Illusionism ≠ Consciousness doesn't exist

Twitter Tuesday #13

Illusionism is a philosophical position which holds that people are subject to the introspective illusion that their experiences involve phenomenal states (or qualia). However, since there are no phenomenal states, people are mistaken.

J.P. Andrew made the following remark on Twitter

Illusionists claim that consciousness itself is an illusion.

No, they don't. Illusionism is the view that phenomenal consciousness is an introspective illusion; that is, that certain features attributed to our experience are not really features of our experience. To claim that illusionists deny we are "conscious" without qualification is at best misleading and at worst false.

The “illusion” involves the mistaken notion that our experiences include certain properties that they do not in fact include. Illusionism does not hold that people are “not conscious.” This is ambiguous. The illusionist holds only that people are not phenomenally conscious, where phenomenal consciousness is a form of consciousness characterized by phenomenal states. There is no good reason to exclude “phenomenal” from one’s description of the kind of consciousness illusionists deny.

Failure to make this explicit is a misleading because the claim that “consciousness itself” is an illusion could be mistakenly interpreted to imply that the illusionist doesn’t think people have experiences, or mental states, or feel happiness or pain, or see red, or have emotions, or any of a variety of other notions that could taken to be implied by such a remark, when an illusionist may very well maintain that we do have experiences, feel happiness and pain, and so on, and may simply disagree about the nature of these phenomena.

Illusionism is a technical position which involves the rejection of certain phenomena distinguished by certain technical terms. Shifting over to the use of semi-colloquial or at least philosophically ambiguous and underspecified terms like “consciousness” without qualification is misleading. It’s sufficiently misleading that I think it would be fair to call it irresponsible for a philosopher to bluntly assert that illusionists think consciousness is an illusion.

A philosopher might maintain that phenomenal consciousness is the only genuine form of consciousness, and that to deny it is to deny consciousness, full stop. But even if one holds such a view, an illusionist isn’t obligated to agree, and probably wouldn’t. Baking your own preconceptions or views into your characterization of opposing views that would probably dispute that characterization is not a good way to describe other people’s positions.

Why can't critics of illusionism even begin with a clear, accurate, and unambiguous characterization of the view? My guess is that it'd be a lot harder to depict it as silly and stupid if they did.

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Spencer Case offered a reply which reflects what I consider to be one of the weakest objections to illusionism

Its fans say that if you only read Dennett carefully enough, you'd see... blah blah blah. But I know that illusions are modes of consciousness so I feel pretty ok with dismissing this one out of hand.

The rough idea here seems to be that you can't be subject to an "illusion" of conscious experience, because this illusion would itself be a conscious experience.

This is one of the worst objections to illusionism because it relies on a superficial misreading of the name of the view. Illusionism holds that:

(1) People take their conscious experience to involve certain features, namely, phenomenal states.

(2) They are mistaken about this. There are no phenomenal states.

Don’t take my word for it. Here is the opening of the description for Frankish’s book defending illusionism:

Illusionism is the view that phenomenal consciousness (in the philosophers' sense) is an introspective illusion ― that introspection misrepresents experiences as having phenomenal properties. This view has many theoretical attractions, but it is often dismissed out of hand for failing to take consciousness seriously.

Comparisons to visual perception are apt. For instance, it may seem to people that they have rich, detailed visual perception throughout their entire visual field. However, this is not true. It may seem a certain way, but it isn't that way. Nothing about this entails that people don't have visual perception. The SEP entry on eliminative materialism points to this analogy (emphasis mine):

llusionism claims that introspection involves something analogous to ordinary sensory illusions; just as our perceptual systems can yield states that radically misrepresent the nature of the outer world, so too, introspection yields representations that substantially misrepresent the actual nature of our inner experience. In particular, introspection represents experiential states as having phenomenal properties—the infamous and deeply problematic what-it-is-likeness of our qualitative mental states. Illusionists claim that these phenomenal properties do not exist, making them eliminativists about phenomenal consciousness.

Pointing out that conscious experience does not involve phenomenal states (or "qualia") does not mean that one denies that people are conscious in any respect at all, or can't be subject to misconstruals or illusions in ways that don't presuppose the existence of phenomenal states.

”Illusion” as a term, merely reflects the view that people think that things are one way, but they are really some other way. The notion of being mistaken about what’s true, in this respect, as with any other, does not require that one believe that the “illusion” people are subject to is itself presented to people phenomenally. That would be absurd. And yet critics will sometimes dismiss illusionism as though its proponents are so stupid that they:

(a) implicitly share with critics the notion that an “illusion” is itself something that can only be understood in terms of phenomenal states

(b) People are subject to the illusion that they have phenomenal states, when they really don’t

So the illusionist is such a profound idiot that it didn’t occur to them that the only proper sense of “illusion” presupposed the very thing they denied.

Of course illusionists don’t think this, and of course “illusion” as a term is merely a label, a term of art adopted to serve as a rough analogical characterization of the kind of mistake they believe is occurring. That they think people are making this mistake, and have opted to call it an “illusion” does not carry, in itself, any weighty philosophical substance. The invocationof the term illusion, in other words, is’t staking ground on the nature of illusions.

Of course, a critic could insist that the only meaningful sense in which something could be an “illusion” would be in the phenomenal sense, but an illusionist could (a) simply deny this and (b) it really wouldn’t be relevant. The illusionist can drop the term “illusion” and analogies to illusions from their account and characterize the position without reference to illusions, e.g., “human cognition systematically prompts people to form mistaken beliefs about the nature of their mental representations” or something along those lines.

Imagine how absurd it would be to criticize a view based on a ludicrously absurd hyper-literal interpretation of the name of the position. In fact, let’s flip this on its head and critique proponents of precisely those views illusionists reject. Let’s go with the hard problem of consciousness.

Well, this is a ridiculous view. Of course there is no hard problem of consciousness. “Hardness” is a property of physical objects, and proponents of the hard problem deny that consciousness is physical. Thus, consciousness is incapable of being hard in the relevant respect. As such, proponents of the hard problem of consciousness are guilty of a basic category error. What a foolish position.

This, of course, would be profoundly silly. Critiques of illusionism that focus on the term “illusion” are admittedly a bit less silly, but they’re still in the “it’s not a good idea to critique a view based on superfluous terminological conventions used to convey the idea and that would require supposing that the proponent of the view is so profoundly incompetent that the very name of the view alludes to its own self-refuting absurdity.”

I suspect at least some critics who dismiss illusionism on these grounds are exhibiting the halfway fallacy, as well (though Spencer may not be). That is, they are committed to a notion of phenomenal states, and regard the experience of an illusion as itself involving phenomenal states. So if someone comes along and suggests that phenomenal states are an illusion, and don’t really exist, this seems absurd. If the illusionist thought of illusions in that way, it would be absurd. But they don’t. So if illusionism is absurd, it will be on its own terms, not because the position is internally contradictory.

I suspect this is at least in some instances (not necessarily in Spencer’s case) an instance of the halfway fallacy specifically when the critique relies on the notion tha the position is somehow self-refuting (rather than it being a kind of external critique). Yet the proponent of illusionism can both deny phenomenal consciousness and deny that the notion of an illusion presupposes or can only be understood in phenomenal terms.

Critics of views like illusionism sometimes make the same mistake as moral realists make towards antirealists when they say that antirealists can't think anything is "really" wrong. Just as a moral antirealist can reject both moral realism and the notion that only realist conceptions of morality are "real" or "genuine" or "really" matter, so too can an illusionist reject the notion that one could only be subject to an illusion in a phenomenal sense.

Here's one way to reveal just how weak of an this objection is: we could drop the "illusion" framing entirely, and simply call the position "anti-phenomenalism": the view that phenomenal states don't exist, even if some people mistakenly think they do. Not much would change about the position. Perhaps critics would then insist one can’t “think” without having phenomenal states. Who knows. One might start to suspect that if critics persisted in insisting one can’t even level objections to their views without presupposing their views, that such insistence would often manifest in a question-begging and presumptuous way. Unfortunately, I think such presumption is all too common among academic philosophers and people discussing philosophy more broadly.

(This Twitter Tuesday is an adaptation from earlier remarks on Facebook. I adapted these to this week’s Twitter Tuesday to get back in form for posting weekly comments on philosophy Twitter)