Illusion-ception

Look, I know COVID-19 is (I hope) by far and away the biggest story of the year, but there's only so much to be said about it. Stay at home and wash your hands until Lady Macbeth herself would look aghast. That's all you can do, so let's try and resume normal services as much as possible.


Remember that weird idea that consciousness doesn't exist ? A while back a gave a summary of a back-and-forth exchange of articles on IAI between a bunch of philosophers, one an idealist (who thinks consciousness is the root of everything) and two... well, frankly complete nutters who contradicted themselves every five seconds. Something about consciousness not existing at all, apparently.

I ended with a set of questions as to what these "illusionists" really believe. This was necessary because trying to figure out what they're saying is like trying to nail fog to a wall or grab a greased eel. The main points are whether they think we have inner mental lives (the mind's eye, ear and so on), in what sense such mental constructs can be said to be "illusory", and, if we don't have such experiences, how can we possibly be fooled into thinking that we do.

In case it wasn't obvious already, it seems to be to be absolutely daft to say we don't have an inner mental life. In this context, "I think, therefore I am" is as close to rock-solid certainty as one can get. This bias, however, does not mean I'm not interested in - or even unwilling to entertain - what the illusionists have to say.

In this latest article, Keith Frankish (who was engaged in the previous exchange) makes a valiant attempt to answer some of these difficulties. Valiant, yes, but ultimately, I think, quite mad.

The basic explanation is simple; illusionists don’t deny that we are conscious. It is true that some interviews with me have appeared under titles that suggest otherwise, but I always make it clear that my target is a much more specific claim, as I shall now explain.

Okay, fair enough - but bear in mind that other illusionists have most certainly said in the most explicit terms that consciousness doesn't happen.

Our lives are filled with conscious experiences — episodes of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, and of having bodily sensations of various kinds. These episodes acquaint us with the world around us — they tell us about the shapes, sizes, colours, and motions of objects, about the composition of our food, about the substances in the air, about the texture of things against our skin, about the condition of our bodies and our psychological well-being, and much more. We also have experiences of mental imagery, which seem like impoverished versions of regular experiences, detached from their normal causes.

Right, good. So we definitely do have inner mental lives and experience non-physical mental constructs. We agree on that.

I shall call this the qualitative conception of consciousness. The conception is widespread, at least among philosophers, and I take it that it is the one Kastrup, Strawson, and other critics of illusionism have in mind. Now the qualitative conception makes consciousness mysterious. How could brain processes create this subjective world of pure qualities, this qualia show?

Yep, with you so far. That's a good description of the problem.

...the view seals off consciousness into a private mental world, isolating it from the network of physical causes mapped by science. This in turn threatens to make consciousness ineffective, since there is good reason to think that all our reactions can be explained in terms of physical processes in the brain (at any rate, scientists haven’t found any that can’t). Defenders of the qualitative view may have to accept the counterintuitive conclusion that consciousness — even the feel of acute pain — has no effect on our behaviour. Such worries give us a reason to question the qualitative view of consciousness and look for an alternative.

Okay, here we begin to come a little unstuck, but just a little bit. We have accept that there's a problem in explaining how the conscious experience interacts with the world - there has been for centuries. That, in fact, is the very problem we're trying to solve. But we don't have to accept that consciousness is ineffective, and we certainly don't say that pain doesn't change our behaviour ! Just because we have a problem in explaining how the process works does not mean we must therefore deny the process exists - if we did that, there'd be no problem.

It's true that people often cite cases of brain damage and chemicals and whatnot as evidence that the physical world affects the mind. Fair enough. And sometimes they go on to say that the process cannot work in reverse, that measurements of the brainwaves show only the effect of matter on the mind, not the other way around. But why should this be ? Suppose that the process works in both directions, that the mind and matter affect each other. How could we ever determine which one was the root cause of our physical observations ?

I put it to you that we can't. We are only observing correlation, not causation. If we see a change in brainwave patterns, perhaps it's perfectly valid to say, "their thoughts have changed their brainwaves" rather than usual, "the brainwaves have changed their thoughts". Perhaps this effect of mind over matter is staring us full in the face. It's very, very hard to say in which direction the causation works, but I say maybe it goes both ways at different times : yes, if you stab someone in the head you'll change their behaviour, but you only did that in the first place because you thought about stabbing them.

In essence, the problem of the interaction between the physical and non-physical mental realities can be argued to be as difficult to explain in either direction. Yet while people readily accept there's a problem when it comes to explaining the "ghost in the machine", that is, how our mind could affect objective reality (even to the extent of saying that it doesn't), they seem generally less concerned about the opposite case. How does the non-physical arise from the physical ? It clearly does : emergent properties like temperature and pressure and relative velocities are unarguably a thing. But how ?

That the interaction is equally problematic in both directions does not invalidate that the processes occur. If one is willing to accept that consciousness can arise from physical matter, one has already conceded that there is some sort of interaction between the two. Why, then, would we assume that this must only go in one direction ? How could matter produce something that cannot affect it ? To me it seems more reasonable to presume that the interaction can go both ways, even without understanding how it happens.

Anyway, I do accept Frankish's argument that we could look for a radical alternative. That's absolutely fine by me. I don't agree with the motivation - I think it's probably only a tiny minority who believe in this ineffective consciousness - but the difficulty of the Hard Problem certainly warrants trying out new ideas.

Illusionists reject the qualitative conception of consciousness. They hold that qualia, and the private show they constitute, are illusory; they seem to exist but don’t really. This is the core claim. (I have sometimes expressed this by saying that phenomenal consciousness is illusory — phenomenal consciousness being a form of consciousness consisting of qualitative properties.)

Okay... what in the world do you mean by "seem to exist but don't really" ? It's obvious that inner perception has no physical substance, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist any more than a rainbow doesn't exist. The whole point and problem of qualia is that they have no physical substance, no physical existence. If I imagine a dinosaur eating everybody, that has no direct effect on anything whatsoever. Yet if I deny that I actually did imagine the dinosaur, I will be deluding myself. Indeed, I could hardly be more certain of anything other than my own thoughts (saving caveats about memory and so on, discussed last time).

The alternative is that consciousness consists, not in awareness of private mental qualities, but in a certain relation to the public world — a relation that involves receiving information about things and reacting to them. For one to have a conscious experience of something is, I claim, for one to have a rich stream of sense-based information about it and for this information to have a wide range of effects — causing rapid behavioural responses, generating beliefs and desires, evoking memories, triggering associations, initiating emotional responses, and changing one’s psychological and behavioural dispositions in a myriad subtle ways.

But I don't see how that helps in the slightest. If one accepts that one has an inner mental life and inner perceptions - in a sense - then this concedes the problem. Of course a large part of this arises from external information, that's obvious. I wouldn't accept that the information need have "a wide range of effects" either - I see a tree, I'm aware of the tree, end of. I don't have to feel compelled to do anything about it, I'm simply aware of it. If one denies an inner "perception", then why not go the whole hog and deny that we have external perception as well ? I mean, look, when I'm looking at this very screen, right now, I'm clearly perceiving something : the external world has been translated into a private mental reality.

On this view, experiences are physical states of the brain, and we can be aware of them in the same way we can be aware of anything else — namely, by receiving information about them and reacting to them. Introspection provides us with information about our experiences, enabling us to do the things I mentioned earlier — recognize our experiences, compare them, report them, say whether we like them, and so on.

So we have inner awareness then ! At this point I feel the need to slap the author very hard and shout, "THAT'S THE WHOLE PROBLEM YOU TWIT !"

But, as with awareness of the world, introspective awareness doesn’t involve or produce mental qualities; it simply is a cascade of informational and reactive processes. When we talk of what our experiences are like, we are referring, in an oblique way, to these effects and dispositions to react.

The blazes are you prattling about, man ? Again we degenerate to the problem of nailing fog to a wall. Either we have mental constructs or we don't. You can't say, "we do have them, but they're not real". That's stupid. Frankish is acutely aware of the difficulty but I find his answer to be even stupider.

Seeming to introspect a mental quality (say, the quale of yellowness) involves having a stream of introspective information which produces the same psychological effects that awareness of the actual quality would have done — producing appropriate beliefs, preferences, associations, emotional reactions, and so on. In short, to have the illusion of qualia is to be inclined to believe that one has them and to react as if one has them. This does not require the existence of the qualia themselves, so the account is not self-defeating or circular.

No, this is as maddeningly ridiculous as I thought it was last time. Nothing new has been added, it boils down to, "we're not really thinking, we just think we're thinking", or, "we're just imagining our own imaginings". It's absolutely as flagrantly circular as Frankish is trying so desperately to deny. This is full-on Flat Earth level of crazy. I'm not a fan of idealism or panpsychism, but bugger me sideways they're more respectable than illusionism.

The demystification of consciousness

This article was written in response to Bernardo Kastrup's article ' The Mysterious Disappearance of Consciousness' Bernardo Kastrup is mystified by the view of consciousness that has come to be known as illusionism . He describes it as a "mind-bogglingly extraordinary claim", which seems to be, simply, "nonsense". He's not alone.