Becoming confused about illusionism, I shift to the simpler topic of many selves

So, I was happily reading along in Eric Schwitzgebel's book, The Weirdness of the World, getting to the last few pages of a chapter where he tries to define consciousness in a defensible fashion, when my attention was captured by a passage about illusionism -- though that term wasn't used by Schwitzgebel.

Some philosophers have argued that consciousness, or phenomenal consciousness, does not exist. Keith Frankish is the most visible recent advocate, but others include Paul Feyerabend, Jay Garfield, Francois Kammerer, and maybe early Patricia Churchland. The argument is always a version of the following: 

The ordinary concept of (phenomenal) consciousness ineliminably contains some dubious metaphysical or epistemic assumption at odds with the mainstream scientific or materialistic world conception. In this way, "consciousness" is like "ghost" or "Heavenly spirit" or "divine revelation." 

You can't remove the immaterial metaphysics from the concept of a ghost or spirit; you can't remove the religious epistemology from the concept of divine revelation. Therefore, all these terms must go; there is no such thing. 

Frankish in particular offers a lovely list of dubious commitments that consciousness enthusiasts sometimes adopt. Let me now disavow all such commitments. Conscious experiences need not be simple, nor ineffable, nor intrinsic, nor private, nor immediately apprehended. 

They need not have non-physical properties, or be inaccessible to "third-person" science, or be inexplicable in materialist vocabulary. My definition did not, I hope, commit me on any such questions (which was exactly Desideratum 1). My best guess -- though only a guess (see chapter 2) -- is that all such claims are false, if intended as universal generalizations about consciousness.

Okay, that wasn't crystal clear (philosophers usually aren't), but I got the basic point. Frankish and his fellow illusionists, as they're called, consider that the way consciousness typically is viewed contains unproven assumptions that have an other-worldly, non-physical leaning. 

I really hadn't thought that, based on the many neuroscience books I've read about consciousness and the brain, but I can understand how Frankish, et. al., consider that their illusionist perspective corrects for those, well, illusions. 

I then embarked on what I thought would be a brief quest to find a fairly short easy-to-understand of what illusionism is all about. I chose to ignore Wikipedia, though in retrospect, this description of illusionism on the Keith Frankish page is pleasingly understandable. 

Frankish is known for espousing the view that phenomenality is an introspective illusion. "We humans have learned a variety of subtle but powerful tricks — strategies of self-control, self-manipulation, and extended problem-solving — which vastly extend the power of our biological brains and give us the sense of having a unified, phenomenally conscious mind, self, or soul."^[1]

Early in his career he took a “robustly materialist stance” and attempted to rebut the zombie argument popularized by David Chalmers. In 2007, when he wrote the "Anti-Zombie Argument," he endorsed a weak form of realism about qualia.^[6] In later work, however, he rejected phenomenal realism altogether, arguing that “materialists should be thoroughgoing eliminativists about qualia.” He called this stance “illusionism.”

I tried to make sense of a piece Frankish wrote called "The consciousness illusion," but had trouble comprehending it. Which seemed strange, since usually I have a high tolerance for esoteric arguments. The first paragraph was about as clear as Frankish got in the piece, from my confused perspective.

In the movie The Matrix (1999), Morpheus offers Neo a red pill. If he takes it, he will discover that reality as he knows it is an illusion created by machine overlords to keep humans enslaved. I am going to offer you a different pill, which – if it works – will convince you that your own consciousness is a sort of illusion, a fiction created by your brain to help you keep track of its activities. This view – which I call illusionism­ – is widely considered absurd (it’s been described by Galen Strawson as ‘the silliest claim ever made’), but it has able defenders (pre-eminently Daniel Dennett), and I want to persuade you that it isn’t absurd and might well be true. Are you ready to see how deep the rabbit hole goes?

After some pondering about my confusion about illusionism, it dawned on me that a core precept (as noted in the Wikipedia article) of this approach to consciousness appears to be skepticism about we humans having, or being, a "unified, phenomenally conscious mind, self, or soul." I share that skepticism.

Otherwise, from what I could tell from my admittedly brief reading about illusionism, Frankish agrees with mainstream neuroscience that consciousness is produced by the physical brain. But he denies that there is "something to be like" you or me or a bat or a dog or any other conscious entity -- perhaps because there is no independent stand-alone enduring entity that is conscious.

So I'll end this post by sharing an excerpt from a June 2023 Scientific American story, "The community of Ella," about a woman who showed 12 different personalities ranging in age from two to 16. Her therapist took an anthropological perspective in treating her over a lengthy period of time, writing:

What, I wondered, might happen if we took the "is she or isn't she" [faking her multiple personalities] off the table and instead questioned our own assumptions about what makes a healthy self?

In the contemporary West, we generally think of the self as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated center of emotional awareness, judgment and action that is distinct from other selves and from the world around us. 

This self is singular, personal, intimate and private: it is not directly accessible to anyone but us. The self is the core of a person, the center of experience, the fundamental aspect of us that makes us who we are.

...But this understanding of the self is far from universal. Anthropologists have long documented very different ideas about the self in cultures around the world. Indeed, the possibility of more than one entity residing in a body at a time is a widespread human belief.

...Dramatic accounts aside, having multiple parts, whatever we call them -- entities, selves, souls -- is a more mundane state than most people might think. Neuroscientist David Eagleman has described how the brain's complex system operates as a collection of individual "minds" that together produce the illusion of unified consciousness.

Internal Family Systems therapy, a burgeoning evidence-based approach, posits that the mind is inherently multiple -- that what we experience as "self" is really an internal system of subjectivities that shift in response to inner and outer cues and that can be engaged and transformed through therapy.

In other words, we all have parts. We even regularly talk about them without marking it as odd. As I'm writing this article, part of me is excited to share what I've learned. Another part of me is overwhelmed by other work and is mindful of all the things not getting done while I write. Another part is nervous about how my ideas -- and Ella -- will be received. Yet another part is eager for the engagement.

That I have all these different parts of me operating at once probably doesn't raise any alarms: we are all familiar with these kinds of complexities. In this sense, I don't think Ella is that different from the rest of us, except that she has barriers between her parts that disrupt the sense of continuous consciousness most of us take for granted.

Comments

[Ron E.]

When it comes to issues of the mind and the self, it seems to me that, apart from the clinical definitions as being mental phenomena like perception, thinking, memory, belief, reasoning, desire, emotion etc. no-one seems to know what the mind or self is or and how/why they manifest.

The simplest explanation I can see is the simple biological one that (as with us and all animals) to navigate our environment information and knowledge is paramount, in effect, how to survive. We begin to accumulate information from birth; who are our caregivers, what can be eaten and what can’t, what beliefs we take on, how to get from A to B, our gender and name etc.

We absorb a huge amount of data regarding who we are and how we can live and maintain ourselves. All this cognitive information is clumped together and labelled as the mind. In effect, the mind doesn’t exist as a particular thing, being just the accumulation of information. I would maintain that it is from all this info and knowledge that the idea and feeling of a ‘self’ is assumed.

The self and mind then become merely conventions, useful as a shortcut to explain all our mental processes and apart from researchers and the such like, generally just accepted. Which is a shame be-cause to recognise the nature of the mind and self as merely emergent phenomenon is necessary to realise how we isolate ourselves in this cocoon of ‘me-ness’ from the rest of the world – and our-selves.

[sant64]

Can This Man PROVE That God Exists?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISUynYz93zY

[Om]

GSD should retire to a cave and just focus on asking for forgiveness till the day that he dies.