Consciousness 5 — Is It Just An Illusion?

Those dots aren't actually there. What else could be an illusion?

In the third post in this series, David Chalmers mentioned that there has been an upsurge within consciousness philosophy towards a position called illusionism. In today's post, I want to begin to explore that position by listening to Keith Frankish, a leading proponent of illusionism. In an October 2019 episode of the Rationally Speaking podcast, Frankish discussed Why Consciousness is an Illusion. Here are the most important points from that discussion:

• The simplest way to put it is that [illusionism is] offering a different model of what consciousness is. This model rejects a central theory that dominates most people’s thinking about consciousness. Consciousness in that sense is illusory and doesn’t exist.
• Our common-sense view of what our inner experience is like is not as solid and reliable as we think. We tend to assume we encounter a presentation of the visual world that is full and complete in every detail right down to the periphery, but it turns out that is wrong. That is an illusion. That’s an introspective illusion. Even in the matrix we would be having this illusion that we have a complete visual field. Once you allow that, you’re opening a wedge here to the idea that introspection itself might be a construction.
• Let me say a bit more about the realist picture and just how odd this picture is. Dan Dennett calls this a sort of Cartesian theatre. The idea that there is this inner display of experience for conscious awareness. The outer world effectively creates this private cinema screen that we (and who are we?) witness. This kind of view of introspection does presuppose an introspect-or. That’s one thing that needs to be hashed out.
• For Descartes this was easy because he envisioned an immaterial soul doing the witnessing, and it has special access. I suppose if there is an immaterial soul then all bets are off as to what it can do. But most philosophers now think it is just a brain. We aren’t two things, but just an embodied brain.
• We are complicated creatures by any account, and we have some sort of self-awareness of our own mental processes, but it wouldn’t be surprising if that picture weren’t totally accurate. Why would nature have equipped us to be super-neuroscientists or to have a super understanding of our own mental processes? We don’t need that. Maybe we have something that’s much more sketchy and caricatured.
• Here’s a way I put this in a paper. These properties are anomalous [i.e. deviating from what is standard, normal, or expected]. They’re not like other properties of the body like digestion, respiration, reproduction, etc. They’re also not like other mental properties like emotion or other things that don’t involve consciousness—we don’t have good cognitive accounts of what’s going on there. ... There are three approaches we could take to that. One is to say that yes they are anomalous and we’ve got to do some radical theorising to account for them. We have to do some heavy-duty metaphysics to say they’re not a part of the physical world. Or perhaps (and this is gaining in popularity) they are a fundamental feature of reality, like the intrinsic nature of all matter is conscious in this way, or that all matter has this intrinsic phenomenal aspect to it. [That's panpsychism.]
• [Digression from illusionism to consciousness in general:]
• If you really want to be realist about consciousness, you’ve got to put it into the natural world somewhere, and it doesn’t fit in easily. So, maybe, [panpsychism is] one way of getting consciousness into the natural world. Or maybe it just pops into existence when you get complex enough brains. That’s a sort of emergence. You start where nature is building brains and the original ones don’t have this phenomenal aspect to them, they just process information and get bigger and bigger and bigger. At some point between the first organisms and us, the lights came on inside. All that information processing, which was doing all the work, led to the lights coming on in a phenomenal aspect. Then the question is when did this happen? We can’t be sure, because we can’t strictly tell if other creatures, or indeed anyone else has this. There is a sort of arbitrariness here where things click on.
• Is this any more arbitrary than the fuzziness surrounding the definition of life? I think consciousness is worse than this in two ways.
• One is that there doesn’t seem to be an in-between condition where there is a little bit of an interior world. Either there is something it is like to be something that has this first-person experience or there isn’t. It may be very impoverished or boring for what it is like to be an electron or an amoeba or whatever, but it is still either or. It either does have this first-person experience or it doesn’t. It’s hard to see how it could have half a perspective. The inner lights are either on or off.
• Second, with life it’s just difficult to specify what you count as life and what you don’t. There is no hidden fact here; it’s just what you say. It’s a terminological issue. With consciousness, there are radically hidden facts. No matter how clearly we define this thing, we can’t tell where it is and where it isn’t. If someone says my cup has it, there is no test you can do to prove it.
• [Returning to illusionism:]
• Let me get back to the three broad positions you can take on this. ... [The third position] is a more conservative response that says we can kind of explain all this in terms of standard resources of cognitive science by talking about representations in the brain and maybe some sort of self-awareness. Maybe when we start to represent our own awareness to ourselves, that’s when this apparent subjective experience comes in. ... That’s been the standard view. Illusionism just goes a bit further. Yes, there are some sort of introspective mechanisms here, but what they are doing is misrepresenting their targets. It’s not that these brain states, these targets, really are that. We have these simple, private, qualitative states. But actual brain states are much more complicated than that. Brain states merely present like that. And that is the illusion.
• Here is an analogy. In the middle ages, people thought other people were possessed by demons. Modern psychology gives a different explanation of what is happening. Now, do we say that’s what demons really are? Schizophrenia is what demons are? Or do you say, "Stop thinking about it that way. Stop using the word demons altogether. This isn’t an explanation of what demons really are." That’s what I’m asking us to do with consciousness.
• Some people start with the presumption that qualia is presented to us in a way that is immediate and transparent. They are revealed to us. There is nothing hidden about them. Just by having the experience, and attending to the experience, we can know the character of that property. I think it’s pretty obvious that if that is your conception of the problem that needs to be explained, then science isn’t going to help you with that. This presupposes a relationship between the subject and the object that you couldn’t have in any physical conception of the world. To these people, to suggest that science has something to say here is to miss the point of the target for the whole debate.
• But we can reconfigure that. We can reconceptualise that; i.e. we are not hard wired to think that way. People who are into Buddhist philosophy tell me that this is what Buddhist thinkers have been doing for a long time. So, I think it’s an open question about how able we are to shake off this picture.

Brief Comments
As I noted in the second post of this series, Sam Harris does indeed use observations from his meditation practice to puncture the idea that consciousness is "presented to us in a way that is immediate and transparent." So, illusionism, while sounding pretty dire on the face of it, seems to be nothing more than the resting place for people who have dropped the supernatural attributes of consciousness, but haven't made the leap to panpsychism to explain it either. Illusionism doesn't say that conscious experience doesn't exist; just that it isn't what people generally think it is. This is important to note because there are still a lot of philosophers who ridicule illusionism by misunderstanding the position.

The problem I see with Frankish's view is that he's still talking about consciousness like an essentialist, talking as if it were one essence that either exists or does not. His claim that consciousness is either on or off seems deeply problematic in an evolving universe. But not all illusionists feel that way. What might they think is behind the illusion then? That will be the subject of the next two posts from perhaps the most famous developer of this idea—Dan Dennett.

What do you think? Are you more comfortable with dualism, panpsychism, or illusionism? Or do you have another name for your position here?

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Previous Posts in This Series:
Consciousness 1 — Introduction to the Series
Consciousness 2 — The Illusory Self and a Fundamental Mystery
Consciousness 3 — The Hard Problem
Consciousness 4 — Panpsychist Problems With Consciousness