Comment by hackinthebochs
3 years ago
> I think it would be because they don't understand the substance.
Fair point. This is a danger.
>If I explain that chairs don't really exist because there's no such thing in physics, I get nodding heads all around. If I say the same about consciousness, people are all up in arms.
The difference is that with chairs people immediately know you're speaking in jargon. No one in their right mind would say something like "chairs are an illusion". This isn't the case when it comes to phenomenal consciousness.
>The challenge here is the implicit assumption that their perception of subjective experience is a direct perception of reality
I'm in favor of challenging these kinds of assumptions. But saying phenomenal consciousness doesn't exist isn't a good way to do it. It (correctly) invites such strong resistance that it makes communicating the more subtle point nearly impossible. Although perhaps there really isn't a more subtle point in the case of illusionism. Frankish views seem to have evolved towards a straightforward eliminativist account, which is disappointing. I was originally very sympathetic to illusionism when I first looked into it, but it is much less appealing now. I go into some detail about my problems with it here[1] if you're interested.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/naturalism/comments/zr6udy/a_challe...
> No one in their right mind would say something like "chairs are an illusion". This isn't the case when it comes to phenomenal consciousness.
Au contraire! I did something like this recently by arguing that solidity is basically illusory. It went ok.
Solidity simply doesn't have the properties that we naively attribute to it given our perceptions (even solids are mostly empty space!), and analogously, neither does our qualitative experience. The qualities we attribute to solids simply changed as we understood more of what was going on.
But this is just more jargon. At the end of the day, you're still going to sit on a chair to rest your legs and fully expect that your backside remains off the floor. But you have no expectation that an illusory cup of water will quench your thirst. Your interlocutor knows this and so feels no need to press you on terminology. This is an example of where the jargon obscures the meaning. I feel like something similar is going on with illusionism. Frankish wants to use the illusion jargon, but still make use of the fact that what's being picked out by phenomenal properties has explanatory efficacy in the world (at least before I started to read him as a plain old eliminativist).