Am I an Illusionist?

An excerpt from a recent journal article

This is an excerpt from my recent article “On the Evolution, Science, and Metaphysics of Consciousness.”

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Alongside Dennett, Frankish has been one of the most forceful critics of the Cartesian paradigm, asking us to think of phenomenal properties and qualia as theoretically misguided concepts of a bygone era similar to magical properties humans once endorsed to explain events in the natural world. Not surprisingly, Dennett’s book Consciousness Explained, was often dubbed Consciousness Explained Away by critics (Bishop, 2003), seemingly asking us to strip the magic out of consciousness by reducing conscious states entirely to the causal functional roles within the brain. This move appeared too radical to many. Yet, the problematic assumptions of the Cartesian paradigm led to even worse “internal problems, which have led its advocates to adopt increasingly extreme positions, such as the panpsychist view that all matter is conscious” (Frankish, 2025, p. 2). While vastly implausible and absurd to many, indeed significantly more so than the illusionist view of Dennett (1988) and Frankish (2016, 2017) that eliminates qualia altogether, panpsychism has been promoted by the most influential names in the Cartesian paradigm, such as Nagel and Chalmers.

Frankish considers illusionism to constitute a post-Cartesian paradigm and hopes to make me sign up for it wholesale. As I emphasize in my book, I am much more interested in the hard question by Dennett (2018) than the hard problem. What does consciousness do for the organism? Who benefits? All throughout my book, I follow a Dennettian post-Cartesian approach to consciousness, trying to figure out what the variations of subjective experience may allow organisms to do, as well as, and perhaps more importantly when it is harmful to the organism as a Darwinian agent. Yet, Frankish is right to point out that I continue to use the lingua franca of the Cartesian paradigm, such as ‘qualia’ and ‘phenomenological properties’. He notes that I employ Churchland’s (2002) call to engage in empirical study of paradigmatic cases, rather than get bogged down in philosophical analysis of the concepts of consciousness itself, and acknowledges that I am trying to naturalize the aforementioned terms central to the Cartesian paradigm in scientifically unproblematic ways. However, Frankish believes that there is a fundamental difference between pre-theoretical terms like ‘water’ and ‘qualia’:

These are not empirical concepts in the ordinary sense. We can’t get together and point to uncontroversial examples of qualia, as we can with koalas; each of us would have to point inwards to something unobservable to the others. Rather, they are philosophers’ notions. Qualia are supposed to be intrinsic properties, which resist functional analysis and are not entailed by facts about structure and dynamics. And the term ‘phenomenal consciousness’ was coined specifically to mark a contrast with a functional form of consciousness (Block, 1995). To use these terms for functional properties invites misunderstanding and accusations of failing to address the real problem. (Frankish, 2025, p. 3)

Here, I think Frankish gets things backwards. Is it not illusionists like him and Dennett that receive the accusation of avoiding the real problem more than anyone else? Does avoiding terms used by Chalmers and Nagel really help us to address the mysteries of consciousness? While I consider myself a post-Cartesian, have defended illusionism, and even described myself as an illusionist elsewhere, fully agreeing with the view that our understanding of the nature of consciousness is distorted through introspection, I also noted that I usually do not use the label because it so often invites misunderstanding (Veit & Browning, 2023a). But it also reflects a disagreement between me and Frankish about when to revise or replace concepts.

Unlike discarded scientific concepts like ‘phlogiston’, the terms illusionists are eager to replace are too tied up with subjective experience to cede the territory and be accused of not really addressing the hard problem. I do not have that much reverence for the history of terms to think that their meaning is forever fixed. Frankish is right of course that these terms are often deliberately defined though often somewhat hidden in a way that makes them immune to “revision in the light of scientific theorizing, as empirical concepts and theoretical constructs are” (Frankish, 2025, p. 3). Later, Frankish notes that a neutral term not associated with the specific conceptions of Cartesians would be useful, such as his proposed term of “quasi-phenomenal properties” (Frankish, 2016), but insists that we would be better off using a new one altogether “rather than trying to repurpose theoretical terms deeply embedded in a fundamentally different paradigm” (Frankish, 2025, p. 4). Here, I simply have a deep disagreement about the nature of concepts altogether.

References can be found in

Veit, W. (2026). On the Evolution, Science, and Metaphysics of Consciousness. Adaptive Behavior. https://doi.org/10.1177/10597123251413204