Illusionism is just a form of gaslighting

This popular theory of consciousness is not merely wrong, but harmful.

Within the context of Philosophy of Mind, illusionism is the position defended by philosophers such as Daniel Dennett, which holds that the subjective aspects of Consciousness, of first-person experience as a whole, are an illusion. As a follow-up to my previous essay on consciousness and physicalism, I will now proceed to dismantle this claim.

Arthur Haswell’s essay Those who do not ‘see’ their own consciousness: can argument help? begins with the following passage:

A searing pang in the loins brings you to the doctor’s office. You explain that you need help, that something must be done. The doctor performs a comprehensive examination of your body and ascertains that you are perfectly healthy. Yes, you say, but even so, the pain is a problem in itself. You can’t live in agony. Isn’t there something that can relieve it? The doctor explains that the pain is not a problem because there is no such a thing as pain. He has never known pain himself and doesn’t believe that such a thing exists. For a few moments, you stare back at him, incredulous. How does one respond to such a claim?

Despite the apparent absurdity of the situation, I think it illustrates the problem rather well. The doctor in question believes in illusionism even if he does not explicitly state it, because his denial of the existence of pain as a purely internal reality follows directly from the premises of illusionism.

What exactly is meant by “illusion”, anyway?

An illusion is typically understood as a failure to represent reality on some level. Classical optical illusions such as the checker shadow illusion demonstrate that this incongruence between our perception and objective reality does, in fact, occur. They often arise as a result of mental heuristics and shortcuts which may have brought some evolutionary advantage by minimizing the need to thoroughly process inputs, thus creating a series of high-recall and low-precision models in our minds. Cognitive biases are similar, though they tend to be more insidious and harder to demonstrate. Illusions are a fact we have to contend with.

Illusionists claim that qualia — subjective experiences as a whole — are an illusion. They don’t merely state that our subjective experiences can be an inaccurate representation of reality; they state that experience is an illusion in and of itself. In other words, it doesn’t actually exist.

That is false, and I need only resort to logic and a basic notion of the workings of language to demonstrate it.

Some people, like me, have the ability to assess what is going on inside their minds to some extent. I don’t know everything that goes on inside my mind, but there are things I can say with absolute certainty. This is not hyperbole: there are things which have no possibility of being false.

I’ll begin with the following: something happens. This is as uncontroversial a statement as one can make. Only the most deranged or dishonest person will claim that “actually, nothing happens”. I am aware that, sadly, these people do exist, but they’re not relevant here.

I’ll follow that with: if I can know that something happens, something happens inside my mind. This is just another way of expressing “I think, therefore I am”. “Mind” is a word used to name a directly verifiable fact of reality.

The part of my mind which contains events I can directly verify is what I call consciousness. “Consciousness” is a word used to name a directly verifiable fact of the mind. There are things which happen inside this consciousness that do not happen in other parts of reality, and these things are called subjective experiences. Another name for subjective experience is qualia. “Qualia” is a word used to name a directly verifiable fact of consciousness.

This is the part that can be considered “controversial” on some level:

Why “qualia”? They are so called because they have a quality that is ineffable and irreductible. In other words, there are aspects of subjective experience that cannot be reduced to a more fundamental object, because they are fundamental themselves, such as the qualitative aspect of pain, pleasure, color, taste, and every other subjective experience. Even if you fully describe the physical process and the neural pathway that leads to the sensation of pain, you will never capture the essence of the experience itself.

Non-illusionist physicalists will say that I’m wrong, and that knowing the physical process is sufficient to know all there is to know about the experience. I find that absurd, because anything that can be described in third-person is necessarily separate from the first-person object it is meant to represent. Physical processes can explain causes, but not the experience itself.

My point is: subjective experience exists, whether it can be fully described by physicalism, or whether it requires some version of idealism, dualism or panpsychism. The fact of the existence of subjective experience is not up for debate here, only its causes. Subjective experiences like pain cannot be an illusion, because they are a self-contained reality, and not merely a faulty representation of something external. Even if some aspect of an experience can be considered illusory, such as in the checker shadow illusion example I gave, the experience itself remains a fact.

And here lies the problem I have with illusionism: both physicalism and illusionism are forms of eliminative materialism; however, whilst one can be a physicalist and still be honest, in the sense that they at least recognize that there is something about consciousness that requires explanation, illusionism is a fundamentally dishonest position. Instead of attempting to offer an explanation, it denies the existence of the thing it cannot explain, or denies its importance, as though practical utility is a necessary component of truth (it isn’t).

This is why I use the term “gaslighting”. When I attempt to argue about consciousness and come across illusionist arguments, it feels as though my very reality is being denied by someone who claims to know better. It is insulting. It is cowardly. It is a strategy employed by those who don’t care about the truth, because the truth that there is something that their reductive worldview cannot explain is unacceptable to them.