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ArgumentThe argument from misleading introspection
Nothing guarantees that introspection tells the truth about itself; and once we have explained why experience seems ineffable to us, nothing is left to explain.
Supports
Frankish · "Illusionism as a Theory of Consciousness" · 2016
- Everything we know of , those private, immediate, ineffable properties, comes from a single source, introspection: the way the brain presents its own states to itself. No outside observation attests to them.
- But that mechanism is a mechanism like any other, and we know it errs: the richness of the visual field is largely reconstructed, we confabulate after the fact the reasons for our choices, we fail to detect huge changes before our eyes. It is not a mirror, it is a summary cut out for acting fast.
- A mechanism that simplifies and errs elsewhere may also err about what it is itself: nothing compels us to treat its verdicts as infallible data, except their force of conviction, which is precisely what needs explaining.
- One question then remains, and this one is tractable: why does the brain represent its states as having ineffable properties? Answering it would account for everything there is to explain, our reports, our astonishment, even our debates, with no remainder.
Therefore So qualia are not to be explained but dissolved: what exists is a brain representing itself as having ineffable experience; what needs explaining is that representation, not its supposed object.
How far does this reasoning convince you?
What introspection misses
- We believe we see a scene sharp and coloured from one edge of our gaze to the other; in fact precision and colour hold only at the centre, and the rest is filled in. The impression of richness matches nothing in the detail of what is processed.
- Asked to explain a choice, we produce a reason without hesitation, including where the experimenter knows it is not the one that operated. The report's sincerity is no guarantee of its truth.
- If introspection is wrong about what we see and about what makes us act, why should it be infallible about the very nature of what it reports?
Therefore Privileged access to oneself is not transparent access: it is a report, produced by a device that can be studied and caught out.
How far does this reasoning convince you?
The meta-problem
- Our talk about consciousness consists of behaviours: it has physical causes, so there must be a physical explanation of what we say about the . This is what called the meta-problem, and most dualists grant it, even if they reserve a role for experience in our judgments.
- That explanation, once found, will say why it seems to us that there is ineffable experience, why it strikes us as indubitable, and why we judge that nothing physical could account for it.
- Two attitudes then become possible: to add to the world an experience that this explanation has no need of, or to acknowledge that it exhausts the phenomenon. The second does not say that nothing is lived: it says that what is lived lacks the properties we ascribe to it.
Therefore Once the meta-problem is solved, adding ineffable experience explains nothing further: parsimony leans toward the illusion.
How far does this reasoning convince you?