Daniel Dennett: Illusionism (Theory of Consciousness) = Consciousness Is Not an Illusion
Mar 24, 2024
Sean Carroll, Daniel Dennett, & Steven Pinker: AI, Parapsychology, Panpsychism, & Physics Violations
• Sean Carroll, Daniel Dennett, & Steven Pin...
Daniel Dennett: Illusionism as the Obvious Default Theory of Consciousness (2016)
"His [Keith Frankish's] account of my own view is flawless, and I was enlightened by many of his remarks about the ideas of other illusionists I thought I fully understood."
"In short, when it comes to stage magic we assume, until positively shown otherwise, that the effects are achieved by some hard-to-imagine concoction of everyday physical causes and effects. Here is where anybody, philosopher or scientist or visionary, is apt to suffer a failure of imagination and mistake it for an insight into necessity. As the noted illusionist Jamy Ian Swiss has said, ‘No one would ever think that we would ever work this hard to fool you. That’s a secret, and a method of magic’ (2007, the e.g.conference, www.egconf.com/ videos/how-magic-works). This is not just an interesting observation. It draws attention to a fact that puts all philosophers on notice: nobody would, or should, take seriously a would-be explainer of stage magic who declared that it was just undeniably, intuitively obvious that no possible sequence of ordinary physical events could account for the feat just observed. We philosophical illusionists say that before you run off half cocked with theories about consciousness as one sort or another of ‘real magic’, you should try to explain it all as an illusion engendered by nature. When philosophers rely on what follows from their most undeniable intuitions about consciousness, before exhausting the physical possibilities, they are not adopting a sound method of enquiry but simply indulging themselves."
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/3...
User illusion
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_illusion
Keith Frankish Explains Illusionism
"Illusionism is Daniel Dennett's position - that I subscribe to. I didn't invent it, I just coined the name ''illusionism'. Dennett already used the term 'illusion', I just added the '-ism'."
• Why Consciousness Is An Illusion
Keith Frankish: Illusionism as a Theory of Consciousness (2016)
https://keithfrankish.github.io/articles/F...
Keith Frankish: The Consciousness Illusion (2019)
"The atoms that make up the skin of the apple aren’t red. Considered as properties of external things, colours are light-reflective surface features, sounds are vibrations in the air, tastes and smells are chemical compounds, and the pain in your toe is cell damage. It seems, then, that the qualities of colour, sound, pain and so on exist only in our minds, as properties of our experiences. Philosophers refer to these subjective qualities of experience as ‘qualia’ or ‘phenomenal properties’, and they say that creatures whose experiences have them are phenomenally conscious.
It is phenomenal consciousness that I believe is illusory. For science finds nothing qualitative in our brains, any more than in the world outside. The atoms in your brain aren’t coloured and they don’t compose a colourful inner image. (And even if they did, there is no inner eye to see it.) Nor do they have any other qualitative properties. There are no inner sounds, smells, tastes and pains, and no inner observer to experience them if there were. [...]
Think of watching a movie. What your eyes are actually witnessing is a series of still images rapidly succeeding each other. But your visual system represents these images as a single fluid moving image. The motion is an illusion. Similarly, illusionists argue, your introspective system misrepresents complex patterns of brain activity as simple phenomenal properties. The phenomenality is an illusion. [...]
In Consciousness Explained (1991), Dennett draws a comparison with a computer’s user interface, with its icons for files, folders, waste basket and so on. This is a fiction created for the benefit of the user (a ‘user illusion’). By manipulating the icons, we can easily control the computer without knowing anything about its programming or hardware. Similarly, representations of phenomenal properties are simplified, schematic representations of the underlying reality, which we can use for the purposes of self-control. We should no more expect to find phenomenal properties in our brains than to find folders and waste baskets inside our laptops."
https://aeon.co/essays/what-if-your-consci...
Daniel Dennett - Consciousness, Qualia and the "Hard Problem"
• Daniel Dennett - Consciousness, Qualia and...
What is consciousness? Philosopher, Dan Dennett explains.
• What is consciousness? Philosopher, Dan D...