Keith Frankish - Illusionism as a Theory of Consciousness

For this session, we'll be reading Keith Frankish's paper "Illusionism as a theory of consciousness".

Up to this point, most of our readings on consciousness have assumed that phenomenal consciousness is real and it's implications are worth exploring. Frankish argues something quite different -- the phenomenon of consciousness is actually an illusion. Our experiences only appear to have phenomenal properties, a result of our partial and distorted awareness of our own sensory states. Frankish doesn't deny experience altogether – there are real functional states (representations, dispositions, neural processes) but they lack the phenomenal "bloom" introspection attributes to them. The result of this argument is to dissolve Chalmer's Hard Problem ("why is there something it is like to be us?") into a meta-problem ("why do we believe there is something it is like to be us?")

You can find the paper here