Consciousness : maybe it's not like a rainbow but a horse

I'm told that philosophy doesn't go in for definitions much these days. But there are two major terms which it doesn't seem to have nailed down properly : free will and consciousness. The first is something about making choices, while the second has something to do with being aware of what's going on. Try and pin things down more precisely than that and things get tricky.

I personally lean heavily towards the everyday, common-sense view that consciousness is real, non-physical, and gives us free will to make decisions. I have absolutely no clue how this works, but while I find the idea that consciousness could be a rainbow-like illusion (being real but having no direct influence over anything) very interesting, in the end I simply don't believe it.

There are lots of things in this essay I strongly agree with. Especially :

Computer icons, cursors and so forth are not illusions, they are causally efficacious representations of underlying machine-language processes. It would be too tedious for most users to think in terms of machine-language, and too slow to interact with the computer by that means. That’s why programmers gave us icons and cursors. But these are causally connected with the underlying machine code, which is why we can actually make things happen in a computer. If they were illusions, nothing would happen – they would be causally inert epiphenomena. 

As a metaphor for mental images, I think this is perfect. Mental constructs are non physical, yet distinctly real : a horse is a collection of atoms, but that makes it no less true that a certain collection of atoms is a horse, A horse is surely more than a convenient label for a bunch of atoms, it is a very real thing. So mental images as ways of presenting what the brain is doing at a much lower level makes a lot of sense to me, and I agree that the label of "illusion" is completely wrong; mental images are no more illusions than horses are illusions. They are both descriptions of something real.

It is certainly true, as the illusionists maintain, that we do not have access to our own neural mechanisms. But we don’t need to, just like a computer user doesn’t need to know machine-language – and, in fact, is far better off for that. This does not at all imply that we are somehow mistaken about our thoughts and feelings. No more than I as a computer user might be mistaken about which ‘folder’ contains the ‘file’ on which I have been ‘writing’ this essay.

When illusionists argue that what we experience as qualia are ‘nothing like’ our actual internal mental mechanisms, they are, in a sense, right. But they also seem to forget that everything we perceive about the outside world is a representation and not the thing-in-itself. 

Exactly. It is nothing but folly to suggest we can define anything except via our perception of it. The problem I have here though is just how far the images-on-a-screen analogy helps with consciousness itself.

Or take a more mundane example. Would you call the wheel of your car an illusion? This illusion talk can be triggered by what I think of as the reductionist temptation, the notion that lower levels of description – in this case, the neurobiological one – are somehow more true, or even the only true ones. The fallaciousness of this kind of thinking can be brought to light in a couple of ways. First of all, and most obviously, why stop at the neurobiological level? Why not say that neurons are themselves illusions, since they are actually made of molecules? But wait! Molecules too are illusions, as they are really made of quarks. Or strings. Or fields. Or whatever the latest from fundamental physics says.

No argument there, but the computer analogy raises a quite different question. As far as our awareness in terms of imaginary images goes, it's fine. But a computer presents images to someone who then gets to make judgements based on them; the computer screen (or indeed any image) need not be conscious or aware itself - at most, it's something you're aware of. What's actually conscious is the person looking at the computer, making judgements and experiencing.

It's obvious that mental images are not presented to a little person inside us making their own judgements, because that leads to an infinite nested series of mini-mes which solves nothing. So how exactly should I understand the analogy ? Is consciousness to be just a label for a process, as "horse" is a label for a particular configuration of atoms ? That doesn't sit right. A horse is clearly real, and more solid than a rainbow-like illusion. Yet, in some sense, "horse" is just a description. Perhaps consciousness, therefore, is both like a horse and a rainbow, i.e. consciousness is a unicorn. Since unicorns are magical, that would easily solve the whole silly problem.

Or in other words : I don't know. I don't think I agree with the author that we can say "bye bye to any form of dualism". We can say that our mental images are not illusions and I like the analogy very much as far as that goes. But I don't think it helps at all with the "spooky" decision-making aspect of awareness; the fundamental difference between non-physical mental concepts and hard reality remains as awkward as ever.

Consciousness is neither a spooky mystery nor an illusory belief - Massimo Pigliucci | Aeon Essays

These days it is highly fashionable to label consciousness an 'illusion'. This in turn fosters the impression, especially among the general public, that the way we normally think of our mental life has been shown by science to be drastically mistaken.