Broadly construed, illusionism is a thesis about awareness of phenomenal character. It is the claim that any awareness of phenomenal character is non-veridical. On the face of it, illusionism seems patently absurd. If I seem to be aware of a bent stick, it’s certainly possible that no bent stick is actually present. But if I *seem* to be aware of the qualitative features presented by my experience, it appears that this is totally sufficient for *actually* being aware of such features. When it comes to phenomenal character, it is hard to deny that appearance simply is reality.
Why do we think that phenomenal character is unique in this way? One plausible answer is that, in experience, the essence of phenomenal character is completely revealed to us. When I am aware of some phenomenal character, this is enough for me to completely grasp the nature of that phenomenal character. Consequently, I cannot be mistaken about what I am aware of because I have complete knowledge of what it is to be that phenomenal character. Since I have this knowledge, I know that being aware of something like *that* (where ‘that’ refers to what I am aware of), is the same as being aware of the relevant phenomenal character.
If experience does, in fact, reveal the essence of phenomenal character to us in this way, how could illusionism possibly be true? One possibility is that, although experience completely reveals the nature of phenomenal character to us, the relevant phenomenal character is never actually instantiated. In other words, when we are aware of a certain phenomenal character, this does not entail the instantiation of any phenomenal character that we are aware of.
This might sound strange at first, but it is very similar to a phenomenon that we are all familiar with: Suppose that someone is thinking about a unicorn. Even though, in such a case, it is true that someone is thinking about a unicorn, this does not entail that there is any unicorn that someone is thinking about. If it did, we could simply infer that unicorns exist from the fact that people can think about them. But this inference is blocked in such a context. The cases in which this sort of inference is blocked are known as “intensional contexts”. Thinking is such a context and it is open to the illusionist to claim that awareness is such a context as well. If this were the case, the fact that someone is aware of a certain phenomenal character is not, on its own, sufficient to conclude that any phenomenal character is actually present. If one is aware of some phenomenal character that is not actually instantiated, such awareness is non-veridical. In this sense, such awareness is illusory.
So, perhaps realists about phenomenal character are correct about revelation. In experience, the nature of phenomenal character is wholly revealed to us. But the illusionist might nevertheless hold that they are wrong insofar as they hold that phenomenal character is actually instantiated in the world. But why would anyone think this? On the face of it, experience seems to at least provide defeasible evidence for believing that phenomenal character is present just like it does for anything else we seem to be aware of. If we think that phenomenal character is illusory, why not think that the ordinary objects of our environment are illusory as well? Why not think that everything we seem to experience is an illusion? The illusionist owes us some reason for thinking that phenomenal character is illusory that does not also apply to everything else that we perceive. Otherwise, they undermine the very sorts of scientific evidence that led them to propose illusionism in the first place.
One reason of this sort that the illusionist can give takes the form of a debunking argument against our knowledge of phenomenal character. Specifically, they can argue that our beliefs about the presence of phenomenal character are “accidental” in a problematic sense that is incompatible with such beliefs counting as knowledge.
In what sense might our beliefs about phenomenal character be accidental? In order to count as knowledge, one plausible requirement is that the things that our beliefs are about must play some role in explaining why we form reliably true beliefs about them. For instance, suppose someone takes a pill that causes them to develop a completely random disposition to form beliefs about when it is going to rain. Suppose that, as a matter of sheer coincidence, they happen to form a disposition to believe it is going to rain when it is dark and cloudy, the weatherman says it’s going to rain, etc. In such a case, the person would have reliably true beliefs about rain that were formed on the basis of good reasons for thinking it is going to going to rain. Nevertheless, because their disposition was a completely random result of the pill that they took, it is accidental. Consequently, it reasonable to suppose that their beliefs still fail to count as knowledge.
If this sort of “non-accidental” constraint is accepted, it can also be applied in the case of phenomenal character. Suppose it is granted that, when we have phenomenally conscious experiences, we reliably form true beliefs that are caused by the appropriate sorts of phenomenally conscious experiences. Nevertheless, the illusionist might claim that the reason we form reliably true beliefs on the basis of those experiences has nothing to do with the phenomenal character that those experiences actually have. For example, according to many panpsychists, the same causal-structural properties described by physics could be realized by quiddities that lacked phenomenal consciousness. In this sense, although phenomenally conscious experiences do, in fact, cause us to form true beliefs about them, their phenomenal character plays no role in an explanation of why we form the beliefs that we do. That sort of explanation might only appeal to the causal-structural features that are only contingently associated with the quiddities responsible for phenomenal consciousness. If this is so, our beliefs about phenomenal character might be accidental and, thus, fail to count as knowledge *even if* they are actually caused by phenomenally conscious experiences.
By appealing to the requirement that our doxastic dispositions must be non-accidental, illusionists can argue that our beliefs about phenomenal character do not count as knowledge without ruling out our knowledge of other objects and properties in our environment. On this basis, they can defend a form of physicalism that does not countenance phenomenal character and hold that experiences of such properties are non-veridical. Furthermore, they can also explain our apparent certainty that such properties are instantiated by appealing to the revelatory character of our experiences. Since experience might reveal the essence of phenomenal character without phenomenal character actually being instantiated, revelation alone cannot undermine illusionism.
The above considerations strike me as a plausible line that illusionists might take in response to realism about phenomenal character. While I do not personally accept the illusionist thesis, it does strike me as being more plausible than any realist proposal that demands a radical transformation of physics in light of phenomenal consciousness.
No comments:
Post a Comment