Introspection and Consciousness: The Illusionism Debate |
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Why does consciousness exist? This question lies at the heart of my book, A Philosophy for the Science of Animal Consciousness, in which I argue that consciousness evolved to help animals navigate difficult trade-offs in decision-making.
Recently, the journal Adaptive Behavior featured nine articles by scientists and philosophers on my book, along with my replies. In my previous post, I summarized my response to Christian de Weerd, who denied that a Darwinian approach to consciousness is even possible. I argued that consciousness science has unnecessarily insulated itself from the evolutionary tools that revolutionized our understanding of every other biological phenomenon, and that treating human consciousness as the paradigm case distorts our picture of consciousness as a natural phenomenon spanning millions of species across millions of years.
Today, I turn to a different kind of challenge. The philosopher Keith Frankish, one of the most influential defenders of illusionism alongside Daniel Dennett (the author of Consciousness Explained), thinks I remain caught in the webs of an old but dominant tradition in thinking about consciousness and asks me to fully cut my ties to it. He worries that phrases I use in my book, such as “commanding sensations” and “imperative feelings,” smuggle in a mistaken assumption: that consciousness involves private, intrinsically........