The Necker Cube of Phenomenal Consciousness

For many years (from mid-2020 to mid-2024 or so?), I've held an illusionist view of consciousness that could be summarized by the following.

Claims about qualia and phenomenal consciousness (and whatever other supposed thingies defined circularly in those terms) are devoid of meaning beyond their object-level sub-claims. (E.g. "I see a red circle" is an object-level sub-claim of "I'm having a phenomenal experience/qualia of a red circle".) You say that the experience of red(ish)ness has some ineffable quality but in no way does it influence your anticipated experiences other than in the future you're going to have a disposition to say similar or analogous things in similar or analogous situtations.

The philosophical zombie thought experiment, actually illustrates (contrary to Chalmers's original intention) how empty the phenomenal-consciousness-talk actually is. If I built a robot with exactly the same cognitive capacities as a human but also with a switch that determines whether it engages in a "simulated" phenomenal-consciousness-talk, you would not be able to make an argument against it having phenomenal consciousness without referring to your dubious beliefs in having these magical internal experiences or some neural/psychological/structural correlates thereof, which are dubious too, as they are derived from your aforementioned dubious beliefs.

I was pretty inside-view-convinced of this perspective, but at the same time (as far as I remember) felt some kind of tension with my … well, ironically, lived internal/phenomenal experience. But any way to verbalize/articulate this tension fell flat because the foundation of the llusionist frame is that it doesn't consider internal/phenomenal experience valid evidence.

I started questioning this view when I read Terrence Deacon's book Incomplete Nature. Not that it gave me any good object-level argument against illusionism. As I just said, any such argument (even if, in some sense, "good") would have fallen flat on my illusionism. Instead, Incomplete Nature had a recurrent theme that was something like "People deny stuff that is obvious because they can't make sense of it in the limited framework that they've adopted.". This is what effectively put a crack in my firm illusionism and led me down the route of thinking in a more open-minded way.1 I started re-examining my "inner experience" without [rejecting it just because I couldn't make any sense of it within my current framework]. I let myself treat it as a butterfly idea, still too immature and in a phase of early exploration/growth to be subjected to intense scrutiny. Perhaps in combination with the question of the core of mindness, this made me think that perhaps I had been privileging the objectively defensible/legibilizable kind of information over more private kind of information, even though (from my subjective perspective), the former always necessarily routes through the latter.2

And so now I have a very unstable view about phenomenal consciousness and I feel like perspective is flickering like the Necker cube between (1) illusionism, (2) phenomenal-experience-first-ism, (3) some superposition of the two which is probably the closest to the truth but currently hard to make sense of. (This has also led me down the road of some forms of medium-strength non-reductionism.)

Footnotes

  1. In hindsight though, perhaps the apparent isomorphism (or at least a kind of "structural similarity") of (some versions of) panpsychism and illusionism should have made me more doubtful earlier. I was actually leaning panpsychist before I realized that it's equivalent to illusionism under relabeling. ↩

  2. For related points, see Limits to Legibility and Don’t ignore bad vibes you get from people. ↩