equal 5. I’d need very strong evidence or arguments to take such possibilities seriously. And to be honest, I don’t think there really is either good evidence or a strong argument for illusionism.
What Keith and Daniel Dennett press on me most often is that I’m trusting my ‘intuitions,’ which is supposed to be a problem. But all philosophical conviction is rooted in a decision to trust what seems most evident, whether that’s 2+2 being equal to 4 or the reality of the table in front of me. And if my anti-illusionist intuitions – that feelings are more than mere behavioural functioning and that experience represents definite qualities – seem much more certain than the reality of the external world, then it’s quite rational for me trust those intuitions with at least as much intensity as I trust the information conveyed by my senses.
Illusionism might be true. But I doubt it.
It seems to me that I don't just have the intuition that I'm consciousness but the direct acquaintance with that fact. You can't be mistaken about the things you're directly acquainted with. That's why I think the existence of consciousness is even more obvious than, for example, moral realism.
"What Keith and Daniel Dennett press on me most often is that I’m trusting my ‘intuitions,’ which is supposed to be a problem."
TBH, after about 11 years in school for philosophy, I still don't quite know what an "intuition" is! My best sense of how we use the term comes from Dennett's _Intuition Pumps_ as a kind of considered gut reaction to a thought experiment. But, it seems unfair on the part of the illusionist or, at least, I think it mischaracterizes the realist's position. I prefer your language that our inner experience (especially our direct phenomenal concepts) is a datum, though I understand why Frankish and Dennett wouldn't use that language.
Perhaps the realist's higher-level belief that introspection presents us with reliable access to our mental life could be considered an intuition, but it's no crime (philosophical or otherwise) to be an intuition. But, I'm not aware of any serious arguments against materialism of the form "it's intuitive that p, if p then ~materialism, thus not materialism." I have, however, sometimes felt that some serious materialist philosophers flirt with arguments of the form "p is merely an intuition in support of some position, so ~p." But, perhaps that's unfair.