However, on further consideration I suspect that it is Dennett who has failed to make this distinction. The arguments seem to me to point to an illusion of conclusion but Dennett’s analogies are illusions of experience.
Also, it may be that Dennett is overstating the case. What we can say about consciousness, when examined carefully, is very different from what we would conclude from our direct experience. And it is so different that Dennett announces that “there is no consciousness,” because the reality is other than what we normally mean by consciousness. (However, I am not convinced of this myself yet.)
That’s not how I read Dennett. In brief, conscious experience acquaints us with things: when we see something, we get information about its properties. To somebody like Dennett, that’s simply all there is to experience; to people who think that there’s a substantial hard problem, there are further aspects to experience—its qualitative, ineffable, intrinsic nature, the ‘what it’s like’-ness.
That’s what Dennett et al. think we’re wrong about, and what constitutes the illusion of experience: we merely believe that there’s all this extra stuff, but there’s not. So there’s no experience in the sense that it has qualitative, ineffable, intrinsic etc. features, but there’s experience in the sense that we have certain knowledge about the objects within our field of consciousness—say, a cat’s color, size, furriness and the like.
This sort of illusion doesn’t fall prey to the argument that to have an illusion at all is to experience it—or rather, we can ‘experience’ the illusion, in so far as we believe that experience has properties going beyond the merely informational. That is, we have false information about experience: that it has properties going beyond the merely informational, i. e. qualitative, intrinsic, you get the gist. We don’t have a misleading experience of experience, because that sort of thing we think experience is—with all its intrinsicality and what-it’s-like-ness—simply doesn’t exist.
Oh it is absolutely metaphorical. There’s no “screen” of any type. Merely the fact that the processing is done and whatever conscious awareness we have about it is analogous to the display on the screen of a black box computer. i.e. our brain “shows” us the processing of the brain in the form of consciousness just like the screen shows us the working of the computer.
Dennet’s argument is that it doesn’t, though. We’re merely looking at an after-the-fact story about that processing. That can and often does include lies and half-truths.The actual processing is never effable to us.That’s part of the illusion - the “immediacy” of consciousness doesn’t exist (which is trivial to show, Consciousness Explained is full of examples)
Don’t you have to be conscious in the first place in order to have any kind of “illusion”? I don’t have illusions when I’m unconscious because … well, I’m UNCONSCIOUS. Ergo, how can consciousness itself be an illusion?
Well, but already the idea that ‘our brain “shows” us’ anything runs into trouble, namely, that there’s a separate ‘us’ that could somehow ‘observe’ what the brain ‘shows’ it—but that’s already again appealing to the capacity of observing things in order to explain how we do just that.
Now, you could maintain that the observer isn’t observing in the way we do, but merely unconsciously, in which case, you’d get something close to a Higher Order Thought (HOT) approach, where a thought is conscious if it’s the object of a higher order thought (that thought thus ‘observing’ the former), but such an approach runs into great difficulties (not least of which is that its solution to the problem of consciousness essentially amounts to mere stipulation—consciousness just is being the object of a higher order thought, but there isn’t really any account of how that actually works).
At a certain point this kind of discussion devolves into a sort of “what the meaning of ‘is’ is” debate.
Whatever-the-fuck consciousness “is”, it “thinks” it is conscious, that being a self-referential act. From the outside it is relatively easy to dismiss that as a self-monitoring circuit, the equivalent of a status gauge or a security camera array where one security camera is aimed at the bank of security monitors or something of that ilk. From the inside… well, I don’t know firsthand what your experience is like, do I? Mine is imbued with an “I am here, I am me, this is me knowing I am here” awareness, so the question is whether that awareness is an illusion, and we’ve sort of run the “well if so, to whom” retort into the ground, haven’t we?
What would it mean for awareness to be an illusion? How would that be distinguished from being genuinely aware? But now we’re faced with the question of meaning – “what would it mean to whom?” – which highlights the probability that the question (and the answer) have no relevance to anything.
Awareness is. You are experiencing yours, for whatever it is. Neither you nor I can define what that awareness “is” in some kind of objective way precisely because it’s a subjective experience which, in turn, is intrinsic to the topic, that there actually does or does not exist such a thing as subjectivity. Positing that our subjective consciousness awareness is an outcome of an objective phenomenon of self-reference neither validates or nor invalidates a damn thing, useful line of thought though it might otherwise be.
We very quickly run into the limitations of our language for such discussions. The concept of “showing” “observing” and “us” are not perfectly suited for describing what is going on. We shouldn’t get too nit-picky and pedantic because none of us has the ability to describe what is going on without assuming that what we are trying to describe is inherent in formulating and understanding such a description.
I don’t think there is any way around that so I don’t worry about it. I do the best I can. At the simplest level I am comfortable with accepting consciousness as being an emergent property of a sufficiently complex brain, an inescapable artifact. Imperfect, capricious but interesting, but of course only “interesting” by dint of it creating the “me” that might be interested in it…and back round we go.
See, that’s exactly the sort of thing an eliminativist would consider you to be wrong about (i. e. laboring under a particular illusion regarding the kind of thing experience appears to be). They’d claim that, say, something like information-processing, perhaps self-referential information processing or what have you, is all there is, and that when it seems to us that it’s not, that there’s some ineffable undefinable unquantifiable incommunicable element to it, exactly then are we mistaken about it—in the perfectly ordinary way we’re mistaken when we consider a magic trick to involve something transcending the laws of physics, say.
For any properly constructed elminativism, the issue of ‘to whom’ an illusion is illusory simply doesn’t arise, and claiming it does simply misconstrues the position in a question-begging way, because we suppose that there needs to be some of the ‘mysterious’ awareness in order for there to be somebody who could properly said to be under an illusion; but that’s of course exactly what the eliminativist denies.
Perhaps think about it in terms of two different notions of awareness, awareness[sub]q[/sub] and awareness[sub]e[/sub], where awareness[sub]q[/sub] refers to the qualophile’s intrinsic, ineffable, ineluctably and inexplicably subjective experience we all (even the eliminativist) take ourselves to possess, and awareness[sub]e[/sub] refers to the eliminativist’s information-processing awareness, or whatever exact form it may take. A problem only arises if we suppose that to have the illusion of being aware[sub]q[/sub] of something, one needs to be aware[sub]q[/sub] of having that sort of illusion; but that’s just question-begging, as the eliminativist can simply say, well, it just seems as if we’re aware[sub]q[/sub], because that’s just what the illusion is—that is, being aware[sub]e[/sub] of something entails believing ourselves to be aware[sub]q[/sub] of it, but in fact, there’s no such thing as awareness[sub]q[/sub].
That doesn’t make eliminativism right, or even plausible—indeed, I don’t think it really stands a chance—but its failings aren’t quite that immediate.
This isn’t a conclusion, though; it’s an explanatory hypotheses put forward by certain people to get a grip on the difficult metaphysical character of conscious experience (by essentially saying that it only seems difficult, but is, in reality, much less so). The point being, awareness doesn’t seem like self-referential information processing, so there’s a need for explanation if that’s what it, in fact, is—namely, how to get to awareness from self-referential information processing. This is what illusionism offers: that seeming is only illusory (and that’s not circular, because it doesn’t appeal to any ‘seeming’ that goes beyond self-referential information processing), and thus, we may stand a chance to close that explanatory gap.
Emergentism, on the other hand, would be the claim that something more arises out of the self-referential information processing, perhaps in a way not reducible to that processing. Dual-aspect theories, panpsychism and outright Cartesian dualism take the stance that there actually is, as it seems, more to awareness than the mere information-processing, while, on the other extreme, idealism considers that really only that ‘something else’ exists, with everything else—the physical world and all the information within it—reducible to that, instead.
So I think one shouldn’t be so quick to try and dismiss the option of eliminativism on mere terminological grounds; there’s a real, contentful metaphysical thesis here that prima facie might just be how the world is.
I think I understand why these are seen as diametrically opposed positions.
And I am saying that actually they are not, aside from a lot of implicit (and often explicit) adjectives like “just”, “only”, and “merely” and associated terms such as “all”. Those seem to have less to do with what is, and pertain instead to some kind of “intrinsic value” argument, an argument that tastes to me like “are you a soulless machine or do you possess a soul”.
It’s an argument also approached pretty often from a discussion of artificial intelligence. And I tend to say “when the machine lays claim to having a soul, we’re in no position to claim otherwise”.
I’m not intending a value judgement, though. It’s analogous to seeing a shape in a darkened room, of a jacket, on some frame, with perhaps a hat, having the outline of a person—it seems as if there’s a person there, but it could be ‘just’ the jacket hanging on a rack. There might be ‘more’ there—an actual person (person here as a physical object, without any appeal to the value judgement in the notion of personhood), or ‘just’, ‘merely’, ‘only’ the jacket. Both are live options, and it might be the case that only closer inspection can adjudicate between the two—the same, it seems to me, is the case with experience and whether it’s ‘only’ information processing, or if ‘more’ is going on.
Actually, I think that’s pretty much everybody’s position.
To make this very clear: they found that the brain information processing made the decision and after the fact the self experienced itself making a choice by conscious thought processes.
The brain created an illusion of a self making a conscious decision. A false narrative of agency.
The experiment in no way proves that every experienced conscious decision made is an illusionary process, but it is most consistent with a formulation that consciousness is, in part at least, how our brains lie to us.
But again, these are necessary lies for our selves to exist and our senses of self and agency (“real” or “illusory”) have value.
Who is claiming that consciousness is an illusion? How can I trust that your interpretation of this concept is consistent with the interpretation of whomever originated this idea? How do I know you aren’t arguing a strawman?
I think awareness can be illusory, in that we are great at telling ourselves a story to explain our motivations and actions. The story may certainly feel right and it may in fact be right. But it can easily be a confabulation. Who authors the confabulation? The unconscious part of us. The part of us that controls all of our involuntary processes and does all kinds of things outside of our awareness. The part that tells us scary stories as we sleep at night.
But just because I think we are self-deluding creatures doesn’t mean I think consciousness is a charade. We certainly have some awareness, even if it’s just awareness of our existence. I know I can’t really know with 100% certainty why I committed a particular act, but that doesn’t mean I can’t say with 100% certainty that I possess an image of me committing an act. That image may not be an accurate depiction of reality, but that doesn’t mean the image itself doesn’t exist somewhere (whether it be in my body’s brain or in a mainframe computer on an asteroid a trillion light-years from planet Earth). To me, a modicum of awareness of one’s own cognition is all consciousness is. It’s a very low bar to meet.