Terrapin Station wrote: ↑December 2nd, 2021, 5:32 pm
According to illusionism, phenomenal consciousness is an introspective illusion. The illusion problem (Frankish 2016) is to explain the cause of the illusion, or why we are powerfully disposed to judge—erroneously—that we are phenomenally conscious.
"Judging that we are phenomenally conscious" is evidence of being phenomenally conscious. So consciousness can't be an illusion in that case, it's not something we can be mistaken about.
For the sake of its consistency, illusionism should be expected to also deny that there are conscious judgments, i.e. judgings as conscious acts of inner speech.
However, strictly speaking, illusionism's basic denial is that there are mental/experiential events or states
with phenomenal properties, which doesn't include a denial of the existence of mental/experiential occurrents
without phenomenal properties. So illusionists can argue that there are conscious thoughts, including conscious judgments,
but they lack phenomenal properties, being conscious but not
phenomenally conscious (whatever exactly it means to say so). Actually, the illusionists aren't the only philosophers of mind who believe that there is no phenomenology of thought. I think they are wrong!
What makes illusionism especially confusing is that its adherents such as Keith Frankish haven't stopped using the words "consciousness" and "experience"; and instead of attributing phenomenal properties to them (which they believe don't exist), they attribute obscure "quasi-phenomenal" properties to experiences. But, to put it mildly, it is anything but clear that Frankishian "experiences" with "quasi-phenomenal properties" (whose existence is said to be compatible with illusionism) still deserve to be called so. It seems to me that we have a case of homonymy here: one word—"experience"—with the same pronunciation and spelling, but with two different meanings.
An analogy:
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"If someone seemingly tells us that God exists, and then goes on to tell us that 'God' denotes the evolutionary-historical process that has brought us into being, and if we ourselves think that this evolutionary-historical process is far from deserving the name he gives it, then we should count him as an atheist. We may report that he says the words 'God exists', but we would be wrong to say
that he says that God exists. (Or at least we would be wrong to say it without immediate qualification.) He believes in something that he thinks deserves the name 'God'. But if we are right and he is wrong about what it takes to deserve the name, then he does not believe in anything that would in fact deserve that name, and we would be wrong to say otherwise."
(Lewis, David. "Noneism or Allism." In
Papers in Metaphysics and Epistemology, 152-163. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. p. 153)
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So: If someone seemingly tells us that
experience exists, and then goes on to tell us that
"experience" denotes nothing more than
"the mental states that are the direct output of sensory systems", then…
When illusionists keep on referring to and talking about experience as something that is really part of the mind, they're doing what Galen Strawson calls semantic "looking-glassing"—by redefining "experience" in nonphenomenological, purely functionalistic terms.
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"To looking-glass or reversify a term is to define it in such a way that whatever one means by it, it excludes what the term means."
(Strawson, Galen. "Fundamental Singleness: How to Turn the 2nd Paralogism into a Valid Argument." 2010. Reprinted in
The Subject of Experience, 165-187. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. p. 167n6)
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QUOTE>
"Conscious experience has a subjective aspect; we say it is
like something to see colours, to hear sounds, smell odours, and so on. Such talk is widely construed to mean that conscious experiences have introspectable qualitative properties, or 'feels', which determine what it is like to undergo them. Various terms are used for these putative properties. I shall use 'phenomenal properties', and, for variation, 'phenomenal feels' and 'phenomenal character', and I shall say that experiences with such properties are
phenomenally conscious. (I shall use the term 'experience' itself in a functional sense, for the mental states that are the direct output of sensory systems. In this sense it is not definitional that experiences are phenomenally conscious.)"
(p. 13)
"Illusionism makes a very strong claim: it claims that phenomenal consciousness is illusory; experiences do not really have qualitative, ‘what-it’s-like’ properties, whether physical or non-physical."
(p. 15)
"A quasi-phenomenal property is a non-phenomenal, physical property (perhaps a complex, gerrymandered one) that introspection typically misrepresents as phenomenal. For example, quasi-phenomenal redness is the physical property that typically triggers introspective representations of phenomenal redness. There is nothing phenomenal about such properties—nothing 'feely' or qualitative—and they present no special explanatory problem. Strong illusionists hold that the introspectable properties of experience are merely quasi-phenomenal ones."
(p. 15)
(Frankish, Keith. "Illusionism as a Theory of Consciousness." In
Illusionism as a Theory of Consciousness, edited by Keith Frankish, 11-39. Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2017.)
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