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.
I think there's a much more straightforward debunking of illusionism. It's just a classic case of assuming what is to be demonstrated. It can't be reduced to a question of "being tricked into thinking" or "feeling" something, whether "representations" or anything else, as these very notions are themselves inherently mentalistic from the outset. If they weren't, they would be ruthlessly eliminated from materialistic explanation more comprehensively than the grin of the Cheshire Cat and cashed out, purely and without residue, as impersonal physical processes (not "information", mark you, a similarly illegitimate attempt to smuggle the non-physical into materialism).
You can't have it both ways. If the elements of the non-physical aren't in your supposedly fundamental ontology you can't then legitimately magic them up as part of your "proof" that they don't exist! To put it simply, according to materialism, properly analysed, you don't "think" at all. Consequently it's somewhat self-contradicting to argue that it's your thinking that's the root of the problem! But blithely assuming what is to be demonstrated in this way is a hallmark of the metaphysical grand larceny inherent in strict materialism.
Materialism is a position that is committed to a strictly physical account of reality, an account which could of course be internally self-consistent did it not subsequently attempt to appeal to strongly emergent subjective artifacts, which are neither implied by, nor available to support, a supposedly closed and complete account of purely physical evolution. But could such a constrained, impersonal view plausibly stand as a complete account of subjective reality? In judging that for yourself, you refute it thus.
Philip,
I'm skeptical of your second illusion claim and your supporting criterion that representations of edenic qualities still have to be reduced to physical quantities in order for such representations to be explained (found in your reply to Keith). Why does the representationalist have to accept this reductionist criterion? They aren't arguing that a physical state having a representations of properties X, somehow means that X has to be in the physical state, only that it is in the representation. Here's Dretske on this issue, " In hallucin-ating pink rats we are aware of something-the properties, pink and rat-shaped that something is represented as having-but we are not aware of any object that has these properties-a pink, rat-shaped, object. We are aware of pure universals, uninstantiated properties." (p.73) https://www.jstor.org/stable/3050525
Michael Tye also makes very similar claims. So representationalists are already committed to some kind of metaphysical relation (the awareness relation) to universals. Why not then simply say that (mis)representing phenomenal state Y consists of having a relation to the universal phenomenal property that would be instantiated by state Y? I don't see anywhere the need for the criterion that the phenomenal property has to be capable of physically existing. Presumably universals also include properties that only exist in possible worlds.
P.S. I'm not a representationalist