Facing up to the Problem of Illusionism
The argument that consciousness is an illusion actually has some interesting subtlety to it that most people miss when hearing about it.
The claim is that our introspection misleads us into attributing phenomenal feels to experience. It seems like we have the ineffable, intrinsic, private and immediately apprehended qualia which is so hard to reconcile with any scientific account. But instead what we have is a quasi-phenomenal redness of red. The quasi part means a distortion of the actual biological mechanisms which create experience. It's a simplification of a complex process represented in a way that seems phenomenal.
This means that the philosophical zombie argument is mistaken, because there would be something it is like for a zombie, which is the illusion of having qualia. However, zombies are supposed to be "all dark" inside, so the zombie thought experiment is making a mistake which a better understanding of neuroscience would show to be impossible. If the zombie is physically the same us, it undergoes the same illusion about being conscious. The what it's like is introspection telling the zombie there is something it's like to see red or be in pain, and that introspection is itself a functional process. Thus, illusionism is not denying there is something it's like. That's the illusion.
This argument also has a good reason motivating it. If we do actually possess phenomenal consciousness, then how do we know about it? How is it represented in memory, and how do place it into language? Those are understood to be neurological functions. Which would mean the qualia is somehow being accessed by the brain. Wittgenstein's beetle-in-the-box deserves a shout out here as well.
The advantage of illusionism over outright eliminativism is that it acknowledges we do very much seem to have these rich phenomenal experiences, leading to the concept of qualia. But our introspection is unreliable. Colors, sounds, feels, etc. are useful fictions consolidating an overwhelming amount of information and processing into something an organism can easily act upon. And this is why consciousness seems to be so hard to explain.
The remaining difficulty for the illusionist is providing the mechanism for the introspective illusion of qualia. Which presumably neuroscience will uncover at some point, if the position is correct.
The claim is that our introspection misleads us into attributing phenomenal feels to experience. It seems like we have the ineffable, intrinsic, private and immediately apprehended qualia which is so hard to reconcile with any scientific account. But instead what we have is a quasi-phenomenal redness of red. The quasi part means a distortion of the actual biological mechanisms which create experience. It's a simplification of a complex process represented in a way that seems phenomenal.
This means that the philosophical zombie argument is mistaken, because there would be something it is like for a zombie, which is the illusion of having qualia. However, zombies are supposed to be "all dark" inside, so the zombie thought experiment is making a mistake which a better understanding of neuroscience would show to be impossible. If the zombie is physically the same us, it undergoes the same illusion about being conscious. The what it's like is introspection telling the zombie there is something it's like to see red or be in pain, and that introspection is itself a functional process. Thus, illusionism is not denying there is something it's like. That's the illusion.
This argument also has a good reason motivating it. If we do actually possess phenomenal consciousness, then how do we know about it? How is it represented in memory, and how do place it into language? Those are understood to be neurological functions. Which would mean the qualia is somehow being accessed by the brain. Wittgenstein's beetle-in-the-box deserves a shout out here as well.
The advantage of illusionism over outright eliminativism is that it acknowledges we do very much seem to have these rich phenomenal experiences, leading to the concept of qualia. But our introspection is unreliable. Colors, sounds, feels, etc. are useful fictions consolidating an overwhelming amount of information and processing into something an organism can easily act upon. And this is why consciousness seems to be so hard to explain.
The remaining difficulty for the illusionist is providing the mechanism for the introspective illusion of qualia. Which presumably neuroscience will uncover at some point, if the position is correct.
Comments (70)
How does the brain introspect, and when a brain introspects, why doesn't it experience an arrangement of excited neurons rather than the qualia of colors, shapes, sounds, etc.,? Does it make sense to say that a brain can think about thinking? If it can do that, then is "thinking" (I think therefore I am) an illusion? How do you know where the illusions stop and reality begins to even say "I think, therefore I am"?
Good to know about this analogy. I had always thought of the subjectivity of experience, mostly of colour and that there was no way to deduce that my image of colour green is remotely similar to someone else's image of the colour green.
This is what I would choose as an alternative to functionalism and panpsychism ; that consciousness arises from the processing of huge amounts of information in the brain. It is intuitive and won't lead us to conclude that everything has some essence of consciousness. The obvious problem however, is that we don't have the slightest of clue how such a process results in the experience of qualia
I'll second here. You'll have to first define illusion in a way that makes sense when inside the mind. What's the difference between experiencing the illusion of qualia and experiencing qualia themselves? What difference does it make in any practical capacity?
One leads to a hard problem and one doesn't.
Quoting Echarmion
An analogy used is that the illusion is like a computer desktop, which is a useful abstraction for users, while the underlying computer system is quite different from the visual interface.
That strikes me as a bit circular. The hard problem is the reason we are even considering the approach.
Quoting Marchesk
But since, in that scenario, we are the computer desktop, it seems entirely irrelevant (much like the simulation hypothesis, incidentally).
Why would the brain produce a qualia of colors, shapes, sounds, etc.? Qualia aren't compatible with neuroscience. That's why it's called the hard problem.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Yes, but I take it this position is assuming indirect realism. It's certainly assuming that science has shown that the world is not colored in, doesn't sound or taste or feel like we experience it.
Quoting Harry Hindu
A fiction would be useful for hiding the overwhelming complexity an organism is dealing with. But you raise some good question I don't know enough to answer.
Yes, but this is a rejection of the hard problem, while explaining why we mistakenly think there is one.
Quoting Echarmion
Yes, the brain is presenting an "interface" to itself. Some people have suggested this is for an greater ability to reflect instead of just automatic responses.
That's the entire problem...
The what it's like is the illusion that we have qualia. So we are having an experience that seems to be what it's like in the sense of the hard problem. It's a powerful illusion.
I admit this isn't entirely convincing. The crux of the argument is whether one can present this in a way where the illusion isn't itself phenomenal.
But what it is doing is attacking the notion that we can just take our introspective judgement of consciousness at face value. What if we're wrong?
That manner of talk is the problem.
"What it's like" is just a way of saying that.
But does it really explain, in the sense of giving additional information? What is it that Illusionism says beyond "the hard problem is an illusion?"
Quoting Marchesk
And what are the implications, other than that the hard problem doesn't exist?
That's the point of the debate. If there's no hard problem, then it's just a matter of the easier problems amenable to neuroscience and psychology. Easier as in they don't cause a metaphysical or epistemological issue.
I hear this a lot. But I wonder how, and even whether, it is meant to deflate qualia talk and Cartesian theatre talk. A visual interface is pictures we look at, and locating them in the head implies a homunculus to view them, whether or not they are to be read as depicting realistically or figuratively.
Kind of an own goal.
However, to your point, I do wonder about dreams and day dreams, which very much seem like a theater or movie playing in the head. It's weird to me how the hard problem is super-focused on perception, when I think the hardest part is the non-perceptual experiences, because those aren't originating from outside. A dream is almost entirely a product of the brain (setting aside occasional external stimulus making their way into the dream). And that presents a problem.
Oh dear. Did I suggest that? I'll read what I wrote and see if I'm to blame... But your response was awfully quick. Not saying I expected you to meditate on it with any great reverence, but blimey.
Quoting Marchesk
But I did say "read".
Btw, grateful for your links on this...
https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/k0711/kf_articles/blob/master/Frankish_Illusionism%20as%20a%20theory%20of%20consciousness_eprint.pdf
https://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/dennett/papers/illusionism.pdf
I'm not sure whether this is a pro or con. Maybe the fact that we're subject to illusions and hallucinations suggests that the entire thing is illusiory. Why would genuine qualia be subject to illusion?
Quoting Marchesk
Quoting Marchesk
Who or what is this 'we' to whom all of this occurs? And wouldn't anything occurring to anyone presume that there is a subject - we, or I - to whom it occurs? Could you frame any of these propositions without an implicit reference to 'we' or 'I'?
Quoting Marchesk
Neuroscience is an activity conducted by neuroscientists, who are also 'I' or 'we', even if they report in apparently impersonal, third-person terminology.
Quoting Marchesk
If the world isn't colored in, or sound or feel like we experience it, then how can you say that there are brains that produce qualia? It seems to me that minds produce brains - which is a 3-dimensional colored shape as we experience it. What is it really "out there" - brains or minds? How does a mind "fictionalize" other minds - as brains?
Quoting Marchesk
That's more of a model, or representation. I don't think "illusion" or "fiction" would be the proper terms to use here. The illusion would be to mistake the representation for reality, just as a mirage is to mistake the behavior of light over a heated surface for a pool of water.
Quoting Marchesk
Illusions are a mistake in judgement, or the wrong interpretation. The qualia that create the mirage is real. It is what you would expect to see if we see light, not objects (just as we see bent straws in water - we see light, not the actual objects). The part of the mind that interprets the qualia uses past experiences to interpret current experiences. The mirage looks like a pool of water and is interpreted as such - hence the illusion. The illusion is broken when you realize that the pool of water moves and your past experience is that pools of water do not move. More observations make better interpretations. Visual illusions are usually based on the mind believing that it is seeing objects and not light.
Inference to the best explanation, given the overwhelming data from studies, experiments and various medical cases we have now.
Science is not compatible with the world being colored in, full of sound, feels, etc. But this was known to an extent in ancient philosophy. Full-blown naive realism just cannot be the case. Now maybe a sophisticated version of direct realism can work, but not one that places our perceptual sensations out there in the world.
This is a contradiction, as I was trying to point out before. If you're going to claim that our mind is an illusion and that naive realism cannot be the case, then how can you even claim that brains exist, as brains are concepts that stem from our experience with the world? You can't have your cake and eat it too.
How can you even claim that science has provided answers if we don't get at the real states-of-affairs of the universe in some way? Direct and indirect become meaningless if we get at the answers of the universe. Effects carry information about their causes - no matter how direct/indirect the causal relationship is. Each effect carries information about all subsequent causes - just as your visual experience (the effect) carries information about the ripeness of the apple, the amount of light in the environment and the state of your visual system. The eye doctor asks you to read a chart that is the constant where each patient is the variable. The eye doctor isn't testing the light or the chart when he asks you to read it. He's testing your visual system, as the light and the chart are the constants.
Why would the doctor reference your illusion to test your visual system?
Our perceptual sensations are out there in the world if there are other minds. If you were to call them other "illusions" wouldn't make much sense. Those "illusions" have causal power. Think of Beethoven and Picasso.
The short answer is: when asked straight out or not if the self existed, the Buddha would not answer (ref). This is because, He said, to answer 'no' would be to side with nihilists (which would include any of today's physicalists.) To answer 'yes' would be to side with the eternalists (who believed there was an eternal self that could be reborn in perpetuity.) But the subtleties of Buddhist dialectic is well outside the scope of the discussion.
Look again at the question I asked - who is the 'I' or 'we' which any kind of illusionism posits is subject to illusion? Because, an illusion is a mistake, right? Illusion only exists in contrast to reality, it is something that only exists in a conscious mind; there are no illusions possible outside that domain. It implies a mistaken judgement.
And this is the contradiction at the basis of any such arguments: they want to say that what is real, is only the neural systems that give rise to 'the sense of being'. But the being that is the supposed 'illusion' is the only one who can make such a judgement!
I've probably already posted this Schopenhauer quote about it, but it can't hurt to say it again:
[quote=Schopenhauer ][Materialism] seeks the primary and most simple state of matter, and then tries to develop all the others from it; ascending from mere mechanism, to chemism, to polarity, to the vegetable and to the animal kingdom. And if we suppose this to have been done, the last link in the chain would be animal sensibility - that is knowledge - which would consequently now appear as a mere modification or state of matter produced by causality. Now if we had followed materialism thus far with clear ideas, when we reached its highest point we would suddenly be seized with a fit of the inextinguishable laughter of the Olympians. As if waking from a dream, we would all at once become aware that its final result - knowledge, which it reached so laboriously, was presupposed as the indispensable condition of its very starting-point, mere matter; and when we imagined that we thought matter, we really thought only the subject that perceives matter; the eye that sees it, the hand that feels it, the understanding that knows it. Thus the tremendous petitio principii reveals itself unexpectedly.[/quote]
'Petito principi' is a fallacy in which a conclusion is taken for granted in the premises; begging the question.
This criticism applies to all such arguments; once you realise this, you will not be able to entertain them any further. It is a mistake, as the ancient aphorism says, 'like the hand trying to grasp itself or the eye trying to see itself'.
"Out there in the world" is understood to be mind-independent. Naive realism assumes that objects have all the properties we perceive them to have, the way we perceive them. That has been shown to be wrong. The mind-independent world is not simply a reflection of our perceptions. Not unless you're a subjective idealist.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Of course I'm assuming science is providing answers based on some correlation with the real world. But there is a long standing problem of perception. Which is why skepticism never completely goes away, and people come to different metaphysical conclusions about the nature of reality.
We've had 100+ page debates on this in the old forum before.
I have no idea what consciousness is. I only know it presents a confounding puzzle.
An indirect realist understands that objects have properties that our perceptions represent. If you understand causation, you understand that effects are not their causes. No, the apple isn't red, it is ripe. I get at it's ripeness (property of the apple) by experiencing redness (property of my mind). It doesn't make sense to talk about direct vs. indirect if I can get at the truth - which the state of ripeness of the apple. If you had direct access, and I had indirect access, but we both realized the apple is ripe, then what exactly is the meaningful difference?
Quoting Marchesk
Science is based on making as many observations as possible from all perspectives. If science is based on observation and science wants to claim that those observations are illusions, then then scientists have pulled the rug out from under themselves.
Quoting Marchesk
Science is based on observations, which entails colors, sounds and feelings representing the world as it is
But, it's not part of experience; it's what is required for there to be experience.
How would camouflage evolve if visual experiences were merely illusions, or fictions, and didn't play a causal role in nature. Just as predators and prey have a causal relationship in each other's evolution, camouflage and visual experiences play a causal role in the evolution of better ways to avoid visual detection and better visual systems to detect hidden objects.
The mind and "physical" bodies play a causal role in each others' evolution. In this sense, "physical" and "mental" categories become meaningless. It is all information.
But we don't need a justification to ignore the hard problem. We can just concentrate on the easier problems regardless. It's not like the hard problems presents any barrier to physical research.
In addition, it seems to me that all Illusionism does is shift the problem. Isn't the problem of creating illusins of qualia just as hard?
Bingo. It is actually a dualism. We are positing that some things (processing things like brains) have a dual aspect to them, which seems contrary to the monism of naturalism (everything is basically matter/energy in space/time).
You don't need a justification to ignore any philosophical problem. You can just do it. Same with math, history, unsolved crimes, etc. But some people will continue to be interested in those puzzles and want to solve them. Even some scientists. Why does it matter at all? Because the hard problem potentially alters what we think about the world and ourselves. But again, you can ignore that if you want.
Nope, because an illusion of qualia does not present a fundamental conceptual problem That's what the illusionists think.
You can always prove you are conscious to yourself because you are the one experiencing the phenomena you just can't prove it to other people/ give it third person accessibility
Because it builds on "problem of other minds" Chalmers' argument is set up in a way that it can't be refuted. He even said as such to another neuroscientist.
Fwiw, don't bother with Dennett if you're interested in anything mind related. if you look at his earlier psychology work he denies dreams exist during sleep ignoring a lot of empirical evidence they do.
It's not that I want to ignore it. It just seems to me there should be implications of this line of reasoning that go beyond circumventing this specific problem.
Quoting Marchesk
Isn't the conceptual problem at the heart of the "hard problem" that no algorithm can translate wavelengths into the feeling of redness? In Illusionism, something still has to provide the qualia. They don't need to be generated by the specific input, but they do need to be generated somehow. But since we can't seem to come up with a physical process for generating qualia, they remain non-physical.
What is an illusion? What is not an illusion?
Ordinarily one says things like, "it looks as though there is an oasis, over there, but it is an illusion, there is just more sand." So to say x is an illusion is to say there is no x, or at least there is no x where there is purported be x.
So the illusionist seems to want to say " it looks as though it looks as though there is an oasis, but it is an illusion, it doesn't really look as though anything at all. However would one know such a thing, even if it made sense?
I'm not sure illusionism entirely avoids the problem, but I thought it worth summarizing my understanding of their argument, because most people just dismiss it of hand.
An appearance of something which isn't there. And it's not limited to the visual. It could be any sensation or object.
Yes, but that's what I always thought the redness of red was - the appearance of something. Was I supposed to have thought it was something else? A thing in an inner world? If one had thought that, ie, had been an indirect realist, then the destruction of the inner world would be highly significant and shocking. I suppose? As it is I assume that crimson is the appearance of the settee I'm lounging in and scarlet is the colour of the fleece I'm wearing. Radical, but that's communism for you.
I still don't know about the damned bat, though. But I think Ned Block's harder problem can be addressed if illusionism is the case. That's libertarianism for you.
I'm fine with that, if I can have it that red is the colour of my true love's hair in the morning, when we rise. My inner world is soggy meat, and I live in the outer world which I call 'the world'.
Only if your introspection is telling you that reliably.
Quoting Forgottenticket
One might consider this a flaw with the argumentQuoting Forgottenticket
Yeah, the coming-to-seem-to-remember. It was wrong, and illusionism needs to be able to handle dreaming.
Sure, but is that definition one that is incompatible with physical reality?
What is it that is being misinterpreted, and what is it being misinterpreted as, and what is the truth (how it should be interpreted to overcome the illusion)? You overcome the illusion of a mirage by understanding that you see bending light, not pools of water. If we see light and not objects, mirages and bent sticks in water is what you would expect one to experience.
It seems to me that if you claim that it is an illusion, then you know how to overcome the illusion and see things as they truly are. You're going to have to explain the underlying mechanisms (the behavior of light and it's interaction with a visual sensory information processor) that create the effect (the mirage) and why it gets misinterpreted, or why it appears to be something that it isn't (as a pool of water rather than bent light waves).
First step would be understanding how the illusion is generated. Neuroscience would have to supply that.
As for seeing things as they really are, eyes only give you limited information from a certain perspective. You need other instruments to form a proper physical description.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Our subjective experiences are being misinterpreted as something which is hard to reconcile with any sort of objective explanation.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Sure, but that doesn't work for the experience of color, because physically color is a label for the wavelength of photons based on our having experiences of color. The photons themselves are not colored. It wouldn't matter if they were, because it's electrons which get sent to the visual cortex, not photons. The brain has to turn that stimulus into an experience of color.
As some people like to say in response to direct realism, the green grass doesn't get into our heads. It's not like the color green (or it's shape) hops onto photons from their reflective surface, rides the photons into our eyes, then hops on electrons to ride into the brain for us to see it. Rather, we generate an experience of green grass from the information provided by our senses.
We don't just have eyes. We have other instruments (senses). While each one provides a different experience (seeing you is different than hearing you), they share this quality of depth. They even overlap providing fault-tolerant and reaffirming information about an object's location relative to the body. You are where I see you, hear you and feel you. So it seems to me that a very important part of the description of some object is it's location relative to the body. It is even how the visual field is arranged - the world located relative to the eyes.
Quoting Marchesk
Maybe the problem (illusion) is assuming some kind of dualism, like subjective/objective, physical/mental, direct/indirect, etc.,
Quoting Marchesk
What is an "experience"? What does it mean for an object (a brain) to have, or generate, an "experience"? How is the brain different from the experience?
Yes, and those senses still don't tell us most of what an object is without serious investigation by many people.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Yes, but that's a relation. What is an object when we're not around to sense it?
Quoting Harry Hindu
Qualia certainly makes dualism a possibility. But there's no getting around some sort of dualism, even if it's only epistemic. There's a difference between how we experience, think and talk about the world and the world itself. Unless you're an anti-realist.
Quoting Harry Hindu
i feel like this ground has been covered already.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Are you asking whether idealism is the case?
A picture in the head?
The illusion is that there is an appearance of something that is red that seems to have the quality of redness, but it doesn't? I don't get it. What is that something that appears to be red but isn't, and why does it appear red? What are we referring to when we say, "red"?
Quoting Marchesk
Wait, I thought we needed many people to tell us what an object is, yet now you are asking what an object is without people. You're not being consistent.
Quoting Marchesk
The only necessary dualism is cause and effect. Redness is a property of minds. Ripeness is a property of apples. When they are both causally related, the experience of a red apple occurs (the effect). Maybe the illusion is assuming apples are red as well as ripe instead of the correct answer which is that red represents ripe. One would be confusing one's mental properties with the properties of the apple. Just as saying the "apple is good", good is a property of minds that projects values onto objects in which values are not a property. It's not the apple that is good or red. The apple is simply ripe. Good and red refer to our gustatory and visual sensations of the apple's ripeness, and are not properties of the apple, but of our mind.
While multiple senses may provide fault-tolerance and reaffirmation, the downside is that they may also provide the appearance of multiple properties of an object where that object is actually simpler than that. One property can appear like five different properties to five different senses. Naive realist and idealist minds tend to confuse the properties of minds with the properties of the object that isn't another mind. Minds with multiple instruments may tend to make the world to appear to be more complicated than it is.
How we experience, think and talk about the world is part of the world itself. How we experience, think and talk about the world, is an effect of the world (natural selection) and has an effect on the world (culture and technology). I have been trying to point out that our minds have causal power and are in turn caused themselves. Our minds are just as real, and part of the world, as everything else is.
Quoting Marchesk
Really? Where?
Quoting Marchesk
No. I'm simply asking you what the difference between a brain and an experience is - ontologically. If the two are so distinct, then how does one generate (cause) the other? How does meat get fooled by illusions?
Difference between epistemology and ontology. Hard problem raises the possibility that the ontology of the world is dualistic, but it also raises an epistemological question of whether we can know what the nature of consciousness is.
This is one aspect of the modern version of the problem of perception.
A homunculi watching moving pictures in its head. In. color, with sound.
You have it backwards. The hard problem is the product of the dualists own making by positing two different substances with no means for them to interact. How does meat generate meatless illusions? There is no hard problem for a monist.
Provided you can give an adequate description for consciousness AND he world.
I agree that idealism doesn't have this problem.
Oh, I get it. You come to expose the illusionists, not to praise?
I came to do what I stated in the OP.
Quoting Marchesk
Is this your position or your proposed reading of theirs?
Neither. It's a response to the idea of pictures in the head.
Haha, sarcasm, then?
Fine, although I do think that the "neural representations" favoured by the likes of Dennett and Frankish (thanks for the links) are questionable as being probably ghosts of "the idea idea", and other mentalisms. Hence the prevaricating in 3.3 Who is the audience?. And the possible own goal, if
Quoting Marchesk
gets supposed as a thing located in the head, to the delight and justified exasperation of dualists everywhere.
How? What exactly is the difference between the two?
I don't know. What does it mean for something to be material as opposed to information? Why not just say the mind is made of matter? If you only know about matter by how it is represented in the mind as concepts, then what exactly is the nature of matter and how does it interact with mind if the mind is not matter as well? Is there any difference in how matter and information behave, or interact causally?
If by "panpsychist", you mean that I believe everything from atoms to the universe is conscious, then no. I think we should clarify the distinctions between qualia, thoughts, experiences, and consciousness, and determine if any one is a fundamental building block of another.
Why would my feet be conscious if my brain was aware of the state of my feet? What layer of reality does my consciousness reside? Is it neurons that have consciousness, brains, or whole bodies? Why would there be different layers of consciousness if the upper layers could simply be conscious of the lower layers, thereby bringing them into existence? It seems a bit more complex than is necessary to claim the everything at every layer or reality is conscious, when consciousness seems to reside at a certain layer, and not all of them.
The objects that seem conscious are the ones that have brains. The brain could be thought of as an sensory information feedback unit. It is how the brain tracks behaviors and their results in real-time and compares it to some goal in the mind. It is a way of mapping one's progress towards changing the current state-of-affairs to match a conceptual state-of-affairs. This is where the feeling of "looking at qualia" that entails what many think of when they think of consciousness - an experience, with the experienced and the experiencer. I don't see matter other brains having this information feedback producing a "what it is like". Only brains do that, thanks to the massive energy they process for fuel.
The rest of the universe, we are told is "mostly empty space", and "matter and energy are interchangeable", so how is it that we can't think of consciousness as pure energy, or an energy feedback loop? How is that incompatible with a materialist view of the universe, and how would that leave consciousness under-explained?
I tend to think of information as the relationship between causes and their effects. So when I say everything is information, what I mean is that everything is causal relationships. You mentioned relationships before. Apples are the effects of prior causes - an accumulation of events, becoming exponentially more complex with the steady stream of energy flowing into the system, within a particular area. Our minds are a snapshot of a particular event in space-time, even symbolizing the snapshot with words, "a ripe apple", transforming the event in the world into an object of the mind, hence our idea of physicalism.