{"id":205444,"date":"2025-02-04T04:10:34","date_gmt":"2025-02-04T10:10:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/02\/keith-frankish-on-the-consciousness-illusion"},"modified":"2025-02-04T04:10:34","modified_gmt":"2025-02-04T10:10:34","slug":"keith-frankish-on-the-consciousness-illusion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/02\/keith-frankish-on-the-consciousness-illusion","title":{"rendered":"Keith Frankish on the consciousness illusion"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"padding-right: 20px\"><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/keith-frankish-on-the-consciousness-illusion.png\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Along the lines of last night\u2019s post, Keith Frankish has an article at Aeon <a href=\"https:\/\/aeon.co\/essays\/what-if-your-consciousness-is-an-illusion-created-by-your-brain?utm_medium=feed&utm_source=atom-feed\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">describing and defending the <i>illusion <\/i>ist viewpoint<\/a>, that phenomenal consciousness is an <i>illusion<\/i>. It\u2019s an excellent introduction for anyone who isn\u2019t familiar with the basic argument.<\/p>\n<p>As noted before, I think the <i>illusion <\/i>ists are right about the reality, but I\u2019m not sure using the word \u201c<i>illusion<\/i>\u201d is productive. We could just as easily say that yes, phenomenal consciousness <a href=\"https:\/\/selfawarepatterns.com\/2019\/01\/27\/consciousness-lies-in-the-eye-of-the-beholder\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">exists *subjectively* but not objectively<\/a>, and this is how that subjective experience is constructed. There is some value in using stark language to get people\u2019s attention, but it also frequently gets their summary dismissal.<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019m also not entirely sure it\u2019s all in the introspection mechanisms. Phenomenal qualities seem useful in discriminating between different objects, and the affect lacing the brain weaves in also clues the deliberation engine on how to regard those objects. It seems likely that our introspective representations of these perceptual representations are value added rather than entirely constructive. Thinking the latter implies a lot of processing overload for introspection, which doesn\u2019t necessarily feel adaptive to me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Along the lines of last night\u2019s post, Keith Frankish has an article at Aeon describing and defending the illusion ist viewpoint, that phenomenal consciousness is an illusion. It\u2019s an excellent introduction for anyone who isn\u2019t familiar with the basic argument. As noted before, I think the illusion ists are right about the reality, but I\u2019m [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":661,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-205444","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-neuroscience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205444","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/661"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=205444"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205444\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=205444"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=205444"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=205444"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}