Thankyou for a fantastically lucid exposition of this tricky terrain! I myself am a strong illusionist, and I really appreciated your analogy of phenomenal conscious being more like the plot of a story, rather than the film on the screen (cartesian theatre). This feels like one of Dennett’s ‘strange inversions of reasoning’ - a critical inversion if strong illusionism is the right way forward—like the Necker cube, where a perspective-shift out of the thicket of conceptual baggage of theories of consciousness with which our introspective, self-reflective machinery source code is infected (an ecosystem of believed-to-be-true fictitious memes). With this in mind, I deeply acknowledge your ‘pull in the other direction’! One thing I’d like to add in relation to your comment about Frankish’s ‘promissory note’. We may be decades or centuries away from a ‘full neuroscientific account’ of the functionality of the brain vis-a-vis consciousness. Nonetheless I find it incredibly useful to bear in mind that, as Dennett points out, this vast symphony of neurons signalling, like so many murmurations of starlings, are REAL physical events. Every conscious moment experienced by every conscious being in the history of the world, every moment of transcendence, every epiphany of realisation, ever moment of felt experience, had a one-to-one neural correlate made of matter and information in the brains of those conscious beings. In short, figment is real only and precisely in this sense. So while the strong illusionist may at present only have a promissory note to offer in lieu of all the exquisite details of the electro-chemical-informational complexity, I think this is precisely the best way out of the ill-construed ‘hard problem’ hall of mirrors. I am with Dennett, Frankish, Metzinger, Graziano, Churchland and others in this regard.
Thankyou for a fantastically lucid exposition of this tricky terrain! I myself am a strong illusionist, and I really appreciated your analogy of phenomenal conscious being more like the plot of a story, rather than the film on the screen (cartesian theatre). This feels like one of Dennett’s ‘strange inversions of reasoning’ - a critical inversion if strong illusionism is the right way forward—like the Necker cube, where a perspective-shift out of the thicket of conceptual baggage of theories of consciousness with which our introspective, self-reflective machinery source code is infected (an ecosystem of believed-to-be-true fictitious memes). With this in mind, I deeply acknowledge your ‘pull in the other direction’!
One thing I’d like to add in relation to your comment about Frankish’s ‘promissory note’. We may be decades or centuries away from a ‘full neuroscientific account’ of the functionality of the brain vis-a-vis consciousness. Nonetheless I find it incredibly useful to bear in mind that, as Dennett points out, this vast symphony of neurons signalling, like so many murmurations of starlings, are REAL physical events. Every conscious moment experienced by every conscious being in the history of the world, every moment of transcendence, every epiphany of realisation, ever moment of felt experience, had a one-to-one neural correlate made of matter and information in the brains of those conscious beings. In short, figment is real only and precisely in this sense.
So while the strong illusionist may at present only have a promissory note to offer in lieu of all the exquisite details of the electro-chemical-informational complexity, I think this is precisely the best way out of the ill-construed ‘hard problem’ hall of mirrors. I am with Dennett, Frankish, Metzinger, Graziano, Churchland and others in this regard.