Comment by naasking | Hacker News Reader

Comment by naasking | Hacker News Reader

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> Yes, all experience could be fallible and illusory but the fact of experience itself cannnot be an illusion.

Sure it can, and it remains only to explain how and why this illusion works to fool us into making erroneous statements, like "the fact of experience itself cannnot be an illusion".

> Experience qua experience is the thing no scientific theory of perception and cognition needs. So why does it exist?

It probably doesn't! Although I'm not as convinced as you that qualia are entirely non-functional.

> But an illusion (which is some experience whose epistemology we have misconstrued) is not itself an illusion.

What is an illusion? To my mind, an illusion is a perception or inference thereof that, taken at face value, entails a falsehood. So to call phenomenal consciousness an illusion is to say that the claims inferred from our direct perceptions are false, eg. "I have subjective awareness". There's nothing problematic about this that I can see.

>What is an illusion? To my mind, an illusion is a perception or inference thereof that, taken at face value, entails a falsehood.

But that is not the part of the illusion we're interested in. The part of it we're interested in is the part it shares with all other experiences. It was an experience. Stop. That fact can't be gainsayed.

What you're using to deny this is the epistemological status of the illusion experience. So that's things like "it was caused by brain cells XYZ firing" or "it did not accurately represent reality" or "it did not correspond to anything in reality at all". All those things could be true but they are beside the point being made.

Either one gets this fundamental idea or they don't in my experience (lol).

We're discussing the ontological status of phenomenal experience, so its illusory nature is very much relevant to this question.

No one, not even eliminative materialists, would deny that people have what they believe to be phenomenal experience. See Frankish [1]:

> Does illusionism entail eliminativism about consciousness? Is the illusionist claiming that we are mistaken in thinking we have conscious experiences? It depends on what we mean by ‘conscious experiences’. If we mean experiences with phenomenal properties, then illusionists do indeed deny that such things exist. But if we mean experiences of the kind that philosophers characterize as having phenomenal properties, then illusionists do not deny their existence. They simply offer a different account of their nature, characterizing them as having merely quasi-phenomenal properties. Similarly, illusionists deny the existence of phenomenal consciousness properly so-called, but do not deny the existence of a form of consciousness (perhaps distinct from other kinds, such as access consciousness) which consists in the possession of states with quasi-phenomenal properties and is commonly mischaracterized as phenomenal.

[1] https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/k0711/kf_articles/blob/m...

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