Reading Notes: May 2nd, 2022

“From the moment we wake we are bombarded with stimuli….But something else happens too. We have conscious experiences. We see a bright light, hear a scream, feel the roughness of a surface. There is something it is like to detect the stimuli; each experience has a distinctive qualitative aspect—a quale in philosopher’s jargon (plural qualia). Such experiences constitute what we call consciousness. But what is consciousness for? What do qualia do?” (Frankish, Consciousness is a Life-Transforming Illusion, 1)  

“Cognitive science sees the mind as a representational system….On this view, for us to be aware of anything, our brains must represent it….Even if our brain states did have qualia, our brains would have to represent these qualia in order for us to be aware of them. Unrepresented qualia would be no more to us than unheard sounds.” (Frankish, Consciousness is a Life-Affirming Illusion, 3)  

“Maybe qualia are a sort of illusion. Evolution couldn’t set it up so that brain states really have qualia, so it did the next best thing. It set things up so that they seem to have qualia when we attend to them (when we introspect). Consciousness is, as Humphrey puts it, a sort of inner magic show, in which brain states are the actors and introspection the audience.” (Frankish, Consciousness is a Life-Affirming Illusion, 3)

“Illusionists deny that experiences have phenomenal properties and focus on why they seem to have them. [Illusionists] typically allow that we are introspectively aware of our sensory states but argue that this awareness is partial and distorted, leading us to misrepresent the states as having phenomenal properties. Of course, it is essential [to the illusionist approach] that the posited introspective representations are not phenomenally conscious ones. It would be self-defeating to explain illusory phenomenal properties of experience in terms of real phenomenal properties of introspective states….[Illusionism holds] that the introspectable qualities of experience are merely quasi-phenomenal ones.” (Frankish, Illusionism as a Theory of Consciousness, 3)