Although it has powerful defenders — pre-eminently Daniel Dennett — illusionism remains a minority position, and it is often dismissed out of hand as failing to ‘take consciousness seriously’ (Chalmers, 1996).
Further, in the 2020 PhillPapers Survey, 998 English-speaking philosophers were asked “Hard problem of consciousness (is there one?): no or yes?” and 62% said yes while only 29% said no.
One other (more anecdotal) observation I have is that this distinction seems to often be at the crux of disagreement between moral realists and anti-realists. If you are in camp #2 and valenced qualia obviously exists, then it more naturally follows that qualia has inherent value and thus there is such thing as inherent value. However the r-value correlation between the two questions is only 0.21 so I may be missing something.
(also if you are a moral realist, I think there are important implications for AI safety worth being aware of.)
Its worth mentioning that the majority of people are in camp #2. For example, in Illusionism as a Theory of Consciousness, Frankish notes:
Further, in the 2020 PhillPapers Survey, 998 English-speaking philosophers were asked “Hard problem of consciousness (is there one?): no or yes?” and 62% said yes while only 29% said no.
One other (more anecdotal) observation I have is that this distinction seems to often be at the crux of disagreement between moral realists and anti-realists. If you are in camp #2 and valenced qualia obviously exists, then it more naturally follows that qualia has inherent value and thus there is such thing as inherent value. However the r-value correlation between the two questions is only 0.21 so I may be missing something.
(also if you are a moral realist, I think there are important implications for AI safety worth being aware of.)
Camp 1 includes illusionists, functionalists, and materialists.