Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind

by Annaka Harris

Some philosophers go so far as to suggest that there isn’t a hard problem of consciousness at all, reducing consciousness to an illusion. But as others have pointed out, consciousness is the one thing that can’t be an illusion—by definition. An illusion can appear within consciousness, but you are either experiencing something or you’re not—consciousness is necessary for an illusion to take place. In his essay “The Consciousness Deniers,” the British analytic philosopher Galen Strawson analyzes this view of consciousness-as-illusion and expresses exasperation with the utter incoherence of the idea: “How could anybody have been led to something so silly as to deny the existence of conscious experience, the only general thing we know for certain exists?”