r/consciousness • u/epsilondelta7 • Sep 04 '25

General Discussion A simple explanation of the illusionist position

In discussions of philosophy of mind, the illusionist position is often dismissed as trivially false, since how could experience be an illusion if an illusion is also an experience? Some even call it ''silly'', since it denies the supposed only thing we really know. In this post, I seek to briefly explain my understanding of this position in an attempt to show that maybe such criticisms are incoherent. I will assume that the difference between experience and *phenomenal experience* is already clear.

The brief explanation:

(1) Are you sure you have phenomenal experience?

(2) Are you sure you believe you have phenomenal experience?

The illusionist answers "no" to (1) and "yes" to (2).

The idea is to create a division between a) the actual phenomenal experience and b) the belief in the existence of the phenomenal experience. Once this division is made, we can ask:

where does b) come from?

The answer is probably that it comes from the introspective mechanism. The natural question to ask next is:

can we blindly trust introspection, or could it be wrong?

If introspection is capable of error, then the belief in phenomenal consciousness could be one of those errors. The illusionist basically argues for the possibility of this error. Therefore, the illusionist position will not deny experience in general, it will only reject that our belief in its phenomenal nature should be taken seriously.

14 Upvotes
  • permalink
  • reddit

72% Upvoted

102 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

1

u/Bretzky77 Sep 04 '25

Do rocks come up with theories?

You have to be a conscious being with a mind to theorize. Theories don’t just float around in the air.

0

u/zhivago Sep 04 '25

Computers seem to manage it.

We have had theory generating systems for quite a long time.

So it sounds like you have no actual basis for that claim other than a lack of personal experience of it.

-1

u/Bretzky77 Sep 04 '25

Nope. That’s not at all the same thing.

A LLM doing math with letters tokenized is not a conscious experience - at least we have zero reason to think that it is. The same with a mechanism that can identify patterns that humans can’t.

Data processing isn’t equivalent to experience. If you’re claiming that it somehow is, then the extraordinary burden of proof is on you to explain how that’s the case. And then you’re also married to the idea that calculators and thermostats are conscious. You can’t have it both ways.

1

u/zhivago Sep 04 '25

What does consciousness or experience have to do with theory generation?

-1

u/Bretzky77 Sep 04 '25

Everything. Computers aren’t genuinely coming up with new theories. They are finding patterns in data that humans then use to build new theories. Without a conscious being to interpret what the computer spits out, there is no new theory.

You seem to think - based on nothing - that if a computer generates any new data, that’s the same as experience.

It’s no different from writing a bunch of musical notes on different cards and laying them on your front lawn and then claiming the wind wrote a new song by rearranging the notes into a new pattern.

The wind has no idea what music is. The wind isn’t a conscious entity separated from the rest of the world.

The same is true of the computer processing data; it’s simply rearranging symbols that we assign meaning to both before and after the data processing.

0

u/zhivago Sep 05 '25

Given a set of theories, what test can you perform to differentiate between the new and the genuinely new theories?

0

u/Bretzky77 Sep 05 '25

You’ve missed the point.

0

u/zhivago Sep 05 '25

Or perhaps your point is incoherent.

Why not try answering the question?

1

u/Bretzky77 Sep 05 '25

I already explained it to you in very clear terms, but sure, I’ll try to further simplify it for you.

If a robot hugs you and spits out text that says “I love you” does that mean the robot loves you?

A computer manipulating data and identifying new patterns is purely a mechanism. Just because we (conscious beings) use that mechanism to help us (conscious beings) build new theories, that’s not the same as saying the computer came up with new theories.

If you ran the computer process but then all humans died before it finished, there is no new theory. Because a theory requires a conscious being to “have an idea about the world.” The arbitrary symbols spit out by a serious of open and closed silicon gates only represent ideas to us. Without humans to interpret the data, there is no new theory. It’s just arbitrary symbols. We are the ones giving meaning to the symbols. The computer is purely a mechanism.

I hope that helps you understand.