My impression is that the word "illusion" is essentially what causes so much trouble here. People hear "illusion" and think "trickery, fakery, delusion". And freak out. Of course, what they should think is "oh, like a stage trick performed by a magician (who doesn't actually know any magic, obviously, because magic doesn't exist)"
What is peculiar is why people continue to freak out after having this explained to them, and persistently refuse to listen to what is being explained to them. It really is weird.
Part of the refusal may be because such observations make the position too uncontroversial. When you expect there to be a good reason for the heat in some discourse and then someone provides an boring, sensible explanation that turns it cold, there's going to be this natural sense of incredulity about that guy's explanation. "Wait, that's *too easy*... how could all these smart guys be missing it?" And, of course, there's a natural sense of incredulity people will feel about what I'm saying right now (of the same kind).
I think idealism can also accommodate for the intuitions that 1) phenomenal states are irreducible to physical states and 2) there's only one kind of "thing" (i.e., monism). But idealism also has the advantage over illusionism that it also preserves a third intuition that phenomenal states are actually real.
Sure, but I would imagine for most people the relevant intuition isn't just generalized monism but rather physicalism specifically - although you're right that for some things, like causal closure, idealism also works fine.
Well yeah, if we're just assuming people have an intuition that physicalism is true, then idealism can't account for that intuition, obviously. But that's pretty weak argument because there's no evidence people have any kind of ‘physicalist’ intuition. And even if there were, why trust that intuition?
I think we should trust our intuition that there are concrete external objects because that's the best way to account for an extremely wide range of other empirically verifiable beliefs we have about the world - it's not impossible to translate those backwards into an idealist framework, but certainly that's not the default approach anyone actually takes, nor is it the most parsimonious, non-arbitrary, etc.
You're conflating "there are concrete external objects" with "those objects are [like this]" and [like this] is just an assumption the world is the physicalist understanding of nature.
In other words, your entire argument boils down to - if we already think physicalism is true, then illusionism is the best option for explaining the place of mind in the world. The question at hand is whether physicalism could be true given it's inability to incorporate mind in it's ontology.
This is why you think idealism translates that backwards, you're starting with an assumption of physicalism without realising it, calling it an "intuition".
Well, I'm not even really talking about illusionism here anymore, just idealism and physicalism in general. And I think it's pretty obvious that the vast majority of people have a commonsense view of the world wherein they think at least some concrete, physical objects exist. Do you disagree?
I agree we should be realists about the external world, but to ask if I agree physical objects exist is a loaded question. The disagreement is about what is meant by the word physical.
I don’t think anyone has an intuition that those external objects are as they must be if physicalism is true, in fact the opposite is true, our intuition is idealist. If physicalism is true those external objects are colourless, tasteless etc, whereas we all operate under the assumption apples are red and crispy, the sky is blue and fire is hot.
I'm not sure what is arbitrary or non-parsimonious about idealism, perhaps you can enlighten me.
If the intuition is simply that "there are objects that are external to myself", that seems intuitive to me, so I don't have a problem with that. But I don't see how that leads one to the physicalist's (and more specifically illusionist's) conclusion that "those objects are intrinsically mindless and I am made from them and my awareness of them is an illusion". That's just a totally unwarranted leap in logic.
I definitely have the specific intuition that rocks, trees, hunks of plastic, etc are mindless, and that my body is also made of mindless "stuff" (as opposed to merely different sorts of thoughts or mental constructions than the ones I have access to myself). Of course, as a physicalist, I would say that firm distinction between the physical and the mental isn't actually ontologically real - but I don't think it's equally plausible to resolve the distinction in one direction or another.
Can't idealism accommodate this intuition just by saying that what appears to be external is a mental representation of something about which we can't ultimately determine the externality/internality of? Maybe that's not really idealism, but neutral monism. I've actually started warming up to illusionism by considering that everything we experience is a "belief-about" state. That would extend to both to the physical and the mental — their difference is ultimately preserved by a belief in their difference. The fact that this is a belief doesn't make it less real, as everything would come down to belief, and clearly *something* is "real" in the sense that we typically mean the word: if everyone sees a table, that table is real, even if its realness is ultimately constituted by a shared belief that there is a table there. If there are stable, causal laws governing these beliefs, then we get a unified account of both the internal and external world that is about as empirical as you can get, not going beyond making statements about what we can actually observe and also without falling into solipsism or radical skepticism (because the definition of reality is based within the belief-about structure, which we accept as real because we have no other coherent way of defining real).
What I don't get about illusionism though is what the seeming is — that's always what I took the problem to be. In the magician analogy, I obviously agree that the best explanation is the illusionist perspective. But I've always taken the illusionist perspective to be going one step further. The "substrate" of the saw illusion is real people performing physical acts, that part is fine. But then the illusionist perspective seems to be that the people performing physical acts are also an illusion caused by another substrate. So what is the explanation for that? What is the explanation for the existence of an illusion at all? What is the substrate of the illusion? That's what I haven't understood in this.
Great post. I came out of the "New Atheism" phase via folks like Feser, Swinburne, Rasmussen, Hart, etc, and so even while I became an Atheist, I took a lot of the standard anti-physicalist arguments against Dennett and co. for granted. It wasn't until I sat down and read the arguments themselves that I realized the position is a lot more plausible than I gave it credit for. I know it's not fully related to illusionism, but Jared Warren's "This Quintessence of Dust - Consciousness Explained, at Thirty" is an excellent exposition of the misunderstandings that Dennett's arguments often face, and I can't help but wonder if tangentially similar views like type-A physicalism or illusionism also face a similar phenomena.
Do you agree that with the way you've set this up, Illusionism is open to empirical disconfirmation if we get better at surveying what the 'folk' view is?
I certainly feel the pull of 'the redness of red' or what people mean when they gesture at qualia but I'm skeptical this is *that* common an experience. I've been in the awkward position of trying to explain inverted spectrum to family and friends with their reaction being of complete bafflement. As in the don't seem to 'get it'.
This is a good question - I definitely think we should take a sort of conditional approach that says, *to the degree that we do take our experiences to have phenomenal properties,* those properties are illusory. So if it turns out that's a misrepresentation of the folk view, then we should drop it, but then there wouldn't really be any problem anyway.
Interesting piece. The problem I have the more I look into illusionism is how difficult it is to work out what is actually being called an illusion. One one hand it seems to simply be the idea that there are "qualia" or "phenomenal" qualities or properties, on the other it seems to be something of the entirety of conscious experience. If it's purely the former, it seems like a critique of a particular kind of dualism or a set of ideas that emerge from the hard problem framing that I don't think reflect how most ordinary people would see their own consciousness, in which case the term "illusionism" seems inherently problematic for describing consciousness as a general phenomenon. If it's a denial of conscious experience itself, which it doesn't entirely seem to be although it seems to sometimes be implied, then I think it's a much weaker position, and my observation is that there tends to emerge a kind of unsaid motte and bailey between these two positions. My personal view is that consciousness still presents a problem for physicalism even if you dispense with "qualia," and given I find a lot of qualia language to be confused, I'm not sure how useful illusionism really is.
Yes, I didn't really get into this in the piece but as I've said elsewhere: I do think we should be illusionists only to the degree that people do, in fact, have the illusion - if there are people who don't take themselves to have an introspective sense of their own experiences as intrinsically private, non-physical, ineffable, etc then that's great, and we shouldn't demand they have it just so we can then say it's false. And I do think it's an open empirical question as to whether or not that sort of illusion is fundamental to all humanity or merely the product of a certain sort of cultural and linguistic context. Personally, I would imagine that most people do have at least some of those intuitions. But if they don't, that's even better for illusionism, except in the sense that what we're saying might not be as exciting as we thought.
Can you not think experience is private and ineffable and be a physicalist? I can believe I can't describe what red is to a blind man without being a non physicalist, I would think? I would say that sort of makes my point that I find it confusing exactly what an illusionist denies.
Well, certainly physicalism doesn't commit you to the belief that you could actually go out today and have a reasonable chance of explaining redness to a blind person, or using a brain scan to determine what someone is feeling at any particular moment - but it should commit you, I think, to the idea that no mental state is *intrinsically* private or ineffable. It should be theoretically possible to identify and communicate the full content of any mental state purely through a description of the physical features involved, even if we shouldn't (maybe ever) expect it to be a practical option for us.
I think you could say that there is no other way to absorb the visual information of seeing red other than visually, so to know everything about redness or to have it described or to know everything about another person's experience of red is simply to be missing a piece of information that you can only possess via your own visual processing. I don't see that it requires anything non physical just to say that you cannot know what it's like to see red unless you see red, and that you can't communicate it via non visual verbal means, hence it is both private and ineffable.
Oh sure, I may have misunderstood what you were saying. Of course an illusionist can affirm that, as a contingent matter of human neurobiology, it's not possible to realize the mental state that represents objects with the property of redness without a certain "input" from your rods and cones and all that.
>] “It should be theoretically possible to identify and communicate the full content of any mental state purely through a description of the physical features involved even if we shouldn't (maybe ever) expect it to be a practical option for us.”
This would seem to have 2 intractable problems:
1.) There is no coherent definition for what it means to be a “physical” thing. It just doesn’t exist.
2.) Even taking a more charitable view and setting aside a general ‘physical’ view aside in favor of that which we term as internal mental states as being, in principle, entirely expressable in purely quantative terms is itself self-refuting.
There is no such thing as a quantity absent the pre-existing vanishing point of consciousness that gives rise to it in the first place.
Show me where a quantity exists in the world absent the mind that must be there to articulate said expression in the field of conscious awareness that is their mind. It cannot be done.
Ergo Illusionism, even as a theoretical construct, cannot be justified. It means literally nothing.
I can very easily give you an example of a quantity that exists in the world absent any mind: In my dresser, I've got a box of 20 Christmas ornaments right now, and no mind is necessary for that to be true.
The mental category that we refer to as "20" necessarily preassumes a mind for it to exist in - as you yourself had to prove just now as a mind that had to type that statement out in order for it to be known.
If you and every other mind in the universe vanished tomorrow, what then would be left? Mindless assortments of objects and other stuff that have no thoughts, no feelings, no conceptualizations and no mental categories of anything. Quantities as a concept would effectively cease to be as there would be no minds to hold the categories.
I always felt that people don't really distinguish between qualia and phenomenal consciousness, as you can dispense with the former while keeping the latter. Consciousness is a tricky subject and there are such a wide selection of options available within Theory of Mind that to think we've "solved" phenomenal consciousness (either by explaining it vis-a-vis its underlying physical substrate or by eliminating it from the physical picture entirely) is probably very wrong and not the common consensus among expert neuroscientists, as far as I'm aware. Illusionism seems like the conservative option because we really don't know what to do with the idea of phenomenal consciousness, whether we should or shouldn't take it seriously. The strongest objection to it has to just be the question of what exactly Illusionism is trying to identify as the thing that supposedly doesn't exist but seems like it does.
> To be an illusionist doesn’t require rejecting anything about how consciousness seems to us — only the second-order assumption that how it seems to us is really how it is.
How is “seems” being used here? Ordinarily when I say, “it seems to me that x,” I am attempting to relay a fact about my conscious experience. If a thing isn’t conscious, like a table or chair or bottle of water, I would ordinarily say, it is simply not “seemed-to.”
If, on illusionism, we say people aren’t seemed to, then I don’t think we can account for these intuitions at all, because right off the bat we are saying, “if you think it *seems* to you that X, you’re wrong,” independent of the truth or falsity of X.
But if we’re saying the opposite - that, on illusionism, some non-conscious things are seemed-to and some non-conscious things aren’t - isn’t fleshing out this distinction the point of a theory of mind? If we are saying yes, there is some factor that distinguishes humans from rocks such that the former are seemed-to and the latter aren’t, what is that factor?
And once we have a reliable account of what that factor is - of what use is illusionism?
Well, illusionism as I'm presenting it definitely wouldn't be the rejection of consciousness in general - we should absolutely accept that human beings are conscious and therefore that some things seem a certain way to us. And I agree that any fully complete theory of neuroscience and of consciousness is going to explain what it is about a certain kind of processing or representation that creates those sorts of seemings. But what illusionism does say, right now, is just what that distinction *isn't*: Mainly, some categorical line between the presence or absence of actual phenomenal properties.
A good analogy might be with vitalism - when people first rejected that theory, they didn't have a good answer for what, exactly, explained why animals are alive but rivers aren't. But they did take the strong position that, whatever it was distinguishing the two, it wasn't an actual vital essence present in one but not the other. Now that we have a much stronger grasp on biology, no one is really an "illusionist" about vital essences anymore. But there was a time where staking out the "no vital essence is involved" position was still a meaningful step forward, and I see illusionism as something like that today in the context of where we are in the study of neuroscience and perception.
When I hear the term “phenomenal properties,” to me, this is basically interchangeable with “ways things seem” (red, or loud, or sweet, and so on) in the sense that, if something seems sweet, it follows quite naturally that there are facts about sweetness, that sweetness is a property (of ways things can seem), and so on.
If I endeavored to reject “phenomenal properties” in some sense (no pun intended) without rejecting ways things seem, it’s not clear what exactly I’m rejecting, if anything? Am I rejecting some customary set of claims about ways things seem (for instance, that they are undetectable to third parties)? If so, this seems more easily achieved by offering counterexamples (eg, an explanation of how one might observe something seeming sweet to someone else), than by positing that set of rejections as a theory of mind in its own right.
If we are still saying consciousness, experience, being-seemed-to, all that, exists (just that there aren’t phenomenal properties), isn’t it still an open question whether consciousness is physical? Or am I wildly off base here?
You're not wildly off base at all, but I do think this is where the distinction between the object of an experience and the experience of an object is really important. Gilbert Harman's paper on this (http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/images/personal-zenon-pylyshyn/class-info/Consciousness_2014/Harman_IntrinsicQualityOfExperience.pdf) really helped me understand the debate in a different way. He uses the example of a painting of a unicorn: We can talk about the painting of the subject (it's on canvas, it's made with acrylics, it's 8' by 10', whatever) and we can talk about the subject of the painting (it's white, has a horn, it's flying over a rainbow, whatever) but those two things are obviously very different, and only the former set of claims are actually describing something that exists.
Similarly, we have to make a distinction between claims about *the object of our experience* and claims about *our experience of the object.* When I say "That tree seems green to me," what I'm reporting is a feature *of the tree* - I'm determining that feature through experience, of course, but "what it seems like" is a report about my best guess (so to speak) about the way the tree is. And no illusionist should have a problem with people saying things like that. But on the other hand, if I say "it seems to me my perception of the tree has an ineffable green qualia," I'm saying something about the features *of my experience,* not of the tree. And that's the sort of seeming that illusionists reject - we're saying that when we try to consider our experiences *as experiences,* rather than considering the thing those experiences are getting us in touch with, we come to false beliefs about their actual nature. Does that make sense? I also touch on this in another piece I wrote a while ago that could help: https://bothsidesbrigade.substack.com/p/representationalism-to-the-rescue
But I could say "the tree seems green to me" while at the same time happily admitting that it seems brown (sepia?) to a colorblind observer and not to me, and without exclaiming that they must be mistaken - so surely I must be ascribing that green-ness to something other than the tree itself?
Aren't I ascribing that green-ness to the way the tree seems to me? And wouldn't it follow that the way the tree seems to me (a) exists (in the sense that there are true vs false facts about it) and (b) is green?
Okay, I think this is the fundamental disagreement! Because no, when you say "The tree seems sepia-toned to the colorblind person," I don't take that to be a claim about a feature *of their seeming.* Rather, I take it to be a statement about what kind of tree they're internally representing to themselves - in other words, when you say "The tree seems sepia-toned to the colorblind person," I take you to be saying that the tree that would need to exist in order for their internal representation to be accurate would have to be a sepia-toned one.
That might seem (ha!) a little obtuse, but it makes a lot of sense when you compare it with how we discuss other sorts of representations. For example, if I look at a painting of a child, and I say "That child seems to be sad," then I'm still obviously making a claim about the child *in the painting,* rather than saying the painting itself is sad - it's not as though, by using the word "seem," I switch from referring to the subject of the painting to the painting of that subject. Instead, I'm saying that, if the painting is an accurate one, then the child it represents was a sad one. And if we take our own internal states to also be similar sorts of representations, then we should take a roughly similar approach: To say that X seems Y is just to say that X would need to be Y in order for your representation of it to be accurate. And there are absolutely true or false statements you could make about that, but those true or false statements are statements about something that doesn't actually exist (unless, of course, your representation *is* accurate). Does that make sense?
I just don’t think that color is a property of physical objects in this rigid sense - if the tree seems sepia to the colorblind person and seems green to me, I don’t think there’s any sense in which we disagree or have incompatible beliefs, we just have different kinds of eyes.
If I say the tree seems green to me, this statement is simply true - it doesn’t depend on there being an underlying fact of the matter regarding the tree’s “true” color.
There is no question whether the tree “is as it seems” - being and seeming are just two different sorts of activities. And if asked why this is so, I’d say, because a dog might see it as orange and a bee might see it as purple, and the color arises not in the tree but in our experience of it.
To play devil’s advocate, arguably epiphenomenalist dualism is conservative in a similar sense. It respects both the causal closure of the physical and the irreducibility of phenomenal properties. But to me epiphenomenalism seems much weirder than illusionism.
That's interesting, I think you're right - but the concerns I have with dualism are bigger than just causal closure, so it's still not really a match for my intuitions at least.
This is a great angle, and I'm mostly in agreement.
But I think your post undersells the significance of the intuition rejected by illusionism, that phenomenal consciousness is real. The Hard Problem of Consciousness is Hard because we have various intuitions and they cannot all be reconciled. I think it's a bit cheap to mostly just ignore one of those intuitions and claim that illusionism is therefore more conservative.
Anticipating your response, I agree with your point that as long as a theory can explain why things would appear as they do, even if that theory suggests that those appearances are misleading, then we no longer have much reason to take those appearances as reason to reject the theory. So, if phenomenal consciousness seems to exist, and illusionism can explain why it seems to exist even if it doesn't, then the apparent existence of phenomenal consciousness is no reason to reject illusionism.
Even so, I think you're underestimating the power of this intuition. When we were debating moral realism, you said:
> if I feel like I have good reasons to believe in moral realism, then the fact that I would still believe it even if I was wrong doesn’t mean much
I think that many people are going to have a similar response to illusionism. They think they have good reasons to believe in phenomenal consciousness (because they conceive of phenomenal consciousness as being a prerequisite for awareness at all, or of being deceived at all, or as something like an axiomatic "starting point" for reason, etc), so they are not going to be moved by the argument that illusionism can explain why they think phenomenal consciousness is real.
I agree with you that those people do not in fact have good independent reasons to think phenomenal consciousness is real. They only think phenomenal consciousness is real because of the intuitive force of the illusion, so their reasons are not independent. But I think the same is true of you and your views on moral realism.
Obviously, you will disagree; you will think that your reasons for moral realism are independent of the intuition and the reasons of the anti-illusionists are not independent of the intuition. But they will also disagree with this. So your argument here should not be expected to be persuasive to anyone who is not already on Team Illusionism, just as my arguments against moral realism are not persuasive to you.
I definitely think you're right that accounting for an intuition inside an alternate framework isn't enough to defuse the force that intuition lends to the "default" framework - but at the same time, I guess all I can really say is just that I think the independent reasons for belief in phenomenal consciousness are very different from, and much worse than, the independent reasons for belief in moral properties, and that it's not really possible to draw a specific parallelism between them, just because they relate to very different issues. But with that said, certainly if someone does believe that phenomenal properties are required to (for example) justify common features of "experience discourse," then that would be (agent-relative) reason for them to reject illusionism! I just think they'd be very wrong about that.
So, my main point is that I don't think you get to call yourself conservative just because you preserve two intuitions at the cost of abandoning a third. Other positions could do the same. But I think this angle is a nice corrective to the idea that illusionism is imply a radical idea.
I think the ability to "conceive of" phenomenal consciousness as a "prerequisite" to awareness could be countered on the grounds that Illusionists typically argue, that...
A. We are trying to inject our notion of p-consciousness into our notion of awareness, where awareness cannot be thought of without invoking this other notion of p-consciousness. An Illusionist would just define awareness in a way that doesn't refer in any way to the spooky phenomenal states that realists are invoking.
B. The ability to "conceive of" something does not necessitate that the thing being conceived of must be a coherent concept that can be meaningfully differentiated from other common ideas, and it can simply be re-packaged in phenomenal terms. What exactly is the thing you are conceiving of, and how is it meaningfully differentiated? Can you meaningfully express that to which you are referring?
Another issue: how are you sure that phenomenal states, understood as private and inexpressible, have the same private referent for you as they do for everyone else who talks about having phenomenal states? What if other people are really talking about something very different? This is the argument against private language. Check out the "beetle in a box" argument.
I think a definition of phenomenal states needs to be outlined in order for conversations about it to be meaningful. If it can't really be explained or expressed through language, then why are we invoking it?
Fine. And I'm an illusionist, so that's all well and good. But these issues are subtle and difficult, and there are responses to all this too, so it's not decisive. Phenomenal realists end up thinking they have good independent reasons for phenomenal realism just like BSB thinks he has good independent reasons for moral realism. The point is that I don't think you can just brush all this aside, ignore it, and say that because illusionism respects the remaining intuitions, it is conservative. It violates intuitions too, so it is radical.
I agree with all of this. I would just add, as would be expected for anyone who follows my posts, that the claim that phenomenal properties are illusory is woefully underspecified. Those who are realist about phenomenal properties are dreadfully coy about what the hell they actually mean.
What I've never understood about illusionism is that it claims (as I understand it) that phenomenal properties are illusory properties. But what are they illusions *of*? Are they impossible objects like the round square? If so, I don't see how the view is coherent. It can't even seem to one that something is both round and square, for example. If they are literal non-beings, then how do they manage to appear differently (blue appears different from the taste of an orange): their extensional reference is the empty set. But if they're not impossible objects, then where in reality are they? At possible words distant from here, perhaps? Even still, how do we seem to be acquainted with them? I can grant that the illusion of a quantitative property doesn't have to actually have that property (e.g. it may seem to me I'm looking at a 1000-sided figure, but actually it only has 999 sides), but I don't understand how an illusion of a *qualitative* property could lack that quality, unless qualities are reducible to quantities. But if you think they are, you question beg against dualists and anybody else that thinks physics is about more than just mathematical structure.
Well, it's clearly possible to distinguish between representations of different impossible things, right? There are multiple types of impossible staircases I can tell apart, even though both, as you say, have an extensional reference that's empty. So that doesn't seem to be a huge issue, imo. But as for the question of where "in reality" these features are, I'd say the answer is nowhere - those features are the intensional content of a representation but that doesn't require instantiation. (I give a more detailed explanation of my views on this here: https://bothsidesbrigade.substack.com/p/representationalism-to-the-rescue?scrlybrkr=97226825) And yes, to some degree that "begs the question" against dualists, but only in the sense that it requires rejecting their fundamental assumptions - and all physicalism is going to require doing that at some point.
Yeah, I figured something like this would be the answer. It's just unconvincing to me. It still doesn't really get at the fundamental problems which are 1) representations of different impossible things are distinguishable because of structural differences in their representations, but 2) purported qualia are not structurally different but qualitatively different, so 3) it seems one has to deny qualitative reality entirely by reducing it to structure.
Why think *all* qualitative reality goes out the window? Because, I think, we don't actually have a concept of the qualitative outside of mental quality. We just draw an analogy to the purported phenomenal qualities and then assert there is "something like that, but it's non-mental, somehow".
To me, it seems the illusionist is really saying that all qualitative reality is illusory. It just doesn't exist at all. Fine for ontic structural realists, I guess. But for anybody who thinks physics isn't just about pure quantities and relations but that those quantities are about something qualitative (if non-mental), this is a problem.
As someone who is always naturalist leaning about everything, I'm not yet an illusuonist because I just don't understand what it means no matter how much I've read about it so far. What's the best source to get the concept?
No I haven't! Thanks. I've only read substack stuff from people who promote it or like youtube videos. I haven't gotten into the more official canon phil stuff cuz I'm busy with non-metaphysics, non-mind classes and I forget about it. Should be fun.
"To be an illusionist doesn’t require rejecting anything about how consciousness seems to us — only the second-order assumption that how it seems to us is really how it is."
The illusionist says it seems like searing pain has a certain felt quality, but in fact there is no such quality present in one's experience. And the same goes for all perceptual experience: there aren't any sensory qualities with distinct, immediately recognizable characters, there are only mistaken judgments and beliefs to the effect that such qualities exist. This means that for illusionists there's nothing non-conceptual about consciousness, which I think puts them in a tight spot: how are concepts thought about and communicated if not in terms of non-conceptual content?
That was a good read, thanks for the link. I would agree with this. It seems to me conscious experience (which illusionists do not deny) are entirely made out of non-conceptual qualia (which illusionists do deny). That's kinda weird, right? Qualia are structured: for example, light blue and dark blue are two distinct qualia but their "intristic natures" are close together. An illusionist would have us get rid of the qualia but keep the structure. It's a bit like agreeing that the house exists, but that the bricks it's made out of don't exist.
I think Both Sides Brigade makes a great point that illusionism explains two major pieces of intuition regarding consciousness. But it requires switching from a consciousness ontology I understand to an consciousness ontology I cannot understand. If my goal is to understand consciousness, I'm not making progress with illusionism.
Agreed, and the claim that there's no pre-theoretical notion of mental qualities that grounds what it's like talk (what the qualia quietest claims) seems to me false. People understand prefectly well the idea that what it's like to see red is distinct from what it's like to see blue - that these have distinct qualitative characters - and they would agree that there's something it's like to see colors in dreams, which are uncontroversially mental episodes.
I suggested to the great qualia quietist Pete Mandik that qualia can be defined as the primitives or "atoms" of the mind. I'm not a physicalist, but even a physicalist should be able to use such a definition to identify the fundamental neural building blocks that the brain uses when producing thought and sensations (and thus identify qualia). I thought this was a pretty good suggestion.
He suggested that such talk is based off an old-fashioned "sense datum" idea of consciousness which has long since been disproven. I looked into just a little bit and while sense datum theory has fallen out of style, it doesn't seem completely disproven. But then again Pete knows far more than I so perhaps I need to look into this more.
I like the idea of basic qualia as epistemic or representational primitives that might have neural correlates. After all, representation can't go on indefinitely on pain of a regress so there have to be bottom level, non-composite components that aren't themselves represented, but simply presented - presentational, occurent, ineffable content. About which see p. 14 of https://naturalism.org/sites/naturalism.org/files/Locating%20Consciousness_0.pdf and section and section 5 of https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/79xg8_v1
But of course Pete will have none of it since he doesn't think there's any non-conceptual content in consciousness to account for.
I'm assuming you are the author of these linked works. If so, very nice! I think we are aligned on things consciousness related, except you've done actual research and are a good writer!
Very glad to see some confirmation from you and Metingzer on the idea of qualia being some sort of "mind primitive". Reading on in the first link, you also talk about phenomenal-physical parallelism which interests me. I don't believe in God, but I've always found Leibniz's pre-established harmony as being on the right track. I'll have to read more of your work.
I didn't really know much about this interpretation until just now and I must say, this is a total cop-out. Illusions are defined by the relation of reality to perception, an appearance that deceives one of what actually exists. The woman appears to be cut in half, though she really wasn't. Qualia are entirely defined by appearance. There can be no deceptive appearance here because the appearance IS the phenomenon. You tell me my experience of the color blue is an illusion. Sure, I know it's actually a representation of a certain wavelength of light produced by some pattern of brain activity. But what is it that's so intrinsically blue about that? It's the experience of the blueness that I'm curious about, and it can't be an illusion because it is entirely self-explanatory. And who is it that's perceiving it? I can't be hallucinating my own self because that doesn't make any damn sense. You can tell me my sense of self is an illusion, an image that doesn't reflect reality. And yet, the fact that I am RIGHT HERE inherently disproves that. It's just transmuting the hard problem into the easy problem yet again.
I know you're joking, but I sort of do, too. I imagine my interior as housing blue when I think of blueness, and I 'see' the blue. It's very easy to imagine that this is infallible introspection, rather than a muddled imaginative convention.
What exactly is it that physicalist theories of consciousness are unable to account for? And if we're discussing p-consciousness "what it's like" then whatever we want to call that, a "phenomenal property" belongs to some internal representation given by the brain.
So called "inner experience", which science *seems* unable to account for. The illusionist asks why we should believe in the existence of something that science seems unable to account for. What I want to know is why it seems that science cannot account for it. That is the intuition. I just don't think illusionism is plausible because it doesn't really offer an explanation for this seeming that doesn't both appear to affirm and deny its existence simultaneously.
Maybe it would be a better idea to just become some kind of meta-illusionist like Mandik and deny that the word "phenomenal consciousness" actually specifies anything meaningful in the first place. In other words, you could try going to route of just saying that "phenomenal consciousness" doesn't refer. There is neither an intersubjective consensus or a private notion being referenced.
My own view is one of realism. Essentially, there really is something that the word "phenomenal consciousness" is referring to. But people just have to accept that whatever mental states they are experiencing are in principle explicable in terms of physical processes unless we happen to have some really good reason to think otherwise, and we don't.
The only think I think would cause me to convert to illusionism is if I was given some good reason to think that physical stuff can't also be mental stuff. And if qualia or phenomenal states are ineffable, then we simply cannot know if they refer to physical things or not, since we'd just be unable to meaningfully differentiate them in a logically robust way. It's possible that phenomenal states are just given by sufficiently complex physical processes in a way that we are currently unable to represent.
One could also argue that our first empirical knowledge of the world is mediated through our private conscious experience, and that we only update our mental representations when they fail to track reality, but we can never ditch those representations. It seems that Illusionism might entail ditching first-person experience or rewriting them within the framework of a reductive physicalist model, but that reductive physicalist model was something we conceived by our own minds.
So we would be, in that instance, rewriting our own mental representations by appealing to an external framework that fails to account for the nature of those representations and then re-interpreting our mental experiences through that framework, but then why should we prefer the abstract explanatory model over our own first-person experience? Maybe we have some meta-epistemological justification for thinking that minds are unable to accurately represent their own contents, but that would also mean that Illusionism could equally be a misrepresentation of mental contents since minds are still required to conceive of and adopt an Illusionist view of mental contents.
Even if you don't personally have a particular intuition, the fact that a position can reconcile two widespread and foundational intuitions held by other experts in the field is still a point in its favor.
My impression is that the word "illusion" is essentially what causes so much trouble here. People hear "illusion" and think "trickery, fakery, delusion". And freak out. Of course, what they should think is "oh, like a stage trick performed by a magician (who doesn't actually know any magic, obviously, because magic doesn't exist)"
What is peculiar is why people continue to freak out after having this explained to them, and persistently refuse to listen to what is being explained to them. It really is weird.
Part of the refusal may be because such observations make the position too uncontroversial. When you expect there to be a good reason for the heat in some discourse and then someone provides an boring, sensible explanation that turns it cold, there's going to be this natural sense of incredulity about that guy's explanation. "Wait, that's *too easy*... how could all these smart guys be missing it?" And, of course, there's a natural sense of incredulity people will feel about what I'm saying right now (of the same kind).
I think idealism can also accommodate for the intuitions that 1) phenomenal states are irreducible to physical states and 2) there's only one kind of "thing" (i.e., monism). But idealism also has the advantage over illusionism that it also preserves a third intuition that phenomenal states are actually real.
Sure, but I would imagine for most people the relevant intuition isn't just generalized monism but rather physicalism specifically - although you're right that for some things, like causal closure, idealism also works fine.
Well yeah, if we're just assuming people have an intuition that physicalism is true, then idealism can't account for that intuition, obviously. But that's pretty weak argument because there's no evidence people have any kind of ‘physicalist’ intuition. And even if there were, why trust that intuition?
I think we should trust our intuition that there are concrete external objects because that's the best way to account for an extremely wide range of other empirically verifiable beliefs we have about the world - it's not impossible to translate those backwards into an idealist framework, but certainly that's not the default approach anyone actually takes, nor is it the most parsimonious, non-arbitrary, etc.
You're conflating "there are concrete external objects" with "those objects are [like this]" and [like this] is just an assumption the world is the physicalist understanding of nature.
In other words, your entire argument boils down to - if we already think physicalism is true, then illusionism is the best option for explaining the place of mind in the world. The question at hand is whether physicalism could be true given it's inability to incorporate mind in it's ontology.
This is why you think idealism translates that backwards, you're starting with an assumption of physicalism without realising it, calling it an "intuition".
Well, I'm not even really talking about illusionism here anymore, just idealism and physicalism in general. And I think it's pretty obvious that the vast majority of people have a commonsense view of the world wherein they think at least some concrete, physical objects exist. Do you disagree?
I agree we should be realists about the external world, but to ask if I agree physical objects exist is a loaded question. The disagreement is about what is meant by the word physical.
I don’t think anyone has an intuition that those external objects are as they must be if physicalism is true, in fact the opposite is true, our intuition is idealist. If physicalism is true those external objects are colourless, tasteless etc, whereas we all operate under the assumption apples are red and crispy, the sky is blue and fire is hot.
I'm not sure what is arbitrary or non-parsimonious about idealism, perhaps you can enlighten me.
If the intuition is simply that "there are objects that are external to myself", that seems intuitive to me, so I don't have a problem with that. But I don't see how that leads one to the physicalist's (and more specifically illusionist's) conclusion that "those objects are intrinsically mindless and I am made from them and my awareness of them is an illusion". That's just a totally unwarranted leap in logic.
I definitely have the specific intuition that rocks, trees, hunks of plastic, etc are mindless, and that my body is also made of mindless "stuff" (as opposed to merely different sorts of thoughts or mental constructions than the ones I have access to myself). Of course, as a physicalist, I would say that firm distinction between the physical and the mental isn't actually ontologically real - but I don't think it's equally plausible to resolve the distinction in one direction or another.
Can't idealism accommodate this intuition just by saying that what appears to be external is a mental representation of something about which we can't ultimately determine the externality/internality of? Maybe that's not really idealism, but neutral monism. I've actually started warming up to illusionism by considering that everything we experience is a "belief-about" state. That would extend to both to the physical and the mental — their difference is ultimately preserved by a belief in their difference. The fact that this is a belief doesn't make it less real, as everything would come down to belief, and clearly *something* is "real" in the sense that we typically mean the word: if everyone sees a table, that table is real, even if its realness is ultimately constituted by a shared belief that there is a table there. If there are stable, causal laws governing these beliefs, then we get a unified account of both the internal and external world that is about as empirical as you can get, not going beyond making statements about what we can actually observe and also without falling into solipsism or radical skepticism (because the definition of reality is based within the belief-about structure, which we accept as real because we have no other coherent way of defining real).
What I don't get about illusionism though is what the seeming is — that's always what I took the problem to be. In the magician analogy, I obviously agree that the best explanation is the illusionist perspective. But I've always taken the illusionist perspective to be going one step further. The "substrate" of the saw illusion is real people performing physical acts, that part is fine. But then the illusionist perspective seems to be that the people performing physical acts are also an illusion caused by another substrate. So what is the explanation for that? What is the explanation for the existence of an illusion at all? What is the substrate of the illusion? That's what I haven't understood in this.
I think it's too charitable to call it an intuition, seems like a plain case of question begging.
Great post. I came out of the "New Atheism" phase via folks like Feser, Swinburne, Rasmussen, Hart, etc, and so even while I became an Atheist, I took a lot of the standard anti-physicalist arguments against Dennett and co. for granted. It wasn't until I sat down and read the arguments themselves that I realized the position is a lot more plausible than I gave it credit for. I know it's not fully related to illusionism, but Jared Warren's "This Quintessence of Dust - Consciousness Explained, at Thirty" is an excellent exposition of the misunderstandings that Dennett's arguments often face, and I can't help but wonder if tangentially similar views like type-A physicalism or illusionism also face a similar phenomena.
Do you agree that with the way you've set this up, Illusionism is open to empirical disconfirmation if we get better at surveying what the 'folk' view is?
I certainly feel the pull of 'the redness of red' or what people mean when they gesture at qualia but I'm skeptical this is *that* common an experience. I've been in the awkward position of trying to explain inverted spectrum to family and friends with their reaction being of complete bafflement. As in the don't seem to 'get it'.
This is a good question - I definitely think we should take a sort of conditional approach that says, *to the degree that we do take our experiences to have phenomenal properties,* those properties are illusory. So if it turns out that's a misrepresentation of the folk view, then we should drop it, but then there wouldn't really be any problem anyway.
Interesting piece. The problem I have the more I look into illusionism is how difficult it is to work out what is actually being called an illusion. One one hand it seems to simply be the idea that there are "qualia" or "phenomenal" qualities or properties, on the other it seems to be something of the entirety of conscious experience. If it's purely the former, it seems like a critique of a particular kind of dualism or a set of ideas that emerge from the hard problem framing that I don't think reflect how most ordinary people would see their own consciousness, in which case the term "illusionism" seems inherently problematic for describing consciousness as a general phenomenon. If it's a denial of conscious experience itself, which it doesn't entirely seem to be although it seems to sometimes be implied, then I think it's a much weaker position, and my observation is that there tends to emerge a kind of unsaid motte and bailey between these two positions. My personal view is that consciousness still presents a problem for physicalism even if you dispense with "qualia," and given I find a lot of qualia language to be confused, I'm not sure how useful illusionism really is.
Yes, I didn't really get into this in the piece but as I've said elsewhere: I do think we should be illusionists only to the degree that people do, in fact, have the illusion - if there are people who don't take themselves to have an introspective sense of their own experiences as intrinsically private, non-physical, ineffable, etc then that's great, and we shouldn't demand they have it just so we can then say it's false. And I do think it's an open empirical question as to whether or not that sort of illusion is fundamental to all humanity or merely the product of a certain sort of cultural and linguistic context. Personally, I would imagine that most people do have at least some of those intuitions. But if they don't, that's even better for illusionism, except in the sense that what we're saying might not be as exciting as we thought.
Qualia quietism does it one better, in my opinion.
Can you not think experience is private and ineffable and be a physicalist? I can believe I can't describe what red is to a blind man without being a non physicalist, I would think? I would say that sort of makes my point that I find it confusing exactly what an illusionist denies.
Well, certainly physicalism doesn't commit you to the belief that you could actually go out today and have a reasonable chance of explaining redness to a blind person, or using a brain scan to determine what someone is feeling at any particular moment - but it should commit you, I think, to the idea that no mental state is *intrinsically* private or ineffable. It should be theoretically possible to identify and communicate the full content of any mental state purely through a description of the physical features involved, even if we shouldn't (maybe ever) expect it to be a practical option for us.
I think you could say that there is no other way to absorb the visual information of seeing red other than visually, so to know everything about redness or to have it described or to know everything about another person's experience of red is simply to be missing a piece of information that you can only possess via your own visual processing. I don't see that it requires anything non physical just to say that you cannot know what it's like to see red unless you see red, and that you can't communicate it via non visual verbal means, hence it is both private and ineffable.
Oh sure, I may have misunderstood what you were saying. Of course an illusionist can affirm that, as a contingent matter of human neurobiology, it's not possible to realize the mental state that represents objects with the property of redness without a certain "input" from your rods and cones and all that.
>] “It should be theoretically possible to identify and communicate the full content of any mental state purely through a description of the physical features involved even if we shouldn't (maybe ever) expect it to be a practical option for us.”
This would seem to have 2 intractable problems:
1.) There is no coherent definition for what it means to be a “physical” thing. It just doesn’t exist.
2.) Even taking a more charitable view and setting aside a general ‘physical’ view aside in favor of that which we term as internal mental states as being, in principle, entirely expressable in purely quantative terms is itself self-refuting.
There is no such thing as a quantity absent the pre-existing vanishing point of consciousness that gives rise to it in the first place.
Show me where a quantity exists in the world absent the mind that must be there to articulate said expression in the field of conscious awareness that is their mind. It cannot be done.
Ergo Illusionism, even as a theoretical construct, cannot be justified. It means literally nothing.
I can very easily give you an example of a quantity that exists in the world absent any mind: In my dresser, I've got a box of 20 Christmas ornaments right now, and no mind is necessary for that to be true.
The mental category that we refer to as "20" necessarily preassumes a mind for it to exist in - as you yourself had to prove just now as a mind that had to type that statement out in order for it to be known.
If you and every other mind in the universe vanished tomorrow, what then would be left? Mindless assortments of objects and other stuff that have no thoughts, no feelings, no conceptualizations and no mental categories of anything. Quantities as a concept would effectively cease to be as there would be no minds to hold the categories.
I always felt that people don't really distinguish between qualia and phenomenal consciousness, as you can dispense with the former while keeping the latter. Consciousness is a tricky subject and there are such a wide selection of options available within Theory of Mind that to think we've "solved" phenomenal consciousness (either by explaining it vis-a-vis its underlying physical substrate or by eliminating it from the physical picture entirely) is probably very wrong and not the common consensus among expert neuroscientists, as far as I'm aware. Illusionism seems like the conservative option because we really don't know what to do with the idea of phenomenal consciousness, whether we should or shouldn't take it seriously. The strongest objection to it has to just be the question of what exactly Illusionism is trying to identify as the thing that supposedly doesn't exist but seems like it does.
> To be an illusionist doesn’t require rejecting anything about how consciousness seems to us — only the second-order assumption that how it seems to us is really how it is.
How is “seems” being used here? Ordinarily when I say, “it seems to me that x,” I am attempting to relay a fact about my conscious experience. If a thing isn’t conscious, like a table or chair or bottle of water, I would ordinarily say, it is simply not “seemed-to.”
If, on illusionism, we say people aren’t seemed to, then I don’t think we can account for these intuitions at all, because right off the bat we are saying, “if you think it *seems* to you that X, you’re wrong,” independent of the truth or falsity of X.
But if we’re saying the opposite - that, on illusionism, some non-conscious things are seemed-to and some non-conscious things aren’t - isn’t fleshing out this distinction the point of a theory of mind? If we are saying yes, there is some factor that distinguishes humans from rocks such that the former are seemed-to and the latter aren’t, what is that factor?
And once we have a reliable account of what that factor is - of what use is illusionism?
Well, illusionism as I'm presenting it definitely wouldn't be the rejection of consciousness in general - we should absolutely accept that human beings are conscious and therefore that some things seem a certain way to us. And I agree that any fully complete theory of neuroscience and of consciousness is going to explain what it is about a certain kind of processing or representation that creates those sorts of seemings. But what illusionism does say, right now, is just what that distinction *isn't*: Mainly, some categorical line between the presence or absence of actual phenomenal properties.
A good analogy might be with vitalism - when people first rejected that theory, they didn't have a good answer for what, exactly, explained why animals are alive but rivers aren't. But they did take the strong position that, whatever it was distinguishing the two, it wasn't an actual vital essence present in one but not the other. Now that we have a much stronger grasp on biology, no one is really an "illusionist" about vital essences anymore. But there was a time where staking out the "no vital essence is involved" position was still a meaningful step forward, and I see illusionism as something like that today in the context of where we are in the study of neuroscience and perception.
When I hear the term “phenomenal properties,” to me, this is basically interchangeable with “ways things seem” (red, or loud, or sweet, and so on) in the sense that, if something seems sweet, it follows quite naturally that there are facts about sweetness, that sweetness is a property (of ways things can seem), and so on.
If I endeavored to reject “phenomenal properties” in some sense (no pun intended) without rejecting ways things seem, it’s not clear what exactly I’m rejecting, if anything? Am I rejecting some customary set of claims about ways things seem (for instance, that they are undetectable to third parties)? If so, this seems more easily achieved by offering counterexamples (eg, an explanation of how one might observe something seeming sweet to someone else), than by positing that set of rejections as a theory of mind in its own right.
If we are still saying consciousness, experience, being-seemed-to, all that, exists (just that there aren’t phenomenal properties), isn’t it still an open question whether consciousness is physical? Or am I wildly off base here?
You're not wildly off base at all, but I do think this is where the distinction between the object of an experience and the experience of an object is really important. Gilbert Harman's paper on this (http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/images/personal-zenon-pylyshyn/class-info/Consciousness_2014/Harman_IntrinsicQualityOfExperience.pdf) really helped me understand the debate in a different way. He uses the example of a painting of a unicorn: We can talk about the painting of the subject (it's on canvas, it's made with acrylics, it's 8' by 10', whatever) and we can talk about the subject of the painting (it's white, has a horn, it's flying over a rainbow, whatever) but those two things are obviously very different, and only the former set of claims are actually describing something that exists.
Similarly, we have to make a distinction between claims about *the object of our experience* and claims about *our experience of the object.* When I say "That tree seems green to me," what I'm reporting is a feature *of the tree* - I'm determining that feature through experience, of course, but "what it seems like" is a report about my best guess (so to speak) about the way the tree is. And no illusionist should have a problem with people saying things like that. But on the other hand, if I say "it seems to me my perception of the tree has an ineffable green qualia," I'm saying something about the features *of my experience,* not of the tree. And that's the sort of seeming that illusionists reject - we're saying that when we try to consider our experiences *as experiences,* rather than considering the thing those experiences are getting us in touch with, we come to false beliefs about their actual nature. Does that make sense? I also touch on this in another piece I wrote a while ago that could help: https://bothsidesbrigade.substack.com/p/representationalism-to-the-rescue
But I could say "the tree seems green to me" while at the same time happily admitting that it seems brown (sepia?) to a colorblind observer and not to me, and without exclaiming that they must be mistaken - so surely I must be ascribing that green-ness to something other than the tree itself?
Aren't I ascribing that green-ness to the way the tree seems to me? And wouldn't it follow that the way the tree seems to me (a) exists (in the sense that there are true vs false facts about it) and (b) is green?
Okay, I think this is the fundamental disagreement! Because no, when you say "The tree seems sepia-toned to the colorblind person," I don't take that to be a claim about a feature *of their seeming.* Rather, I take it to be a statement about what kind of tree they're internally representing to themselves - in other words, when you say "The tree seems sepia-toned to the colorblind person," I take you to be saying that the tree that would need to exist in order for their internal representation to be accurate would have to be a sepia-toned one.
That might seem (ha!) a little obtuse, but it makes a lot of sense when you compare it with how we discuss other sorts of representations. For example, if I look at a painting of a child, and I say "That child seems to be sad," then I'm still obviously making a claim about the child *in the painting,* rather than saying the painting itself is sad - it's not as though, by using the word "seem," I switch from referring to the subject of the painting to the painting of that subject. Instead, I'm saying that, if the painting is an accurate one, then the child it represents was a sad one. And if we take our own internal states to also be similar sorts of representations, then we should take a roughly similar approach: To say that X seems Y is just to say that X would need to be Y in order for your representation of it to be accurate. And there are absolutely true or false statements you could make about that, but those true or false statements are statements about something that doesn't actually exist (unless, of course, your representation *is* accurate). Does that make sense?
I just don’t think that color is a property of physical objects in this rigid sense - if the tree seems sepia to the colorblind person and seems green to me, I don’t think there’s any sense in which we disagree or have incompatible beliefs, we just have different kinds of eyes.
If I say the tree seems green to me, this statement is simply true - it doesn’t depend on there being an underlying fact of the matter regarding the tree’s “true” color.
There is no question whether the tree “is as it seems” - being and seeming are just two different sorts of activities. And if asked why this is so, I’d say, because a dog might see it as orange and a bee might see it as purple, and the color arises not in the tree but in our experience of it.
To play devil’s advocate, arguably epiphenomenalist dualism is conservative in a similar sense. It respects both the causal closure of the physical and the irreducibility of phenomenal properties. But to me epiphenomenalism seems much weirder than illusionism.
That's interesting, I think you're right - but the concerns I have with dualism are bigger than just causal closure, so it's still not really a match for my intuitions at least.
This is a great angle, and I'm mostly in agreement.
But I think your post undersells the significance of the intuition rejected by illusionism, that phenomenal consciousness is real. The Hard Problem of Consciousness is Hard because we have various intuitions and they cannot all be reconciled. I think it's a bit cheap to mostly just ignore one of those intuitions and claim that illusionism is therefore more conservative.
Anticipating your response, I agree with your point that as long as a theory can explain why things would appear as they do, even if that theory suggests that those appearances are misleading, then we no longer have much reason to take those appearances as reason to reject the theory. So, if phenomenal consciousness seems to exist, and illusionism can explain why it seems to exist even if it doesn't, then the apparent existence of phenomenal consciousness is no reason to reject illusionism.
Even so, I think you're underestimating the power of this intuition. When we were debating moral realism, you said:
> if I feel like I have good reasons to believe in moral realism, then the fact that I would still believe it even if I was wrong doesn’t mean much
I think that many people are going to have a similar response to illusionism. They think they have good reasons to believe in phenomenal consciousness (because they conceive of phenomenal consciousness as being a prerequisite for awareness at all, or of being deceived at all, or as something like an axiomatic "starting point" for reason, etc), so they are not going to be moved by the argument that illusionism can explain why they think phenomenal consciousness is real.
I agree with you that those people do not in fact have good independent reasons to think phenomenal consciousness is real. They only think phenomenal consciousness is real because of the intuitive force of the illusion, so their reasons are not independent. But I think the same is true of you and your views on moral realism.
Obviously, you will disagree; you will think that your reasons for moral realism are independent of the intuition and the reasons of the anti-illusionists are not independent of the intuition. But they will also disagree with this. So your argument here should not be expected to be persuasive to anyone who is not already on Team Illusionism, just as my arguments against moral realism are not persuasive to you.
I definitely think you're right that accounting for an intuition inside an alternate framework isn't enough to defuse the force that intuition lends to the "default" framework - but at the same time, I guess all I can really say is just that I think the independent reasons for belief in phenomenal consciousness are very different from, and much worse than, the independent reasons for belief in moral properties, and that it's not really possible to draw a specific parallelism between them, just because they relate to very different issues. But with that said, certainly if someone does believe that phenomenal properties are required to (for example) justify common features of "experience discourse," then that would be (agent-relative) reason for them to reject illusionism! I just think they'd be very wrong about that.
Sure!
So, my main point is that I don't think you get to call yourself conservative just because you preserve two intuitions at the cost of abandoning a third. Other positions could do the same. But I think this angle is a nice corrective to the idea that illusionism is imply a radical idea.
I think the ability to "conceive of" phenomenal consciousness as a "prerequisite" to awareness could be countered on the grounds that Illusionists typically argue, that...
A. We are trying to inject our notion of p-consciousness into our notion of awareness, where awareness cannot be thought of without invoking this other notion of p-consciousness. An Illusionist would just define awareness in a way that doesn't refer in any way to the spooky phenomenal states that realists are invoking.
B. The ability to "conceive of" something does not necessitate that the thing being conceived of must be a coherent concept that can be meaningfully differentiated from other common ideas, and it can simply be re-packaged in phenomenal terms. What exactly is the thing you are conceiving of, and how is it meaningfully differentiated? Can you meaningfully express that to which you are referring?
Another issue: how are you sure that phenomenal states, understood as private and inexpressible, have the same private referent for you as they do for everyone else who talks about having phenomenal states? What if other people are really talking about something very different? This is the argument against private language. Check out the "beetle in a box" argument.
I think a definition of phenomenal states needs to be outlined in order for conversations about it to be meaningful. If it can't really be explained or expressed through language, then why are we invoking it?
Fine. And I'm an illusionist, so that's all well and good. But these issues are subtle and difficult, and there are responses to all this too, so it's not decisive. Phenomenal realists end up thinking they have good independent reasons for phenomenal realism just like BSB thinks he has good independent reasons for moral realism. The point is that I don't think you can just brush all this aside, ignore it, and say that because illusionism respects the remaining intuitions, it is conservative. It violates intuitions too, so it is radical.
I agree with all of this. I would just add, as would be expected for anyone who follows my posts, that the claim that phenomenal properties are illusory is woefully underspecified. Those who are realist about phenomenal properties are dreadfully coy about what the hell they actually mean.
What I've never understood about illusionism is that it claims (as I understand it) that phenomenal properties are illusory properties. But what are they illusions *of*? Are they impossible objects like the round square? If so, I don't see how the view is coherent. It can't even seem to one that something is both round and square, for example. If they are literal non-beings, then how do they manage to appear differently (blue appears different from the taste of an orange): their extensional reference is the empty set. But if they're not impossible objects, then where in reality are they? At possible words distant from here, perhaps? Even still, how do we seem to be acquainted with them? I can grant that the illusion of a quantitative property doesn't have to actually have that property (e.g. it may seem to me I'm looking at a 1000-sided figure, but actually it only has 999 sides), but I don't understand how an illusion of a *qualitative* property could lack that quality, unless qualities are reducible to quantities. But if you think they are, you question beg against dualists and anybody else that thinks physics is about more than just mathematical structure.
Well, it's clearly possible to distinguish between representations of different impossible things, right? There are multiple types of impossible staircases I can tell apart, even though both, as you say, have an extensional reference that's empty. So that doesn't seem to be a huge issue, imo. But as for the question of where "in reality" these features are, I'd say the answer is nowhere - those features are the intensional content of a representation but that doesn't require instantiation. (I give a more detailed explanation of my views on this here: https://bothsidesbrigade.substack.com/p/representationalism-to-the-rescue?scrlybrkr=97226825) And yes, to some degree that "begs the question" against dualists, but only in the sense that it requires rejecting their fundamental assumptions - and all physicalism is going to require doing that at some point.
Yeah, I figured something like this would be the answer. It's just unconvincing to me. It still doesn't really get at the fundamental problems which are 1) representations of different impossible things are distinguishable because of structural differences in their representations, but 2) purported qualia are not structurally different but qualitatively different, so 3) it seems one has to deny qualitative reality entirely by reducing it to structure.
Why think *all* qualitative reality goes out the window? Because, I think, we don't actually have a concept of the qualitative outside of mental quality. We just draw an analogy to the purported phenomenal qualities and then assert there is "something like that, but it's non-mental, somehow".
To me, it seems the illusionist is really saying that all qualitative reality is illusory. It just doesn't exist at all. Fine for ontic structural realists, I guess. But for anybody who thinks physics isn't just about pure quantities and relations but that those quantities are about something qualitative (if non-mental), this is a problem.
As someone who is always naturalist leaning about everything, I'm not yet an illusuonist because I just don't understand what it means no matter how much I've read about it so far. What's the best source to get the concept?
Have you read Frankish’s “What is Illusionism?” It’s online here: https://keithfrankish.github.io/articles/Frankish_What%20is%20illusionism_eprint.pdf
He also has another piece that goes into more detail: https://keithfrankish.github.io/articles/Frankish_Illusionism%20as%20a%20theory%20of%20consciousness_eprint.pdf
Dennett’s “Illusionism as the Default, Obvious Theory of Consciousness” is also great but unfortunately I can’t find a copy online. But it’s in the big journal collection they did, which is up on Anna’s Archive: https://www.amazon.com/Illusionism-consciousness-Journal-Consciousness-Studies/dp/1845409574
No I haven't! Thanks. I've only read substack stuff from people who promote it or like youtube videos. I haven't gotten into the more official canon phil stuff cuz I'm busy with non-metaphysics, non-mind classes and I forget about it. Should be fun.
really enjoyed this
looking forward to the big piece
thanks!
"To be an illusionist doesn’t require rejecting anything about how consciousness seems to us — only the second-order assumption that how it seems to us is really how it is."
The illusionist says it seems like searing pain has a certain felt quality, but in fact there is no such quality present in one's experience. And the same goes for all perceptual experience: there aren't any sensory qualities with distinct, immediately recognizable characters, there are only mistaken judgments and beliefs to the effect that such qualities exist. This means that for illusionists there's nothing non-conceptual about consciousness, which I think puts them in a tight spot: how are concepts thought about and communicated if not in terms of non-conceptual content?
https://www.naturalism.org/philosophy/consciousness/why-qualia-arent-like-unicorns-a-defense-of-phenomenal-realism
That was a good read, thanks for the link. I would agree with this. It seems to me conscious experience (which illusionists do not deny) are entirely made out of non-conceptual qualia (which illusionists do deny). That's kinda weird, right? Qualia are structured: for example, light blue and dark blue are two distinct qualia but their "intristic natures" are close together. An illusionist would have us get rid of the qualia but keep the structure. It's a bit like agreeing that the house exists, but that the bricks it's made out of don't exist.
I think Both Sides Brigade makes a great point that illusionism explains two major pieces of intuition regarding consciousness. But it requires switching from a consciousness ontology I understand to an consciousness ontology I cannot understand. If my goal is to understand consciousness, I'm not making progress with illusionism.
Agreed, and the claim that there's no pre-theoretical notion of mental qualities that grounds what it's like talk (what the qualia quietest claims) seems to me false. People understand prefectly well the idea that what it's like to see red is distinct from what it's like to see blue - that these have distinct qualitative characters - and they would agree that there's something it's like to see colors in dreams, which are uncontroversially mental episodes.
I suggested to the great qualia quietist Pete Mandik that qualia can be defined as the primitives or "atoms" of the mind. I'm not a physicalist, but even a physicalist should be able to use such a definition to identify the fundamental neural building blocks that the brain uses when producing thought and sensations (and thus identify qualia). I thought this was a pretty good suggestion.
He suggested that such talk is based off an old-fashioned "sense datum" idea of consciousness which has long since been disproven. I looked into just a little bit and while sense datum theory has fallen out of style, it doesn't seem completely disproven. But then again Pete knows far more than I so perhaps I need to look into this more.
I like the idea of basic qualia as epistemic or representational primitives that might have neural correlates. After all, representation can't go on indefinitely on pain of a regress so there have to be bottom level, non-composite components that aren't themselves represented, but simply presented - presentational, occurent, ineffable content. About which see p. 14 of https://naturalism.org/sites/naturalism.org/files/Locating%20Consciousness_0.pdf and section and section 5 of https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/79xg8_v1
But of course Pete will have none of it since he doesn't think there's any non-conceptual content in consciousness to account for.
I'm assuming you are the author of these linked works. If so, very nice! I think we are aligned on things consciousness related, except you've done actual research and are a good writer!
Very glad to see some confirmation from you and Metingzer on the idea of qualia being some sort of "mind primitive". Reading on in the first link, you also talk about phenomenal-physical parallelism which interests me. I don't believe in God, but I've always found Leibniz's pre-established harmony as being on the right track. I'll have to read more of your work.
I didn't really know much about this interpretation until just now and I must say, this is a total cop-out. Illusions are defined by the relation of reality to perception, an appearance that deceives one of what actually exists. The woman appears to be cut in half, though she really wasn't. Qualia are entirely defined by appearance. There can be no deceptive appearance here because the appearance IS the phenomenon. You tell me my experience of the color blue is an illusion. Sure, I know it's actually a representation of a certain wavelength of light produced by some pattern of brain activity. But what is it that's so intrinsically blue about that? It's the experience of the blueness that I'm curious about, and it can't be an illusion because it is entirely self-explanatory. And who is it that's perceiving it? I can't be hallucinating my own self because that doesn't make any damn sense. You can tell me my sense of self is an illusion, an image that doesn't reflect reality. And yet, the fact that I am RIGHT HERE inherently disproves that. It's just transmuting the hard problem into the easy problem yet again.
Ask yourself whether you really want to defend the idea that your experience of blue is blue.
When perceiving the sky, i for one paint the inside of my own brain blue
I know you're joking, but I sort of do, too. I imagine my interior as housing blue when I think of blueness, and I 'see' the blue. It's very easy to imagine that this is infallible introspection, rather than a muddled imaginative convention.
What exactly is it that physicalist theories of consciousness are unable to account for? And if we're discussing p-consciousness "what it's like" then whatever we want to call that, a "phenomenal property" belongs to some internal representation given by the brain.
So called "inner experience", which science *seems* unable to account for. The illusionist asks why we should believe in the existence of something that science seems unable to account for. What I want to know is why it seems that science cannot account for it. That is the intuition. I just don't think illusionism is plausible because it doesn't really offer an explanation for this seeming that doesn't both appear to affirm and deny its existence simultaneously.
Maybe it would be a better idea to just become some kind of meta-illusionist like Mandik and deny that the word "phenomenal consciousness" actually specifies anything meaningful in the first place. In other words, you could try going to route of just saying that "phenomenal consciousness" doesn't refer. There is neither an intersubjective consensus or a private notion being referenced.
My own view is one of realism. Essentially, there really is something that the word "phenomenal consciousness" is referring to. But people just have to accept that whatever mental states they are experiencing are in principle explicable in terms of physical processes unless we happen to have some really good reason to think otherwise, and we don't.
The only think I think would cause me to convert to illusionism is if I was given some good reason to think that physical stuff can't also be mental stuff. And if qualia or phenomenal states are ineffable, then we simply cannot know if they refer to physical things or not, since we'd just be unable to meaningfully differentiate them in a logically robust way. It's possible that phenomenal states are just given by sufficiently complex physical processes in a way that we are currently unable to represent.
One could also argue that our first empirical knowledge of the world is mediated through our private conscious experience, and that we only update our mental representations when they fail to track reality, but we can never ditch those representations. It seems that Illusionism might entail ditching first-person experience or rewriting them within the framework of a reductive physicalist model, but that reductive physicalist model was something we conceived by our own minds.
So we would be, in that instance, rewriting our own mental representations by appealing to an external framework that fails to account for the nature of those representations and then re-interpreting our mental experiences through that framework, but then why should we prefer the abstract explanatory model over our own first-person experience? Maybe we have some meta-epistemological justification for thinking that minds are unable to accurately represent their own contents, but that would also mean that Illusionism could equally be a misrepresentation of mental contents since minds are still required to conceive of and adopt an Illusionist view of mental contents.
I don't have those intuitions. the whole argument falls apart. this is such a silly way to argue. have fun tho
Even if you don't personally have a particular intuition, the fact that a position can reconcile two widespread and foundational intuitions held by other experts in the field is still a point in its favor.
I've an intuition this isnt true, so I know it isn't true.