Being You: A New Science of Consciousness

by Anil Seth

There is one more ‘ism’ which deserves mention, though it is a more informal ‘ism’ than those discussed in the main text. Illusionism is the view that (phenomenal) consciousness is an introspective illusion – that when we introspect about conscious states we misrepresent them as having phenomenal properties – qualia – that in fact they do not have. On one reading, which I disagree with, illusionism says that conscious states do not really exist. On another, which I am more sympathetic to, illusionism says that conscious experiences exist but are not what we think they are. It is possible, though not clear, that this reading of illusionism is compatible with what I will say in this book. For more on illusionism see Frankish (2017).