Why I am not (yet) an illusionist

Squaring illusions

Gemini 3 Pro Image.

[UPDATE Jun 2026] For the past few months, I’ve held about 60% credence in illusionism, and mostly write from an illusionist perspective now. However, the issues raised in this article are precisely why my credence is not 80-90%, and if they prove intractable may lead to me abandoning illusionism altogether.

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Strong illusionism about consciousness, in the words of Keith Frankish, is the belief that experiences do not have qualitative, what-is-it-like phenomenal properties at all. Instead, they only have functional, dispositional, representational, etc. properties which misrepresent themselves, leading us to act and think as though we have phenomenal states.

The knee-jerk reaction to illusionism is that it’s self-defeating. If I have a qualitative experience of being fooled about qualitative experiences, I cannot be wrong, because if I were I wouldn’t be feeling anything to begin with. But this isn’t strictly true:

It would be self-defeating to explain illusory phenomenal properties of experience in terms of real phenomenal properties of introspective states. Illusionists may hold that introspection issues directly in dispositions to make phenomenal judgments — judgments about the phenomenal character of particular experiences and about phenomenal consciousness in general. Or they may hold that introspection generates intermediate representations of sensory states, perhaps of a quasi-perceptual kind, which ground our phenomenal judgments. (Frankish)

In other words, illusionism seems obviously contradictory to the realist, who firmly believes that in order to believe anything at all you must have phenomenal states. But illusionists are disputing the very claim that phenomenal properties are essential to introspection at all.

Or think of it this way: in a zombie world, the illusionists would be right and everybody else would be insisting that they were wrong. If there’s a possible world in which the illusionists are right, then their position is not internally contradictory. The illusionists believe we are in the zombie world. They may be very wrong, as wrong as flat Earthers, but that doesn’t make their position self-defeating.

However, I am still not an illusionist… yet. I have more reading and thinking to do, and it is possible I will change my mind. Right now, my perspective is based on the following: there are many things which I have a strong gut instinct are real and non-illusory, but which I could always understand how they would be theoretically compatible with being illusions. Illusionism about consciousness, on the other hand, seems to be different from these other cases, and I have not been able to understand how it could be true.

Illusion #1: Personal Identity

The teletransporter scans your body in New York, disassembles you into atoms, then reassembles the exact same configuration of atoms in London.

Just the thought of teletransportation makes me very uncomfortable. I have an extremely powerful gut feeling that this would kill me and create a clone in London.

But I don’t believe that’s true anymore, for two reasons.¹

First, there are a bunch of philosophical reasons to think it’s false. What if the teletransporter leaves me in place, but disassembles me and nigh-instantaneously reassembles me? What if they only replace 1% of my atoms?(Surely personal identity survives a kidney transplant.) 10%? 50%? 99%? What is the threshold at which I stop being me? What if my brain gets split and put in two bodies; which one is me? If that kills me, what if only a tiny section of my brain is removed? There doesn’t seem to be a principled answer to these questions.²

I am not saying personal identity doesn’t exist in any sense. There is a collection of cells, commonly referred to as Jack Thompson, writing these words. A couple years ago, there was a collection of cells that was extremely similar, that shared a lot of the same history, that the present Jack Thompson has memories of, that both cell-collections feel are continuous with one another. You could describe these as identical, or not. Illusionism about personal identity just establishes that these are semantic, definitional questions. Do I survive teletransportation? Depends on your definition. There is no deep answer about it, just like there is no deep answer to how many grains of sand make a heap.

Second, I can find an explanation for why it would seem like I have personal identity at first glance. Imagine a world in which personal identity didn’t exist, and there was just a long sequence of snapshot-experiences, one caused by the next. Would these snapshots contain the thought “this is an isolated snapshot of conscious experience, and I have no continuity?” Not necessarily. Each snapshot could feel very vivid and real. Plenty of snapshots would include memories. In every snapshot that is thinking about persistent self might also be accompanied by a strong affirmative feeling. Further, it would be evolutionarily advantageous for us to have minds which have a persistent sense of self. If we didn’t feel that we would benefit from pursuing any goals longer-term than a moment, we would likely never gather food, pursue a mate, or tend to our injuries.

Again, all of this might be false. If it seems like you have a self, you have some reason to believe you do in fact have a self. But it is not known with certainty, and the alternative explanation is a live possibility.

So I am a reasonably confident illusionist about personal identity. Personal identity is philosophically problematic, enough so that there’s strong reason to doubt it exists in the way we think it does. And the evidence for personal identity, the way it seems to us, I can think it over and find a pretty satisfying explanation of why we would feel that we have a deep, metaphysical kind of personal identity when we do not.

Illusion #2: Libertarian free will

Metaphysical libertarianism is the position that we have free will and we could not have free will if the universe was determinist (and so therefore determinism is false).

It feels to me that I am making choices, and not that my choice was determined by the laws of physics in my brain. I have an experience only of choosing. I can strengthen that experience by changing my mind, doing something unexpe—BANANASCHLABLAMARANG! See, wasn’t that an uncaused choice?

However, I think free will, at least in the libertarian sense, is illusory.

First, we have strong reasons to believe that the world is deterministic. Determined by the neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky caught a lot of justified flak for not addressing compatibilism at all and for barely engaging with the philosophical literature on free will.³ It is, however, a very strong case for determinism. Study the science of the brain, and there’s a pretty damning picture that everything we do has a physical cause, and said physical causes are deterministic. Sapolsky also addresses quantum, emergence, and chaos-theory approaches and demonstrates that they do not break determinism.

Second, I can easily imagine how deterministic agents would have the illusion of free will. A deterministic brain could certainly have experiences. The contents of those experiences would be determined by what sort of concepts are being represented in the brain, not by how the brain itself works; I don’t feel my synapses firing, after all. To survive and optimize actions, a deterministic brain would still have to have some mechanistic way of comparing alternatives. Even if the ultimate outcome is physically determined, it might just feel like choosing when you’re doing it. The system would just contain the data “I am choosing what to do”, and data about the laws of particle physics wouldn’t enter into it.

So I think free will, as libertarians talk about it, is illusory. There’s still a sense in which we make choices: if I write the word “bananaphone”, it is my brain that caused that to happen. But there is no definite boundary about what is free and what isn’t.

Free will and marble machines

Illusion (?) #3: Phenomenal consciousness

Here is where I break away from the illusionist perspective. Let me try to characterize, as fairly as I can, what illusionists are saying.

• Introspection is a real physical phenomenon. We can make reports of things that are represented in our brains, and they inform our choices and thinking.

• When people introspect, they often report that they are in mental states with particular features, a “what-is-it-like”ness, a kind of phenomenal state that they insist cannot be described by functional, representational, and dispositional accounts of mental states.

• However, there are lots of philosophical problems with these phenomenal things. What exactly are they? What do they do? How do they occur? How would we know what has them? Etc. That’s some reason to think they don’t exist.

• Illusionism does not deny that mental states exist, or that introspection is happening. But they deny that those states have those phenomenal properties. They just are functional, representational, and dispositional states.

• The “illusion” part is that those states misrepresent themselves. When we introspect, we do not literally receive a readout of which neurons are active where, we get a rough, useful description of what’s going on. And that rough, useful description is misleading.

• There are reasons for why this would be. In particular, the attention schema theory describes how and why these descriptions would be misleading.

As I’ve already stated, this theory is not internally contradictory. It’s possible in the zombie world. The question is whether we think it’s true.

And I’m not convinced it is. In the personal identity and free will cases, I can understand how my gut feelings that I have those things could be squared with the illusion. But I don’t get how my feeling that I have phenomenal states, which in and of itself feels like a phenomenal state, could be squared with them being illusory. I don’t understand the mechanism, at all. Illusionists will claim that it is possible, that there is nothing fundamental about my confusion. But why should I believe them? I have tried, and it does not make sense to me.

The Anti-Inductive Argument

Yet I have been successful with the other illusions! I can deflate personal identity and free will all day. I can easily square visual and perceptual illusions with the idea that the underlying object is very different. But I can’t seem to do that with consciousness, despite lots of trying.

Illusionists and materialists of all stripes typically appeal to other phenomena which felt, in the past, to be inexplicable in terms of mere material: life, the origin of species, quantum weirdness, intelligence, and yes, free will and personal identity. The inductive argument is: why would you think that consciousness is different?

But I’d like to turn this argument on its head: every single “illusion” of the past can be easily squared with perception, even to the believer. Folks like Alvin Plantinga who still believe in intelligent creation of life understand that the organisms they see all around them theoretically could have been created by material processes, they just think it’s very unlikely. Quantum mechanics is profoundly weird, but as long as quantum effects don’t ripple out into the macro-perceptual world, it is theoretically compatible with our observations. And as I’ve already said, it’s entirely conceivable to have unfree and non-persistent agents who have strong perceptions of being free and having a persistent identity.

The illusionist might counter that these past illusions seem obvious to me now, because they’ve been absorbed into my culture, whereas illusionism about consciousness is not mainstream. This doesn’t seem to explain the difference:

1. I firmly believed teletransportation would kill me, and had never encountered any arguments to the contrary. Then I read exactly one Parfit article, felt a sense of crisis and vertigo, and then accepted his conclusions with few reservations within a few days. Similarly, I didn’t believe in determinism until I saw a single Crash Course Philosophy video which laid out the straightforward argument about the brain being caused by physics. That shook my faith, and then I forgot about it. I read Robert Sapolsky a few years later, and that instantly converted me. But I have read several books and papers on illusionism and I have not had anything close to the same experience yet.

2. If anything, qualia realism runs counter to my aesthetic philosophical instincts. I’ve deflated everything else; I want the world to be simple! I don’t want to believe in souls, and I really don’t want to believe in a god, since I think any god that created this world could not be all-powerful and all-good. I’m not insecure about “meaning in the cosmos” or anything like that; I’ve happily accepted that humans aren’t the most important things in the world and that we don’t need external objective standards to live happy and meaningful lives. If I am motivated to reason one way, I am motivated to reason in favor of the illusionist. But I cannot deny what I see with my own eyes.

3. To explain quantum mechanics to Isaac Newton, I’d say: “Okay, I’m going to explain these very counterintuitive things about how the world works. But to even have a chance of grasping that, we’re going to have to catch you up on two hundred years of new discoveries in physics. We’ll take it slow, and once you grasp all of those steps as well as today’s physicists do, you’ll be able to learn quantum mechanics.” It’s understandable that Newton wouldn’t be able to get it, because there’s so much background he’s missing. But some illusionists think that at least the basic mechanism for consciousness has already been sketched out, and Dan Dennett does not, to my knowledge, say anything like “this doesn’t make sense right now, but after a bunch more scientific knowledge and some paradigm shifts it’ll make sense.” Dennett and I appear to be looking at the same science, but we draw very different conclusions.

Conclusion

As a rationalist, I cannot accept a view which both (a) seems to me to be false, and (b) I cannot think of any way in which it could be compatible with my observations, despite trying quite hard.

But (b) can change.

My argument is not novel. Daniel Shabasson and François Kammerer have written about this exact issue—why the illusion seems very different from other illusions. They propose counterarguments, and it’s quite possible they succeed. Over the winter break, I will be making a concerted effort to get my head around illusionism as best I can. I’ll be reading those two, as well as Dennett, Frankish, Graziano, and any other illusionists you folks recommend. It is possible that the illusion of phenomenal experience is just harder to deflate than the others, not impossible. I will really do my best, and I hope to write an “I was wrong, here’s how it works” post down the line.

The possibility remains, however, that illusionism will stay unsatisfactory. In which case, my search for a good alternative theory will begin. Stay tuned!

1. I still probably wouldn’t get in a teletransporter, though—the stakes are too high if I’m wrong.

2. Even if you introduce a soul, what’s the relation between the brain and the soul? Do split-brain patients have two souls, or one? If they have one, then it seems to me that souls don’t answer the question of which is “me”; if they have two, then how does it get generated, and how am I sure that whenever my brain gets altered by natural neurogenesis, brain damage, surgery, or sleep, a new soul isn’t generated?

3. If you prefer a compatibilist perspective, check out Freedom Evolves by Dan Dennett.