Are Feels Real? Reflections on Frankish's Illusionism
Keith Frankish is perhaps the best known proponent of illusionism as a theory of consciousness, which he describes in two 2022 papers published in Human Affairs. Here I take up the question of whether on illusionism we can still legitimately talk of how experiences feel, and suggest the anwswer is no. Should illusionism carry the day as the settled account of consciousness, then talk of experiential feels, as in how pain feels, is in error. But Frankish himself declares feels to be real, so something has to give. <