Roger Schriner

In several areas of academic inquiry, including mathematics and moral theory, certain entities these disciplines discuss may well be nonexistent. If they are, this could cause serious practical and conceptual problems. For example, if numbers do not exist, how can mathematics work? One way to address such issues is by treating these states and properties as useful fictions, and some have applied this approach to philosophy of mind. One of the main problems in philosophy of mind has been the difficulty of naturalizing the qualitative character of sensory experiences. Some say this difficulty shows that we cannot naturalize qualitative character; it is nonphysical. Others dispense with this problem by endorsing eliminativism; qualitative experiences do not exist. This paper discusses ways that fictionalism has been employed by qualia-eliminativists such as Dennett and Frankish, and concludes that the value of their fictionalist approach is counterbalanced by conceptual confusions and difficulties communicating with the public. The paper then presents a non-fictional way to solve puzzles about qualitative experiences, through a limited, non-eliminativist form of illusionism. It concludes by comparing the way fictionalism and limited illusionism deal with two challenging conundrums about consciousness: Jackson’s knowledge argument and Levine’s explanatory gap.

Daniel Dennett and others have suggested that qualia and introspectible phenomena do not exist. Dennett's account of consciousness, along with several related approaches, has been called illusionism by Keith Frankish. Frankish's analysis is helpful and provocative. As currently presented, however, his 'strong' version of illusionism suffers from several basic confusions, particularly regarding its relationship to eliminative materialism. This paper contrasts strong illusionism with an alternative that is easier to understand and more sharply focused -- fallibilist experiential realism, or, less technically, modest realism. Fallibilist realism affirms the existence of experiential states that are commonly considered qualitative and phenomenal, but shares Frankish's agenda of thoroughly re-evaluating our judgments about such experiences. To illustrate the advantages of modest realism, I compare the ways illusionism and modest realism address two challenging puzzles: explaining how qualitative differences among sensory experiences could be constituted by differences among neural states, and explaining how neural states could constitute any conscious experiences whatsoever.

Chalmers (2018) maintains that even if we understood every physical process in the brain we could still wonder why these processes give rise to conscious experience. The meta-problem is the challenge of explaining why we think this 'hard problem' exists. This response to the target paper endorses illusionist accounts of three 'problem intuitions' about consciousness: duality, presentation, and revelation. Subject–object duality is explained in terms of a clash between two compelling but contradictory convictions about consciousness. Phenomenal presence is understood in relation to the configurational features of sensory experiences. And intuitions of revelation are explained as due to an unfounded belief in introspective ontological access. These illusionist analyses are used to bolster the case for physicalist realism rather than to support 'strong' illusionism. In addition to addressing the meta-problem they suggest a promising approach to the hard problem as wel.