Illusionism basically says this: once we have successfully explained all our reports about consciousness, there will be nothing left to explain.
As a guiding intuition, consider the case of white light, which was regarded as an intrinsic property of nature until Newton discovered that it is in fact composed of seven distinct colours. White light is an illusion in the sense that it does not possess an intrinsic property “whiteness” (even though it seems to). Suppose we manage to explain, with a high degree of precision, exactly how and when we perceive white, and why we perceive it the way we do. We do not subsequently need to formulate a “hard problem of whiteness” asking why, on top of this, whiteness arises. Illusionists claim that consciousness is an illusion in the same sense that whiteness is.[1]
So literally everything that is in some way an abstraction is an illusion? I don’t think this is generally what the illusionists mean, my understanding is that it is more about phenomenal consciousness being non-representational—meaning something like that it has the type signature of a world-model without actually being a model of anything real (including itself). That could very well be a misrepresentation of what illusionists believe, but I’m still pretty sure it’s not just any reductionist explanation of consciousness.
Thanks for the comment! I had to have a think but here’s my response:
The first thing is that I maybe wasn’t clear about the scope of the comparison. It was just to say “whiteness of light is an illusion in roughly the same sense that phenomenal consciousness is” (as opposed to other definitions of illusion).
Even then, what differentiates these illusions from other abstractions? Obviously not all abstractions are illusions.
Take our (functional) concept of heat. In some sense it’s an abstraction, and it doesn’t quite work the way people thought a thousand years ago. But crucially, there exists a real-world process which maps onto our folk concept extremely nicely, such that the folk concept remains useful and tracks something real. Unlike phenomenal consciousness, it just so happens that we evolved our concept of heat without us attributing too many weird properties to it. Once we developed models of molecular kinetic energy, we could just plug them right in.
Where I think you might have a point is that this is arguably not a binary distinction, some concepts are clearly confused and others clearly not but in some cases it might be blurry (and consciousness might be one of those, i’m not sure).
I don’t think this is generally what the illusionists mean, my understanding is that it is more about phenomenal consciousness being non-representational—meaning something like that it has the type signature of a world-model without actually being a model of anything real (including itself)
I think most illusionists believe consciousness involves real representations, but systematic misrepresentations. The cognitive processes are genuinely representing something (our cognitive states), but they are attributing phenomenal properties that don’t actually exist in those states. That’s quite different from it being non-representational, and not being a model of anything.
At least that’s my understanding which comes from the Daniel Dennett/Keith Frankish views. I’d be interested in learning about others.
So literally everything that is in some way an abstraction is an illusion? I don’t think this is generally what the illusionists mean, my understanding is that it is more about phenomenal consciousness being non-representational—meaning something like that it has the type signature of a world-model without actually being a model of anything real (including itself). That could very well be a misrepresentation of what illusionists believe, but I’m still pretty sure it’s not just any reductionist explanation of consciousness.
Thanks for the comment! I had to have a think but here’s my response:
The first thing is that I maybe wasn’t clear about the scope of the comparison. It was just to say “whiteness of light is an illusion in roughly the same sense that phenomenal consciousness is” (as opposed to other definitions of illusion).
Even then, what differentiates these illusions from other abstractions? Obviously not all abstractions are illusions.
Take our (functional) concept of heat. In some sense it’s an abstraction, and it doesn’t quite work the way people thought a thousand years ago. But crucially, there exists a real-world process which maps onto our folk concept extremely nicely, such that the folk concept remains useful and tracks something real. Unlike phenomenal consciousness, it just so happens that we evolved our concept of heat without us attributing too many weird properties to it. Once we developed models of molecular kinetic energy, we could just plug them right in.
Where I think you might have a point is that this is arguably not a binary distinction, some concepts are clearly confused and others clearly not but in some cases it might be blurry (and consciousness might be one of those, i’m not sure).
I think most illusionists believe consciousness involves real representations, but systematic misrepresentations. The cognitive processes are genuinely representing something (our cognitive states), but they are attributing phenomenal properties that don’t actually exist in those states. That’s quite different from it being non-representational, and not being a model of anything.
At least that’s my understanding which comes from the Daniel Dennett/Keith Frankish views. I’d be interested in learning about others.