Adventures in Super Moorean Land

1.0 Introduction

I called myself an illusionist for a long time. Strong illusionism is the view that phenomenal consciousness doesn’t exist, but we operate under the mistaken impression (i.e.,the illusion) that it does (Frankish, 2016). One might opt for a more modest form which holds that phenomenal consciousness does exist, but isn’t quite what we suppose; it might be missing some key characteristics ordinarily thought to be part of phenomenal consciousness. I endorsed the former. 

However, my views gradually shifted away from this position, only not in the direction one might suppose. Many philosophers regard illusionism as “radical,” “absurd,” “extreme,” or “preposterous”. I’ve even heard people suggest that the view is so ridiculous that nobody could seriously endorse it. After all, the manifest fact that we have phenomenally conscious states is self-evident. It is, perhaps, the one thing we couldn’t doubt. So one might think I’d announce some deconversion story, where I saw the light qualia and came back into the fold.

This isn’t what has happened. Instead, I came to believe that illusionism doesn't go far enough. Illusionists hold that:

1. Phenomenal states don’t exist (i.e., private, ineffable, immediately accessible qualitative states…don’t take that set of traits to necessarily be exhaustive)

2. All or most people (or at least some substantial proportion of nonphilosophers) are subject to the illusion that they have phenomenal states

3. (not strictly a requirement, but seems implicitly presumed) the notion of a phenomenal state, or qualia, is intelligible, it’s just that they don’t exist

I take illusionism to involve a commitment to (a) and (b), but not necessarily (c). 

I’m not sure when exactly I began to doubt either of these claims, but my views on both crystallized when I ran into Mandik’s (2016) paper on qualia quietism and meta-illusionism. Meta-illusionism (roughly speaking) denies (b), while qualia quietism denies (c). That is, Mandik puts forward the views that:

1. Terms like phenomenal state, qualia, and what-its-likeness aren’t meaningful

2. Illusionists mistakenly think that people are generally subject to the illusion that there are phenomenal states, but even this is not true. (Mandik seems less committed to this claim)

What if the notion of qualia, or phenomenal states, are philosophical terms of art that capture the output of conceptual and linguistic confusions characteristic of analytic philosophy?

I am increasingly coming around to the view that philosophers are routinely subject to mistaken presumptions. Among these presumptions is the notion that much of the way philosophers think is reflected in the way ordinary people speak and think, and that if philosophers find themselves vexed by some conundrum, that this puzzle is an output of what ordinary people are thinking and doing. I suspect this is often not the case, and that the puzzles philosophers face are problems of their own making.

To address this in the context of consciousness, I want to raise some concerns about what illusionists themselves have to say. Part of my concern with illusionism is that its lack of appeal may be due in part to attempting to vindicate the position within the framework of co

ntemporary analytic philosophy, rather than taking a step back and considering the possibility that the problems may be more fundamental. I suspect that the sorts of mistakes that led to the mistaken notion that there are (or could be) phenomenal states is downstream of broader methodological problems with the field. Given that I think certain forms of moral realism rely on meaningless terms, this is a recurring theme, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence. I suspect both mistakes share common, overlapping causes.

2.0 The Moorean argument for phenomenal consciousness

To this end, I want to examine a recent paper by Kammerer (2022), How can you be so sure? Illusionism and the obviousness of phenomenal consciousness.

Kammerer (2022) offers a rebuttal to a Moorean argument against illusionism, which holds that illusionism is false because it is obvious that we have phenomenal consciousness. I like Kammerer’s paper. Kammerer targets what I take to be incredibly weak arguments, and does a good job of identifying weaknesses in those arguments. Most laudably, this involves picking apart multiple possible meanings behind the premises. However, where I take issue is not with Kammerer’s objections, but with a kind of concessive regard for the arguments that are criticized. The overall vibe is one where Kammerer is dealing with a seemingly impenetrable fortress of powerful arguments, when the arguments are so weak it’s more like knocking down sandcastles. This is an example of the dialectical norms I dislike in academia: if sincere, then people are giving bad arguments too much credit. If insincere, and motivated by politeness, then philosophers are pulling their punches in ways that are detrimental. Sometimes, an argument shouldn’t be met with “I respectfully disagree with my esteemed colleague,” but with a “wow, that’s complete bullshit.”

I grant that perhaps an overtly caustic tone could provoke one’s colleagues and perhaps risk one’s chance at publication, and I don’t favor an explicitly hostile polemic. As a result, I don’t intend the remarks that follow to be a critique of the way Kammerer handles the criticisms: I think the criticisms are good, I mostly agree with them, and I understand why one wouldn’t include remarks like “This is ridiculous, what the Socrates is this!” in the middle of an academic paper. Indeed, it’s even possible reviewers or editors would ask one to tone down the force of one’s criticisms were they a bit too acerbic. Instead, I would prefer to construe this as a critique of the overall norms and atmosphere in the academic philosophical community: there is an excess of politeness, of kid gloves, of treating bad arguments with undue gravitas, as though every goofy premise, every silly claim, every dogmatic assertion is a boss monster at the end of a game, and not some redshirt you could bulldoze past by pressing ‘X’. 

2.1 A Moorean objection to Moorean arguments

According to Kammerer, Moorean arguments against illusionism beg the question against illusionism. Does one really need to argue for this though? Of course it’s begging the question. All Moorean arguments are questions begging dressed up in finery. Yet skeptics, critics, and antirealists of various stripes often accord such maneuvers with far too much respect, agreeing that this or that claim does “seem obvious,” buying into the presumptions, or sharing the possibly distorted phenomenology or inferences about one’s phenomenology, that characterize the position they proceed to reject. I’m not saying this must be the case. Perhaps some things seem obvious because they’re true. I grant that illusionists do share the intuitions proponents of phenomenal states have, and do find much of what proponents of the hard problem obvious to be obvious. 

What troubles me is that there seems inadequate attention as to why this might be so. What if proponents and critics share similar intuitions, not because the claims in question are the sorts of intuitions any reasonable person would have, or that human minds are naturally disposed towards, but because they were both inducted into a similar philosophical tradition, or are members of similar cultures, and features of their education or enculturation (or both) dispose them towards shared intuitions for reasons unrelated to the plausibility of the intuitions in question? What if, in other words, even our disposition to think there are phenomenal states or qualia is itself a parochial and idiosyncratic feature of our environment, not some universal, widely shared tendency rational minds find themselves in at the outset of inquiry? Mandik (2016) hints at such a possibility, suggesting that illusionists may be subject to the mistaken presumption that people are subject to an illusion. But perhaps the illusion is a product of training in philosophy, not something people are generally disposed towards.

History is replete with confident pronouncements that this or that notion just “stands to reason” or “is obvious” only for future discoveries to reveal that we were simply wrong. Things that seem obvious and are false seem just as obvious as things that are obvious and true. This leaves such skeptical positions at a dialectical disadvantage: granting more than is necessary, precisely because the skeptic is themselves caught in the same web of conceptual confusions, phenomenal distortions, and flawed methods of rival views. The disadvantage comes in the form of holding a counterintuitive position, leaving the door open for proponents of the view they reject to insist that the critic’s defeaters just aren’t good enough to overcome how “obvious” a given position is. This always allows the proponent of a view to employ an unlimited epistemic fudge factor that renders them the final arbiter of the success of your arguments. 

That may be an unavoidable aspect of how we go about forming beliefs and assessing evidence. It is one thing to say that, given one’s priors, or other commitments, one isn’t persuaded, and another to imply (as philosophers often do, if by omission) that because their own judgments are well-calibrated, that if you don’t convince them, it’s because you’re wrong, and not because they have misaligned priors or have misjudged the quality of the evidence.

This “obviousness” is a blight on good philosophy, not because I deny priors, or “seemings,” or whatever are relevant to adjudicating rival theories, but because those seemings or what is “obvious” is often downstream of antecedent theoretical commitments, or result from and remain plausible only in light of one’s methods, or are insufficiently examined in light of knowledge of human cognition, and so on; they’re a thin veneer, a patching over, of a host of unexamined considerations that, were one to examine them, one might find the beliefs, attitudes, dispositions shifting beneath their feet precisely in ways that influence downstream judgments about what seems “obvious.” 

This conversation-stopping, reflection-suppressing, feature of Moorean approaches is, to put it bluntly, a lazy and ineffective way to do philosophy that relies, among other things, on ignoring the fact that our judgments about what’s obvious are made using cognitive systems whose internal mechanisms are relevant to assessing the reliability of those judgments. Chemists and physicists may use a variety of tools outside of their mind, but philosophers use, for the most part, one tool: the brain. It’s remarkable how little interest many philosophers show in how it works, and the embarrassing and self-undermining degree to which they fail to appreciate how relevant its operations are to what they do. This is more a problem for more rationalistic approaches to philosophy, of course; I’m not talking about empiricists who are typically more sensitive to such considerations, and this is one strong point in favor of more empiricist approaches.

2.2 Returning to Kammerer

I find much to agree with in Kammer’s article. However, I think Kammerer concedes too much to proponents of the hard problem. It is this tendency to embrace much of what proponents of some philosophical view presuppose that I want to push back against. It puzzles me that illusionists are willing to reject an entrenched view sustained largely by intuition and (what I consider) pretty weak arguments, but don’t show a similar willingness to reject many other ideas that are equally (and perhaps in some cases more) dubious.

The Moorean argument against illusionism is simple, and, according to Kammerer, Chalmers regards it as the best argument against illusionism:

P1: People sometimes feel pain.

P2: If illusionism is true, no one feels pain.

C: Illusionism is false. (p. 2849)

This is a terrible argument. The only possible way for it to work is if the notion of feeling pain that Chalmers has in mind refers to phenomenally conscious pain. But once that is settled, then the argument is completely trivial. It amounts to little more than saying that phenomenal states exist, and since illusionism denies this, it is false. This isn’t an argument. It’s an assertion masquerading as an argument.

At a certain point, one has to wonder why philosophers bother with arguments and empty formalisms, when they don’t actually do anything beyond offering the thin veneer of something more sophisticated than the naked assertion of one’s existing views. And if that’s all one seeks to do, why bother with philosophy?

What I find strange about Kammerer’s response isn’t that Kammerer doesn’t get around to a similar conclusion: the argument begs the question. Rather, what I find strange is how Kammerer treats this as a serious argument against illusionism. We’re told:

A sophisticated illusionist could deny that illusionism implies that there are no conscious experiences—insisting that illusionism only denies that there are phenomenally conscious experiences. (p. 2489)

Illusionists don’t need to be sophisticated to resist this argument. They can simply point out that the premises are ambiguous, and, once disambiguated, an illusionist could, with barely any effort at all, simply reject the first premise, or reject the second premise, depending on the way the ambiguity is resolved. This feature of formal syllogisms is incredibly common. Here’s how it works.

Step 1: Design a set of premises that involve ambiguous terms or phrases. Each premise, taken in isolation, sounds superficially plausible, since at least one plausible interpretation is so obvious that only an idiot would deny it. 

Step 2: Ensure the language remains consistent between the premises so as to have a formally valid argument. 

Step 3: Ensure the premises are structured in such a way that, were one to resolve the ambiguity, someone with a contrary view could either reject (in the case of an argument with two premises) the first premise, or the second premise. This ensures that there is no straightforward way to decisively reject either the first or the second premise. Which premise you’d reject must turn on how the ambiguity would be resolved.

Step 4: Throw this argument at your critics. Since it is ambiguous, they cannot decisively reject the first or second premise in particular. Instead, which premise they’d reject turns on which way they resolve the ambiguity.

This would involve nothing more than shuffling words and phrases around. There’s nothing especially sophisticated about it. Yes, if by “illusionism” we mean a view that denies phenomenal states, and if by “conscious experience” we aren’t talking about phenomenal states, then illusionism doesn’t necessarily deny that we have “conscious experience.” But one would have thought that philosophers would have been clear about the meaning of premises they bother to pack into the formal structure of an argument from the outset. Arguments shouldn’t be used to produce ambiguity by passing language through an oversimplification bottleneck that generates ambiguity.

Next, we’re told:

Alternatively, the illusionist could admit that they deny the existence of conscious experiences, but insist that in the most important senses of feeling pain (functional senses) they do not deny that people sometimes feel pain. However, I think that we should grant Chalmers that there is at least one significant reading of “feeling pain” (the phenomenal reading) for which illusionists deny that anyone feels pain. (p. 2849)

This is careful, but I think it’s too careful. The illusionist doesn’t have to “admit” anything, as though they’re confessing to a crime or “biting a bullet” or whatever other terms would make it seem like actual moves are being made, as though Moorean argument is actually causing illusionists to give ground. The “argument” we’re given is just a parade of words that conceal what amounts to an assertion that illusionism is false. If this is an “argument,” it is a vacuous one. There’s nothing to “admit,” any more than someone is “admitting” something by agreeing to the following argument:

P1: If I’m right, you’re wrong.

P2: I’m right.

C: Therefore, you’re wrong.

Philosophers might as well just say this most of the time, because their arguments tend to be no more substantive than this. The formal structure of syllogisms, combined with clever use of ambiguous and loaded terms, is employed to give the impression that something substantive is being said when it isn’t. 

Logic is used in contemporary analytic philosophy as a method of concealing what amounts to little more than mere stipulation and assertion. What’s astounding isn’t that this is the case, but that philosophers keep playing this empty game anyway, seemingly obvious to the fact that much of contemporary analytic philosophy is little more than a proxy war for competing priors and incorrigible commitments. We deploy our toy soldiers on the battlefields of formal logic and the plains of dialectic, when in reality you have your incorrigible dogmas and I have mine, and what we’re really doing is kicking up enough dust and smoke that we dupe people into think we’ve made a case for our view. All we’ve really done is engaged in a charade that dazzles people with jargon and the superficial appearance of something resembling math or science. Much of these disputes look like what would happen if an insane priest, desperate to produce a compelling catechism, couched their sermons in enough Latin and technobabble yanked out of some college textbooks to confound their audience into thinking that, with words so fancy, they must be right.

Kammerer treats this argument as though it has more force than it does. The illusionist has to “admit” things, and “grant” to Chalmers that there is a significant reading of “feeling pain” that the illusionist denies. Rejecting the argument doesn’t require admitting or granting anything. The only way the argument could work from the outset is if the meaning we’re “granting” is if phenomenal reading were made explicit or implied in the premises. And if analytic philosophy is all about clarity and rigor, why leave the matter ambiguous and why rely on implication? It should have been said explicitly that “feels pain” is being used to refer to phenomenal states, i.e., “feels phenomenal pain.” After all, an illusionist doesn’t necessarily deny that people “feel pain” in some non-phenomenal sense, and would typically affirm that they do. So the remark is ambiguous between a phenomenal and non-phenomenal reading. I also take the ambiguity of the claim to be sufficiently obvious that it shouldn’t go unnoticed by philosophers. And yet such arguments are accepted in spite of their ambiguity. Why? What is the reason for this? Why isn’t such an argument rejected on the grounds that it is ambiguous, and its proponent asked to present an argument with premises that aren’t so ambiguous?

If philosophers put work into resolving these ambiguities in advance, they might not have much to do. The problem is that when that’s made explicit, the inanity of the argument becomes obvious. Nothing about the objection to illusionism requires a specific emphasis on pain; it need only maintain that there are phenomenal states of any kind at all. And the only relevant feature of illusionism that is being rejected is its denial of phenomenal states (and not, e.g., claims like “all or most people are subject to the illusion of phenomenal consciousness”). As such, we could substitute “illusionism” for “there are no phenomenal states,” and “feels pain” for “phenomenal states” without changing the essence of the argument. Once we do, we get something like this:

P1: There are phenomenal states.

P2: If there are no phenomenal states, then there are no phenomenal states.

C: There are phenomenal states.

Or:

P1: P.

P2: If ~P, then ~P.

C: P.

This is at best a vacuous argument against illusionism. It’s an assertion that illusionism is false and a tautology. Using an argument that amounts to something like is nothing but logic theater: the misuse of logic to give the appearance that one is raising some kind of sophisticated objection, when one’s “objection” amounts to nothing more than an assertion to the contrary sprinkled with some formalistic garnish to hide the fact. 

Next, Kammerer says:

I grant Chalmers this: there is a reading of “feeling pain” (the phenomenal reading) on which illusionists deny that anyone ever feels pain. 

There’s nothing to “grant” here. Of course there’s a reading of “feeling pain” that illusionists deny: that reading that construes “feeling pain” as “feeling phenomenal pain.” This isn’t something that needs to be granted, but something that anyone using the argument would have to stipulate or clarify in order to make the argument work. For comparison, if one is arguing with a moral realist who takes the word “wrong” to mean “stance-independently wrong,” and uses the word “wrong” in an argument that implicitly presupposes stance-independence, one isn’t “granting” anything to the realist in recognizing that their use of the word “wrong” presupposes stance-independence: they’re just acknowledging a stipulative account of the meaning of the term being given. If someone says “By X I mean Y,” are you granting that X=Y? Is this a concession or an admission? Such language gives the impression of giving ground, when no ground has been given. Why talk this way? Why use language of concession and admission, as though one is guilty of something, when all we’re guilty of is granting that if someone says “By X I mean Y” that by X they mean Y?

A moral realist could make an argument very similar to the anti-illusionist argument here:

P1: Torturing babies for fun is wrong.

P2: If antirealism is true, it’s not wrong to torture babies for fun.

C: Antirealism is false.

This has more or less the same structure as the Moorean argument against illusionism. Note how P1 doesn’t work if “wrong” is used in a way consistent with or presupposing an antirealist conception of wrongness. Append “stance-dependent” to “wrong” and examine the argument:

P1: Torturing babies for fun is stance-dependently wrong.

P2: If antirealism is true, it’s not stance-dependently wrong to torture babies for fun.

C: Antirealism is false.

This argument is no longer sound because P2 is false. The argument could only work if “wrong” just means wrong in a sense inconsistent with antirealism. And, given this, this means that the argument only works if P1 begs the question against antirealism, because “Torturing babies for fun is stance-independently wrong” just is an assertion of a claim inconsistent with antirealism: a statement that could only be true if moral realism were true. Of course an antirealist isn’t going to grant that. The argument might as well be:

P1: Moral realism is true.

P2: If moral realism is true, moral antirealism is false.

C: Moral antirealism is false.

At this point, a philosopher might insist that all arguments in logic work this way, and that anyone who didn’t already recognize this doesn’t understand how logic works. But I wouldn't even deny that, were they to make such a claim. I’m not suggesting logic ought to work differently. I’m suggesting that, deployed in the manner it is in contemporary analytic philosophy, it is used to give the impression that it can do more than it can.

The only way this argument works is if “wrong” means “stance-independently wrong.” If asked to clarify, the realist would presumably either acknowledge this is what they mean by “wrong,” or insist it isn’t. If the former, there’s nothing for us to “grant” the person making the argument. If the latter, P1 would be incontestably false (so presumably the realist isn’t going to think that).

These examples are analogous to the argument Kammerer is responding to. Yet Kammerer employs unnecessarily concessive language in responding to the argument. It gives the impression illusionists are giving argumentative ground. Why do this, when it is completely unnecessary?

The problems with this argument don’t stop here, since, as I will show, the argument is more than merely inane and vacuous. It relies on the active exploitation of ambiguity for argumentative force in a way suspiciously akin to normative entanglement.

Kammerer doesn’t go this route. That is, Kammerer doesn’t point out how vacuous this “argument” is, nor criticize it for exploiting ambiguity to win rhetorical points against the opposition. I think this would have provided a better response than one that lends undeserved gravitas to the argument by taking it so seriously. I understand why someone wouldn’t do this. This is my preferred approach to these sorts of arguments. And I can understand why someone would want to object to these arguments on their own terms, using the tools of analytic philosophy itself. 

Personally, I’m losing patience for that. While I am a moral antirealist, and am generally on the same side as illusionists about consciousness, it often feels like those who nominally share my views treat their opponents like wizards, and regard themselves as wizards, too. They see the opposing side cast flashy spells, and respond in kind with flashy spells of their own. But every time I turn my attention to some topic in analytic philosophy, it feels like another wizard behind a curtain, using language to weave illusions made of words. And when I pull back the curtain, there’s no genuine spellcraft. There’s just someone hammering away at a new verbal gadget or tinkering with a new conceptual tool deviously designed to confuse everyone, including its originator, into thinking their acts of prestidigitation are real magic.

3.0 Granting too much

Kammerer’s next remark is where we really begin to part ways:

Moreover, it seems obvious that people feel pain in this phenomenal sense.

First, we have the standard nonspecific generalization problem in analytic philosophy (I’m trying this term out for referring to the problem; let me know if you have other suggestions for a term). This is the problem where philosophers will say things like “we,” “our,” or “us” without specifying who they’re talking about, or will say that something is “obvious,” or “counterintuitive,” or “commonsensical,” without specifying who they’re referring to. Who does it seem obvious to?

It doesn’t seem obvious to me. I don’t know if it seems obvious to most people. That’s an empirical question. At present, most empirical evidence suggests that ordinary people don’t find the hard problem intuitive or even have a concept of qualia (see e.g., Díaz, 2021; Ozdemier, 2022; Sytsma & Fischer, 2023; Sytsma & Machery, 2010; Sytsma & Ozdemier, 2019; cf. Wyrwa, 2022). 

Perhaps it seems obvious to most analytic philosophers. But if so, is this because analytic philosophers are especially insightful on the matter? What if they tend to share the same conclusions because they study the same topic, and there is something about studying analytic philosophy that causes philosophers to think it’s obvious people have phenomenal states, other than the quality of the arguments? Kammer continues:

However, Chalmers thinks that this does not undermine the argument. In his view, what makes his argument especially strong is that premise 1 is not only obvious: it is more obvious that any scientific or philosophical view that might support illusionism [...] (p. 2849)

This is exactly what I’m talking about when it comes to claiming something is “obvious.” Obviousness is an epistemic blank check that allows one to assign arbitrarily greater evidential weight to their subjective assessment of what’s true than to any evidence to the contrary.

Scientific and philosophical views don’t have to be more obvious to be true, or more plausible. So pointing out that a view is more obvious than views to the contrary isn’t necessarily a good reason to reject that other view. Furthermore, “obviousness” isn’t some intrinsic property of views that is invariant across people, or changes in those people’s existing beliefs. Something that isn’t obvious to you could become obvious once you learn more. And what seems obvious to one person may not to another. Obviousness is a moving target, and varies in accordance with the epistemic status of each person’s perspective. So it’s puzzling Chalmers would say that a particular view is obvious. Obvious to who?

What’s more troubling about claims like this is the notion that a view is so obvious that it’s more obvious than any view that “might” support illusionism: how could we possibly know in advance that there could be no scientific evidence or philosophical considerations that would change how obvious we thought things were?

 

4.0 Other senses of feeling pain

Kammerer suggests that Chalmers’s argument relies on an appeal to the notion that it is obvious people feel phenomenal pain. According to Kammerer, there are at least two other senses in which it’s obvious that people feel pain:

1. A functional sense

2. A normative sense

I agree. But pause for a moment. Why isn’t Chalmers clear about which sense of feeling pain is intended from the outset? If Chalmers is clear, why isn’t this clarity explicit in the premises? If it’s not, then it’s a bit strange to bring up multiple senses of pain rather than critique the original argument for simply being ambiguous in a rather obvious way. Does it really take a whole paper to point out: “Hey, the premises of this argument are so ambiguous and underspecified that it’s hard to even parse it, and, once you do, it’s either question begging or false?” It seems the “best” argument for moral realism could be dispensed with a single question.

Nevertheless, in spite of pulling a whole paper out of an observation of an ambiguous argument, noting both of these alternative meanings is a good move, and one worth giving a thumbs up to. Great job pulling out both forms of ambiguity. I may have focused only on some descriptive sense of feeling pain that doesn’t call for phenomenality, i.e., something like the functional sense, and it may not have occurred to me to emphasize the normative interpretation as well. 

I had said the argument looked suspiciously like normative entanglement a bit earlier. I take that back: it involves normative entanglement as well. In addition to availability of conceptions of pain consistent with illusionism, which makes the original argument ambiguous between a reading that begs the question and one that simply involves a false premise (the illusionist can affirm conceptions of pain consistent with illusionism), there is also the implication that the illusionist somehow doesn’t believe in pain at all. 

All an illusionist is committed to is that pain doesn’t involve mysterious ineffable, incommunicable, private, qualitative properties. It doesn’t require denying the existence of pain in any practical or normative sense. And yet the “best” argument for illusionism is not only ambiguous, it’s ambiguous in a rhetorically misleading way: a way that gives the impression that illusionists are evil psychopaths who don’t believe pain is real. Not only is this absurd (since even a psychopath recognizes that pain is real in some respect), it also makes the illusionist look like a callous or monstrous person. So the illusionist is both an idiot and a monster.

So what we’re offered as the “best” argument against illusionism is both ambiguous and packed to the gills with precisely the kind of normative entanglement that can be leveraged to make proponents of illusionism look silly by associating the position with implications that aren’t actually entailed by it.

As the article continues, Kammerer implies that a belief in phenomenal states is commonsensical. Unfortunately, it’s not clear what exactly this means. If it is a psychological claim about how most nonphilosophers are disposed to think, it may not be true. Above, I provided several references to empirical attempts to evaluate how nonphilosophers think about consciousness. While results are far from decisive, what we don’t have is any clear and decisive indication that nonphilosophers do have qualia intuitions or believe there are phenomenal states. Why, then, do philosophers suppose that a belief in phenomenal states is a “commonsense” view? Why do philosophers persist in making empirical claims without providing the requisite evidence to support such claims?

5.0 Super Moorean Land

Next, we’re treated to a characterization of a move so ludicrous it could be used as a satirical way to mock the excesses of armchair philosophy. Once again, I am with Kammerer in raising concerns about the move that’s described, but the characterization of that move still seems like it’s pulling its punches and strikes me as too concessive. First, Kammerer notes the following:

One point which is usually agreed upon, however, amongst those who tend to endorse Moorean arguments, is that Moorean arguments can be successfully mounted against purely philosophical arguments attacking common-sense beliefs, but not against scientific arguments. (Kammerer, 2022, p. 2854)

That sounds questionable to me, but fine, whatever. This supposedly is a problem because illusionism is presented as a scientific position, so Moorean arguments can’t work against it. As Kammerer points out, one obvious reply is to deny it’s a scientific account. Maybe that would work, or maybe it wouldn’t, but Kammerer goes on to say:

The second, more attractive possibility consists in stating that the Moorean argument against illusionism is just of a different kind than the other Moorean arguments. One could grant that in “normal” cases, scientific-cum-philosophical arguments can overturn obvious commonsensical claims (rendering Moorean arguments ineffective), but the case of consciousness is different. On this view, the Moorean argument against illusionism is really a “super-Moorean” argument, its crucial premise endowed with “super-Moorean” certainty—a kind of certainty that is stronger than “standard” Moorean certainty, and which allows one to counter even arguments which crucially appeal to science. Such position appears to be adopted by Chalmers, who concedes that apparently obviously true claims have sometimes be shown to be false, but stresses that this should not be worrisome for the Moorean argument against illusionism. The reason for this is that its crucial first premise is more obvious than any scientific or philosophical view that might support illusionism. This is tantamount to the claim that we know this premise with what I called “super-Moorean” certainty.  (Kammerer, 2022, p. 2856)

This is an attractive position? This almost sounds like self-parody. I have criticized appeals to intuition by invoking the notion of “super intuitions” as intuitions that automatically override other intuitions. The whole point is to satirically object to how ad hoc and nonsensical such invocations are: one can always just invent some pseudopsychological phenomenon (e.g., a “super intuition”), grant it arbitrary amounts of epistemic weight, and then claim to “have” such a mental state, thereby justifying one’s beliefs or winning an argument or whatever. Let’s take stock of this situation.

Mooreans want to object to illusionism on Moorean grounds. But they find themselves in a bind. They themselves acknowledge that Moorean objections don’t work against scientific hypotheses. Since illusionism is a scientific hypothesis, the Moorean objection isn’t going to work. So what’s the solution?

Super Mooreanism

…Super Mooreanism is just Mooreanism that overrides the very constraint they themselves initially agreed to. How? It just does. That’s how. Were someone to attempt this, it would be a ridiculous and embarrassing way of papering over blatant special pleading by conjuring a farcical notion, slapping a label on it, and then presenting that as some kind of “solution.”

If appeals to how obvious something is are inconsistent with your other commitments, don’t acknowledge that obviousness isn’t enough…just insist it’s super obvious, and viola! Problem solved. Is there anything this couldn’t work for? Is there any claim too fatuous that one couldn’t, in light of any arguments to the contrary, simply add enough “supers” and “dupers” to, then declare victory? I don’t see why not. Supposing we could find some other reason why Super Moorean “arguments” don’t work, you can anticipate what the solution would be:

Super Duper Mooreanism!

This is just clown car epistemology. Picture a tiny car where one clown steps out. Not enough clowns? No worries, one more somehow fits inside the car. Not enough? Fine, here’s a third clown for you. The car packs as many clowns as needed to satisfy the crowd. Just the same, one can simply special plead their way to victory invoking enough supers and dupers to override any considerations to the contrary. This is nothing but epistemic blank checks. One can purchase anything with an unlimited supply of such checks and a bottomless doxastic bank account. If this is how we’re going to do philosophy, why bother with arguments?

Why not just assert what your position is, insist it’s “super duper mega ultra obvious to the max,” then declare anyone who presents arguments to the contrary to be “confused” or “conceptually deficient,” without any arguments or evidence other than that they don’t reach the same conclusions you do. Gather enough friends who share your presuppositions, declare yourselves experts, published enough papers talking to one another, and you can even give the public the impression that you actually achieved something other than the construction of an echo chamber that give the false impression to the outside world that you’re something other than a Eleusinian mystery cult masquerading as a serious contemporary field of academic inquiry.

And yet, in spite of how ridiculous this is, Kammerer calls the “more attractive” possibility. This doesn’t mean Kammerer sees this as a winning move. Kammerer proceeds to critique the view. But why treat it with this level of gravitas? Why grant such a ridiculous move the dignity of presenting it as anything more than it is: clown car epistemology? My concern, then, isn’t Kammerer’s conclusions, which I’m on board with, but with the objections not being sufficiently super obliteratory.

Nevertheless, Kammerer presses the objection enough to expose the problem for anyone willing to see:

What would such unique obviousness consist in? It cannot simply come down to the fact that many of us believe in the existence of phenomenal states considerably more strongly (or more stubbornly) than they believe “standard” Moorean facts, and so that they would never abandon their beliefs—not even when faced with scientific arguments. This putative unique strength of their beliefs would be a mere psychological fact. It is not clear why it should have any epistemic import. (p. 2856)

I wholeheartedly endorse this: one’s degree of incorrigibility may be a mere psychological fact, and it’s unclear why any of the rest of us should take the intransigence of others to be good evidence for a few. And yet this is the primary basis that proponents of qualia or moral realism seem to present to us with: that something is super duper ultra obvious to them. It doesn’t matter what objections you raise: their clown car is packed with however many clowns is needed to make you run screaming.

Sure, they have arguments, but does anyone think that in the absence of such arguments proponents of the hard problem would stop endorsing the view that phenomenal states are real, and that consciousness is obvious, and that its nature poses profound difficulties for conventional physicalist accounts? 

I don’t. It’s obvious to me that such arguments are window dressing, and that the systematic refutation of all of them would still leave the proponent of qualia/phenomenal states nearly as confident as ever about their views. Undermine their intuitions, or their sense that the existence of phenomenal states is “obvious” or “self-evident” or whatever, and the opposite is true: I think you’d find the rest of the arguments were insufficient to sustain belief in phenomenal states/qualia, and that confidence in the hard problem and related views would quickly collapse. Intuition, self-evidence, obviousness, and related mental states are the linchpin of the view. That’s just an empirical claim, though. Maybe I’m wrong. It’s probably not something we’ll ever be able to know.

References

Díaz, R. (2021). Do people think consciousness poses a hard problem?: Empirical evidence on the meta-problem of consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 28(3-4), 55-75.

Frankish, K. (2016). Illusionism as a theory of consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 23(11-12), 11-39.

Kammerer, F. (2022). How can you be so sure? Illusionism and the obviousness of phenomenal consciousness. Philosophical Studies, 179(9), 2845-2867.

Mandik, P. (2016). Meta-illusionism and qualia quietism. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 23(11-12), 140-148.

Ozdemir, E. (2022). Empirical evidence against phenomenal theses (Doctoral dissertation, Open Access Te Herenga Waka-Victoria University of Wellington).

Sytsma, J., & Fischer, E. (2023). ‘Experience’, ordinary and philosophical: a corpus study. Synthese, 201(6), 210.

Sytsma, J., & Machery, E. (2010). Two conceptions of subjective experience. Philosophical studies, 151, 299-327.

Sytsma, J., & Ozdemir, E. (2019). No problem: Evidence that the concept of phenomenal consciousness is not widespread. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 26(9-10), 241-256.

Wyrwa, M. (2022). Does the Folk Concept of Phenomenal Consciousness Exist?. Diametros, 19(71), 46-66.