Illusionism: consciousness experience is an illusion, and there is no qualia

Remember the "hard problem of consciousness"? What if there's no hard problem at all, as I guessed? Then the problem isn't the hard problem of consciousness, but the illusion problem of consciousness. Not "why is there qualia?" but "why do we keep talking about the so-called qualia that doesn't exist?"

Illusionism as a Theory of Consciousness (2017), edited by Keith Frankish:

Illusionism is the view that phenomenal consciousness [feeling, qualia] is an introspective illusion — that introspection misrepresents experiences as having phenomenal properties. This view has many theoretical attractions, but it is often dismissed out of hand for failing to take consciousness seriously.

David Chalmers thinks it's worth consideration:

Illusionism is one of the most important strategies for addressing the problem of consciousness. This volume brings illusionism some of the attention it deserves...

Why illusionism

Illusionism as a Theory of Consciousness (2016), Keith Frankish.

I shall refer to the problem of explaining why experiences seem to have phenomenal properties as the illusion problem... it is often dismissed out of hand as failing to ‘take consciousness seriously’ (Chalmers, 1996)... This article... seeks to persuade the reader that the illusionist research programme is worth pursuing and that illusionists do take consciousness seriously — in some ways, more seriously than realists do.

Maybe consciousness is like some kind of magic trick, like psychokinesis:

First, we could accept... major revisions or extensions to our science... In the case of psychokinesis, we might posit previously unknown psychic forces and embark on a major revision of physics to accommodate them. 

Second, we could argue that, although the phenomenon is real, it is not in fact anomalous and can be explained within current science. Thus, we would... argue that this ability depends on known forces, such as electromagnetism. 

Third, we could argue that the phenomenon is illusory and set about investigating how the illusion is produced. Thus, we might argue that people who seem to have psychokinetic powers are employing some trick...

Qualia is like psychokinesis, and can also have 3 styles of explanations:

First, there is radical realism, which treats phenomenal consciousness as real and inexplicable without radical theoretical innovation. In this camp I group dualists, neutral monists, mysterians, and those who appeal to new physics.

Those are people like David Chalmers, panpsychism, George Berkeley's idealism, etc.

Second, there is conservative realism, which accepts the reality of phenomenal consciousness but seeks to explain it in physical terms, using the resources of contemporary cognitive science or modest extensions of it. Most physicalist theories fall within this camp... 

The third option is illusionism... Illusionists deny that experiences have phenomenal properties and focus on explaining why they seem to have them.

Frankish argues that conservative realism is in trouble: they treat qualia as real, but also seeks to explain them away as if they aren't real. They are saying that the feeling of redness when we see red is real, but that there's nothing left to explain once we can explain all that happens physically when we feel red. If that's all there is, then that'd make qualia just illusions, like psychokinesis.

In short, conservative realism is

Qualia is too real to be illusions, but not so real since it can be explained fully away.

Consider "solidness". Nothing is actually solid once you get to the fundamental laws of physics. Solidness is an emergent property, and we can explain its physics fully by the fundamental laws (and a lot of math). After that is done, it remains to explain why we have the illusion of "solidness", and that's easy, since we are macroscopic creatures for whom the solidness is a very useful approximation in our life. Illusionism thus is a satisfactory explanation of solidness. It might also work for qualia.

Analogies

N. Humphrey thinks that qualia is like a physical model of the Penrose triangle. From most angles, it looks unremarkable. But at a particular angle, it looks like an out-of-the-world bizarre object. Qualia, when viewed from outside of the mind, is just some apathetic neural firing. It's only when viewed from "inside" that it looks remarkable.

Phenomenal consciousness is a ‘fiction of the impossible’ — a magic trick played by the brain on itself.

Daniel Dennett thinks that qualia is like a GUI: they are illusions made to help us use ourselves, like icons on the computer help us use the computer. There's no literal "desktop" in your computer, but they are illusions and they are quite useful. So we shouldn't take qualia literally, even though we still should take them seriously.

Georges Rey compares our introspective lives to the experience of a child in a dark cinema who takes the cartoon creatures on screen to be real. The illusion depends on what the child doesn’t see — on the fact that their visual system does not register individual frames as distinct images. Cinema is an artefact of the limitations of vision, and, illusionists may say, phenomenal consciousness is an artefact of the limitations of introspection.

This doesn't mean that talks about qualia doesn't talk about anything at all; they are still valuable observations about real, if distorted, physical events.

Having watched a performance of King Lear, Lucy remarks, ‘Lear’s anguish in the final scenes was heart-breaking’. What is she talking about? There was no anguish on stage at all, only the artful illusion of it... most people do not regard their phenomenology as illusory; they are like naïve theatregoers who take the action on stage for real. But if illusionists are right, then cognitive scientists should treat phenomenological reports as fictions — albeit ones that provide clues as to what is actually occurring in the brain.

Also, illusionism means we are zombies, but zombies with feelings, and Chalmer's kind of zombies, those that are physically identical, but has no qualia, are impossible.

Illusionists can say that one’s experiences are like something if one is aware of them in a functional sense, courtesy of introspective representational mechanisms... Illusionists agree that... there is something it is like to be a zombie... When we imagine zombies as being different from us, we are — illegitimately — imagining creatures with different introspective capacities.