Thats what illusionist mean by illusionism, but you haven’t offered much motivation to believe it, and it needs motivation, because its far from obvious:-
Sure, right now I haven’t offered that much motivation. The post is already probably too long.
The motivation, therefore is a strong belief in physicalism. Note that the basic manouvre—saying that if E is apparently evidence against hypothesis H , E cannot be true—can be generalised to other areas , and can be used to “prove” almost anything
Agreed that this would be very bad reasoning. But some inference can still be drawn right. If you have very strong independent priors for H and I show E is apparently evidence against H then your credence in E might go down (as might your credence in H to be fair). That would be one prima facie motivation.
Illusionism , as opposed to delusionism, has the further problem Th t it explains the illusion of Qualia as a quasi-phenomenal property: so it eliminates the kind of phenomenal properties for which there is direct evidence in favour of another kind for which there is none.
This is where the big disagreement happens imo. Because illusionists would say the data to explain is “reports about qualia” and not “qualia” (Dennett spoke about heterophenomenology). And for that we have a lot of evidence.
Circling back to motivations, one I didn’t mention in the post is unreliability of introspection undercutting reasons to believe our intuitions about consciousness. A great book, Eric Schwitzgebel’s Perplexities of Consciousness, talks about this e.g. “do we dream in colours?” “can humans echolocate?” “Do you constantly experience your feet in your shoes?”.
One final prima facie motivation is that we should not necessarily expect evolution to produce transparent introspective access to our cognitive processes. Obviously there is some information being exchanged, but the representation only needs to be as faithful as survival demands.
This is where the big disagreement happens imo. Because illusionists would say the data to explain is “reports about qualia” and not “qualia
Whereas the anti illusionist thinks that’s failing to engage with the topic of consciousness at all. Having a dogma in favour of objective reports over subjective introspection isn’t much better than having a dogma in favour of ontological physicalism.
Circling back to motivations, one I didn’t mention in the post is unreliability of introspection undercutting reasons to believe our intuitions about consciousness
If intuition is the only evidence you have , it is the most reliable evidence you have.
Note that the case for nonphysicalism doesn’t have to depend on direct intuitions about nonphysicality.
A great book, Eric Schwitzgebel’s Perplexities of Consciousness, talks about this e.g. “do we dream in colours?” “can humans echolocate?” “Do you constantly experience your feet in your shoes?”.
We still have some sort of conscious experience even we don’t precisely know it. Ineffability is a way of not knowing it, and also a major problem.
Obviously there is some information being exchanged, but the representation only needs to be as faithful as survival demands
That’s not really the problem. Of course, introspection doesn’t reveal anything at all about neural activity. The question is what is going on instead. Introspection reveals a rich phenomenology that we don’t have a reductive explanation for.
ETA
We don’t have a reductive explanation of phenomenality , assumed to be real appearances, and we also don’t have a reductive explanation of (quasi) phenomenally assumed to be illusory appearances...and in fact, the two things are almost the same thing.
Sure, right now I haven’t offered that much motivation. The post is already probably too long.
Agreed that this would be very bad reasoning. But some inference can still be drawn right. If you have very strong independent priors for H and I show E is apparently evidence against H then your credence in E might go down (as might your credence in H to be fair). That would be one prima facie motivation.
This is where the big disagreement happens imo. Because illusionists would say the data to explain is “reports about qualia” and not “qualia” (Dennett spoke about heterophenomenology). And for that we have a lot of evidence.
Circling back to motivations, one I didn’t mention in the post is unreliability of introspection undercutting reasons to believe our intuitions about consciousness. A great book, Eric Schwitzgebel’s Perplexities of Consciousness, talks about this e.g. “do we dream in colours?” “can humans echolocate?” “Do you constantly experience your feet in your shoes?”.
One final prima facie motivation is that we should not necessarily expect evolution to produce transparent introspective access to our cognitive processes. Obviously there is some information being exchanged, but the representation only needs to be as faithful as survival demands.
Whereas the anti illusionist thinks that’s failing to engage with the topic of consciousness at all. Having a dogma in favour of objective reports over subjective introspection isn’t much better than having a dogma in favour of ontological physicalism.
If intuition is the only evidence you have , it is the most reliable evidence you have.
Note that the case for nonphysicalism doesn’t have to depend on direct intuitions about nonphysicality.
We still have some sort of conscious experience even we don’t precisely know it. Ineffability is a way of not knowing it, and also a major problem.
That’s not really the problem. Of course, introspection doesn’t reveal anything at all about neural activity. The question is what is going on instead. Introspection reveals a rich phenomenology that we don’t have a reductive explanation for.
ETA
We don’t have a reductive explanation of phenomenality , assumed to be real appearances, and we also don’t have a reductive explanation of (quasi) phenomenally assumed to be illusory appearances...and in fact, the two things are almost the same thing.