Why are Consciousness Researchers So Resistant to Illusionism?

Introduction

Most consciousness researchers are “realists”. They believe consciousness has special “subjective character”, “what-it-is-likeness”, “phenomenal qualities”, etc. and explaining these qualities, i.e., why and how they arise from the neural processing, poses a very hard problem, maybe the hardest in all of science.

Illusionists, on the other hand, do not believe there exists any “subjective character”, “phenomenality”, etc., that needs to be explained, and, as a consequence, there is no hard problem of consciousness. Illusionism has received increased attention by philosophers and scientists over the last decade, but illusionists are still in the minority. Most consciousness researchers do not find illusionism plausible, and many even find it to be absurd.

Why aren’t more consciousness researchers sympathetic to illusionism? This is a question some illusionists are asking themselves. I ask myself the same question, since I, over the last few years, have become increasingly confident illusionists are right. Though I am not a consciousness researcher, I did closely study the philosophy and science of consciousness as an undergraduate and master’s student, and wrote a master’s thesis on the subject.

Those of us confident in the illusionist view must ask ourselves, is the majority opinion of consciousness experts a good truth-tracking statistic, in which case illusionists, like myself, are likely wrong? Or might there be some other reason(s) for the field’s resistance to illusionism, that is independent of illusionism’s plausibility?

Illusionists have argued previously that people naturally have anti-illusionist intuitions (e.g., see this from Francois Kammerer). It is very common for people to find illusionism to be, not only implausible, but absurd, suggesting there is a natural psychological anti-illusionist intuition. Philosophers like Keith Frankish have suggested this may be why illusionists are still a minority among consciousness researchers.

I believe this is at least part of the explanation. However, I think illusionists need more than this. One can still ask the question, even if people do have natural, anti-illusionist intuitions, why are consciousness researchers failing to override these intuitions with reason (i.e., with philosophical argumentation in support of illusionism)? Presumably scientists and philosophers are precisely the one’s who are best trained to follow reason (i.e., rational argument and the scientific method) wherever it goes, even if it leads to unintuitive or surprising conclusions. So why should we really think scientists and philosophers are so influenced by such naive intuitions?

I want to suggest the following hypothesis: if people have anti-illusionist intuitions, then these intuitions are likely to be unusually strong among consciousness researchers relative to other researchers. This may help form an explanation for why it is consciousness researchers are so influenced by their pre-philosophical intuitions. It also motivates more empirical analysis of our natural intuitions among researchers who do not specialize in consciousness research.

The Meta-Problem of Consciousness

Before explaining this view, we need to discuss some terms. The meta-problem is the problem of providing cognitive-neural explanations of why people tend to think there is a hard problem. More specifically, it is the problem of explaining problem intuitions. Problem intuitions are people’s tendencies to judge consciousness has certain mysterious/problematic properties. For example, explanatory intuitions are tendencies to judge there exists an explanatory gap between consciousness and physical-functional descriptions of the brain. Metaphysical intuitions are tendencies to judge consciousness has non-physical properties. Knowledge intuitions are tendencies to judge we have some special first-person knowledge of our own experiences and their subjective character. And so on.

Anti-Illusionist Intuitions: A Psychological Explanation

Several Illusionists (e.g., here) have previously argued that a problem intuition that needs explaining is the common intuition that illusionism is false. It is quite natural for most studying the philosophy and science of consciousness to find illusionism unpalatable, at best, and outright absurd at worst. And this intuition is present prior to hearing any of the philosophical arguments for or against illusionism, i.e., it is a naive, pre-philosophical intuition present upon hearing a description of the illusionist view. This does not mean it is wrong, just that it is not a result of considering philosophical arguments against illusionism. People just naturally feel the view is implausible, even prior to philosophical analysis. Philosophers like Frankish have suggested this intuition may be the reason consciousness researchers are, like most people, so resistant to illusionism: consciousness researchers, like most, will have this intuition and this biases their views and research against illusionism.

The Sampling Bias Hypothesis

I find the idea that people have natural, anti-illusionist intuitions plausible.

However, I believe there is additional a kind of selection bias in the population of consciousness researchers, i.e., consciousness researchers tend to have unusually strong anti-illusionist intuitions.

Here’s the basic argument:

1. People naturally have anti-illusionist intuitions, which are independent of illusionism’s philosophical merits (i.e., they are pre-philosophical, naive intuitions).
2. How much these anti-illusionist intuitions actually bias a researcher’s beliefs depends on the strength of the intuition: stronger the intuition the more probable and significant its effects.
3. Consciousness researchers have unusually strong anti-illusionist intuitions relative to the general population of researchers.
4. Consciousness researchers have an unusually strong bias against illusionism and this bias is independent of illusionism’s philosophical merit.

Proposition 4 follows from premises 1-3. I think premises 1-3 are quite plausible. Let’s consider each in turn.

Premise 1: People naturally have anti-illusionist intuitions, which are independent of illusionism’s philosophical merits (i.e., they are pre-philosophical, naive intuitions). This should not be controversial. First off, by ‘pre-philosophical’ anti-illusionist intuitions I just mean intuitions that exist prior to hearing the arguments against illusionism. I think it is fairly uncontroversial such intuitions exist given that is quite common for scientists and philosophers to immediately find illusionism absurd. Common arguments against illusionism often just begin with its general description and conclude it is just obvious such a view cannot be right, often on the basis of the common epistemic belief that “if we know anything it is that we are conscious”.

Premise 2: How much these anti-illusionist intuitions actually bias a researcher’s beliefs depends on the strength of the intuition: stronger the intuition the more probable and significant its effects. This premise is essentially true by definition. If we have a tendency to believe idea X is false, then by definition there is significant probability we will form the belief that X is false. A strong intuition that X is false essentially just means a strong probability one forms the belief X is false.

Premise 3: Consciousness researchers have unusually strong anti-illusionist intuitions relative to the general population of researchers. This premise is less obvious and more complex. Why should we believe consciousness researchers have unusually strong anti-illusionist intuitions relative to the general population of researchers?

This is an empirical claim and my evidence is admittedly anecdotal, but I think many others in the field will have had a similar experience. As a student, I seriously considered pursuing a career as a consciousness researcher. I quickly found there are not many jobs for consciousness researchers, to say the least, in both philosophy (whose job market is already abysmal) and science. Further, there is still some stigma (though not a strong as it once was) around researching consciousness, especially in the sciences, which could limit one’s career prospects even if one is lucky enough to find a job where they can investigate consciousness.

Given this situation, why would anyone try to become a consciousness researcher? When it comes to practical concerns, there are basically no reasons to pursue a career as a consciousness researcher and many reasons not to. Thus, there must be some other factor(s) motivating such people to do so.

As a student, I studied in multiple philosophy departments with other students and philosophers working on consciousness, and in UC Irvine’s cognitive science department, which is known to have an unusually large community of consciousness researchers. My experience talking to such researchers strongly suggests to me that these researchers are motivated by an unusual fascination with consciousness, so significant that their fascination outweighs the practical concerns that come with pursuing such a career. This makes sense. If one was not totally taken and fascinated with consciousness there would be little reason to pursue a career as a consciousness researcher.

Where does this unusually strong fascination originate? Why is consciousness so interesting to these people? Consciousness is interesting for multiple reasons. It, for example, is closely tied to moral theory, i.e., an agent’s ability to experience conscious states like pain are important for judging their moral status. Consciousness is also tied to ideas related to meaning: what, after all, is the point of life without first-person experience?

However, what makes consciousness unique relative to every other natural phenomena is its difficulty to explain: the hard problem of consciousness is often said to be the hardest problem in all of science. This sense of mystery is what got me so obsessed with consciousness, and my sense talking to other consciousness researchers was that it too was what made them obsessed. It is the deep mystery around consciousness that makes consciousness unique. It is what fills people like myself with a sense of wonder when thinking about consciousness. It is the reason people like myself get hooked on the subject and make risky career decisions to study it.

Notice, there is another way to describe this natural fascination with the deep mystery of consciousness: having a strong intuition/feeling that explaining consciousness is unusually difficult, and this is equivalent to having strong problem intuitions. Problems intuitions are those tendencies related to judging there is a hard problem of consciousness (see Chalmers original paper). Thus, having strong problem intuitions, put simply, just means having a strong sense there is a hard problem of consciousness. And thus, another way to say what I have just argued is that having strong problem intuitions is what drove many consciousness researchers to be fascinated with consciousness and to decide to go into consciousness research.

Now, if one has strong problem intuitions, this would also entail one has strong anti-illusionist intuitions. For example, having strong knowledge intuitions means have a strong sense that one has special knowledge of their own conscious experience, including its subjective character, etc. This entails premise 3: typically, one does not become a consciousness researcher unless one has unusually strong problem intuitions in the first place. Having strong problem intuitions, like knowledge intuitions, also means having strong anti-illusionist intuitions. Thus, consciousness researchers should be expected to have unusually strong anti-illusionist intuitions relative to the general population of researchers.

The result is that consciousness researchers will be much more influenced by their intuitions than the rest of the population of researchers, and they will be influenced in the direction of believing conscious is deeply mysterious and that views that contradict this, like illusionism, are false.

Now this argument does not necessarily mean realists are wrong, but it does raise the question of whether the popularity of realism is actually based on its philosophical plausibility rather than some naive and unusual intuitions held among consciousness researchers.

Conclusion

Much of this argument for proposition 3 is based on anecdotal data, i.e., my experience talking to graduate students, philosophers, and scientists working on consciousness. I think this anecdotal data is significant enough to justify proposing the hypothesis, but, of course, more empirical testing , possibly through surveys, will of course need to be done to determine how plausible it really is. I would love to see such testing.

An interesting implication of my argument, is that researchers who focus their research on topics other than consciousness, should naturally have less strong anti-illusionist intuitions than consciousness researchers. In my experience, there is plausibility to this implication as well. I find that neuroscientists and AI researchers, that do not work on consciousness, in particular, are much more likely to view the mind through an objective, mechanistic lens than a subjective, experience based one. The objective, mechanistic lens is much more conducive to the illusionist view: according to the illusionists, once we have a nice mechanistic explanation of why we think there is a hard problem we are done. No hard problem exists, so we only need to explain why we think one exists. One key example of an illusionist sympathizer in this community is Turing award winner and Nobel Laureate Geoffrey Hinton, who has explicitly stated his sympathies with illusionist thinking.

Whatever the case, I believe the arguments presented here and those previously by illusionists suggest that consciousness researchers should do a bit of honest self-study. Why do they find illusionism so unpalatable? Is it really due to good philosophical argument against the illusionist position? Or is it due largely naive, pre-philosophical, anti-illusionist intuitions that are unusually strong among consciousness researchers?