1. Introduction

Unicorns are perfectly good mythical beasts – horses with a nice sharp spiraled horn – often brought up to illustrate the thesis that propositions can refer to things that don’t exist. Unicorns are the non-existent (on Earth at any rate) intentional object of beliefs, thoughts, statements, and other expressions of propositions referring to them. An occurrent thought you might entertain about unicorns, for example that they have horns, is a real, albeit transient bit of conscious content that partially constitutes your conscious experience as it occurs. The thought might present itself as an internal sub-vocally (silent) spoken sentence “Unicorns have horns” or as a visual image of the horned horse, or perhaps in terms of some other format. Such a conscious episode is real enough, as is perhaps (depending on your conception of what’s real) the proposition involving the concept unicorn, even though what’s referred to by that concept doesn’t exist.

Some theorists about consciousness, the illusionists, hold that qualia are like unicorns in that they don’t exist, and for essentially the same reason, to be explained below. By “qualia” I mean experiential qualities like pain or redness or sweetness that have a particular character or feel by which we recognize them. For now, please bracket any philosophical views you might have about their nature or how to characterize qualia, e.g., that they’re necessarily non-physical/physical, intrinsic/relational, ineffable/effable, or private/public. I simply mean to refer to experiential qualities prior to any theoretical commitments you might harbor. If you think the term “qualia” as a philosophical term of art necessarily refers to something intrinsic, private, ineffable, and therefore non-physical, then substitute “quality” for “qualia” in what follows. Illusionist Keith Frankish (2016), whose reactivity schema theory I will focus on below, adverts to “introspective qualitative properties,” the “quality of experience” and “intrinsic quality” as being illusory.  Some philosophers, e.g., “qualia quietist” Pete Mandik (Mandik 2016), might argue there’s not even any pre-philosophical concept of quality to be consulted, but standard dictionary definitions of “quality” don’t obviously invoke any deep metaphysical distinctions, at least that I can detect.[1] Eric Schwitzgebel (2020) argues that there’s a metaphysically innocent (“uninflated”) notion of qualitative conscious experience (phenomenality) we can agree exists. Leaving that debate for another day, in what follows you can always substitute “qualities” for “qualia,” and I will use both terms interchangeably. Illusionists can substitute “seeming quality” for “quality” if they like.

In the next section (2) I’ll describe what I take to be the basic illusionist claim about phenomenal consciousness: that the belief we have qualities in experience is false, a mistaken application of a concept that has no real-world referent. I’ll then argue in section 3 that thinking about and communicating concepts requires the deployment of a non-conceptual format, and that sensory qualities are the obvious candidate to play this role. In section 4, I suggest that in denying that experience has any qualitative aspect, illusionists must come up with a non-qualitative alternative format, but when we consult our experience there seems no such alternative. In section 5, I take up Keith Frankish’s reactivity schema theory which, although intended to explain why qualia are illusory, ends up supplying a possible explanation of why qualitative non-conceptual content appears in consciousness. Frankish discounts that appearance as illusory, which I suggest in section 6 might be due to a commitment to physicalism as a metaphysics. I conclude that when investigating the nature of consciousness – phenomenal, quality-laden experience being the main explanatory target – we should remain metaphysically agnostic.

2. The purported illusion of phenomenality

Illusionists such as Daniel Dennett (Dennett, 2016, 2017), Keith Frankish (Frankish 2016, 2020, 2023), and Francois Kammerer (Kammerer 2023) submit that qualia, for example the felt quality of a searing pain, are illusions. As Frankish (2020) puts it “Introspection, illusionists claim, [produces] a raft of psychological effects which leave us convinced that we are acquainted with a private world of mysterious mental qualities.” Such qualities are the non-existent intentional objects of mistaken beliefs about them, in particular the belief that such qualities populate our conscious experience. It might seem to you that pain involves a distinctly phenomenal property, that it has a certain qualitative feel to it, a particular subjective character. But this, they claim, is a non-veridical judgment that such a property exists, just as if you entertained the (false) belief that unicorns exist on Earth. All that’s really going on when you feel a searing in pain are neural processes and physically instantiated psychological reactions, some of which produce the “user illusion” of there being a qualitative “what it’s like” aspect of pain – its feel. Here’s Dennett making this point in the context of having an afterimage of a red stripe (his italics, my underlining):

Qualia are supposed to be somehow the internal subjective properties that we are acquainted with more directly, when we are slightly less acquainted with their normal external causes – real red stripes, and so on in the world. When you make this move, you are positing an internal cause that has the same properties as the intentional objects that normally cause your perceptual beliefs – except that these are private, subjective versions, somehow, of the public, objective properties of redness and so forth. But once you realize that the intentional objects of mistaken beliefs simply don’t exist, anywhere, you have no need in your theory or conjecture for weird internal something-or-others with mysterious properties…So when you see a red stripe when there is no red stripe in the world as its source, there need be no other thing (made of red figment) that is the “real seeming” you take yourself to be experiencing.  Dennett 2017, 360-1.

This passage illustrates the illusionist equivalence of qualia (in this instance the redness of red) and unicorns: both are the non-existent intentional objects of false beliefs. It’s this equivalence I want to challenge, and in doing so make a case against illusionism and for phenomenal realism. Unicorns obviously aren’t among the literal contents of consciousness (that would be weird) but qualities, I will argue, literally are. They aren’t concepts that we misapply in supposing we’re phenomenally conscious but the concrete, directly present, subjectively unmediated non-conceptual format in which concepts themselves are communicated (next section). The cause of the afterimage is some neural goings-on, but its red qualitative character is not an illusion, rather a real constituent of one’s experience. Its precise nature is an open question in the study of consciousness.[2]

3. Conceptual vs. non-conceptual content

As noted in the introduction, in entertaining a thought about unicorns you as a conscious subject undergo a specific, transient experience. This contrasts with any beliefs you might have about them, for instance that they don’t exist. Beliefs might be characterized as latent dispositions to assert a proposition, and although they sometimes get expressed in conscious episodes such as thoughts or verbal reports, such expression isn’t needed to hold them. But occurrent thoughts about a unicorn, e.g., a sub-vocal speech act or a visual presentation in one’s imagination, or the experience of looking at a picture of one, are all conscious episodes with specific qualitative features involving the sensory formats in question. Sub-vocal episodes when thinking about unicorns involve the auditory qualities of the phonemes of the language used (“unicorn” being approximately the sounds when saying aloud in English the words “you,” “knee,” and “corn”), and imagining, say, a red unicorn with a white horn involves shapes defined by color qualities.[3] I’ll proceed on the assumption that most readers are familiar with thoughts as conscious episodes that, whatever their propositional and conceptual content, are couched in qualities (illusionists: seeming qualities) that rapidly succeed themselves in one’s consciousness as the thought occurs. They are evanescent but nevertheless real conscious episodes.

It appears, therefore, that there are at least two sorts of content in play when thinking about unicorns: conceptual and propositional content, e.g., that they are mythical beasts with horns, and the occurrent qualitative content of the format in which the conscious episode transpires. The latter seems non-conceptual and non-propositional, not involving any sort of intentional content even though it participates in a paradigmatically intentional context, that of having a thought about unicorns.[4] If your thought is one of visually imagining a red unicorn, then the quality red, however vague and fleeting, is a conscious feature of the thought that, unlike the unicorn, exists for you as long as it lasts. You can of course also deploy the concept red, but that abstraction refers to the quality and is not itself qualitative, albeit transmitted in non-conceptual qualitative terms, e.g., the sound when saying “red”.[5]

4. The non-conceptual content challenge for illusionism

In denying that qualities exist in conscious experience, illusionists are faced with the problem of how to distinguish these two sorts of content. The unique qualitative character of red in a conscious episode, they claim, is like the unicorn: something you mistakenly believe exists but does not. It’s therefore something akin to intentional content, the non-existent intentional object of a mistaken belief that the quality redness exists. On illusionism, the apparent phenomenal character of red is the conclusion of a judgment deploying a concept that has no real-world referent, just as the concept of a unicorn has none. It is deployed in believing, falsely, that the quality of red is present in one’s experience. Supposing – believing, judging – that there are qualities in experience is on the same footing as having the false belief that unicorns exist somewhere on Earth. On illusionism both involve the deployment of a concept.

However, as suggested above, in deploying concepts in propositions, whether in thought, overt speech, text, or other media, there’s always a non-conceptual format in terms of which the proposition appears or is presented, or at least it very much seems that way. If not in terms of the non-conceptual content of the various formats that involve our sensory channels (visual, auditory, tactile, etc.)  and expressive capacities (voice, gestures, writing, etc.), how are propositions and concepts thought about or communicated? They are abstracta that only get expressed by using a multitude of more or less arbitrary sounds and symbols – the concreta of human language. There has to be some non-conceptual format with which to think, visualize, speak, write, or otherwise engage with concepts, and in the human case it is sensory qualities that are the media that support their expression: for an English speaker the sonically (but not semantically) arbitrary combination of the sounds “you – knee – corn” communicates the concept of a horse with one horn using the vocal-auditory channel.

The question then is this. If, as illusionists claim, what we take as qualitative red is akin to applying a concept in making a judgment, one that we mistakenly apply in supposing the quality red appears in experience, in terms of what non-conceptual format does that concept present itself? If formats are non-conceptual, then the illusionist needs to have some account of how the concept red, when communicated or thought about, is formatted in a way that isn’t itself conceptual. On illusionism the format can’t be qualitative since the illusionist denies the existence of qualities in experience. But absent qualities, there seems no obvious candidate that we can identify in conscious experience to play such a role; rather, and to state the obvious, red simply presents itself in experience as non-conceptual and qualitative, not as a concept, and there is no consciously available sub-format in terms of which it appears. The upshot is that under illusionism we are at a loss to say how concepts and propositions are deployed in conscious episodes. If, as illusionists claim, the apparently qualitative sounds “you – knee – corn” too involve nothing qualitative but rather the application of concepts in making judgments, then it seems that on illusionism all we have in consciousness are judgments and their attendant concepts, with some deceiving us into supposing there exists non-conceptual conscious content that presents itself as sensory qualities.

But again, when speaking or in having sub-vocally expressed thoughts, we don’t deploy phonemes as concepts but as the non-conceptual vocal-auditory vehicles with which concepts are communicated. Likewise, when dreaming about a red unicorn we’re not deploying the quality of redness as a concept; rather, it non-conceptually participates in how the unicorn appears in the dream experience. There’s no way around the need for non-conceptual content as the vehicle for communicating concepts, in which case the illusionists need something to play that role. Since they’ve ruled out sensory qualities, what can take their place as the non-conceptual format in which concepts and propositions get expressed, in particular the proposition expressing the belief that qualia exist?

5. The appearance of phenomenal character: the reactivity schema theory

On illusionism as presented by Frankish (2016, 2020, 2023), the belief that qualia exist – phenomenal realism in a strong sense – can involve the concept of a quale (quality) as a non-physical, private, intrinsic mental essence or feel presented to an internal subject, e.g., a homunculus sitting in Dennett’s Cartesian Theater, who alone has access to it. Introspective mechanisms mislead us into judging that experiences have such properties, when in fact they are a host of neurally instantiated (thus physical) psychological reactions, none of which involve anything qualitative or essentially private. The concept of a quale is thus a bit of faulty dualistic metaphysics, of believing that redness can’t just be these physical reactions. That our experience of red seems nothing like such reactions naturally contributes to such a judgment (see Papineau 2003 on this).

The difficulty here is that since we obviously don’t have conscious access to the physical goings-on that constitute the reactions, illusionists have to specify what we do have access to in experience that would lead us to adopt a faulty (on their view) metaphysics and then mistakenly apply the concept of non-physical qualia in characterizing consciousness. What on their account is directly and unmediatedly present for us in having experiences? According to Frankish’s recently proposed reactivity schema theory, introspection produces a vastly simplified model of the reactions that make up experiences, and it’s this model which induces the false belief in qualia. The model’s schematic information is made available to higher level cognitive processes such that we can reflect on our experiences and thus make judgments about them. The model is not itself a concept but that which induces (generates) the formation of the concept of non-physical mental qualities available only to the subject. But how is that concept arrived at? It would seem that the model’s content would have to be present in consciousness and it’s this, according to illusionism, that we’d mistakenly judge to be non-physical, thus applying a dualistic concept of qualia.

This in fact is how Frankish describes the situation. In a recent talk on reactivity schema theory, Frankish says (1:28:00) “The schema presents experience as an abstract pattern, an essence of significance, a pure feel.” This seems perilously close to how one would describe a basic quality (quale): as having an ineffable phenomenal character. Indeed, as he puts it a bit later: “I can’t tell you anything about it because it’s got no structure available to me… I can make comparisons and evaluations; we might say it’s a pure, ineffable feel that I’m acquainted with…” These remarks convey his considered judgment about how experience presents itself: as being like a feel. But Frankish immediately discounts that judgment as faulty: “But there’s no feel there, no quale, only a pattern of reactions that are schematically modeled that produces judgments about them which I express in the only way I can: it’s got this feel, hence the illusion of phenomenal consciousness.”

6. Physicalism as a possible driver of illusionism

Frankish, if I’ve understood him correctly, concedes the reality of the appearance in experience of what looks to be a phenomenal feel – a structureless, hence ineffable, quality. The reactivity schema theory has it that this appearance is the non-conceptual content of the schematic model of reactivity as delivered to higher level cognitive processes. And this appearance, says Frankish, then generates the false judgment involving the conceptual content that we have feels in consciousness, where feels are conceptualized as non-physical.

But nothing in Frankish’s account of the appearance of the content of the reactivity schema – that it presents itself like a quality, something with an unstructured essential character – requires us to judge that appearance as being either illusory or non-physical. Why might a philosopher make that judgment? One possibility is that they are committed to a physicalist metaphysics: since qualitative character is on the face of it difficult to physicalize (Kim 2005) we must discount the qualitative aspect of the appearances as illusory. Frankish (2016) says

The central problem, of course, is that phenomenal properties seem too weird to yield to physical explanation. They resist functional analysis and float free of whatever physical mechanisms are posited to explain them.

But Frankish has granted that the appearance itself is perfectly real: non-conceptual content present in experience delivered by the reactivity schema; and he has granted that it really seems qualitative, that is, non-structural. Nothing about being non-structural necessarily implies anti-physicalism such that physicalists must deny the non-structural (qualitative) character of appearances itself as illusory, weird though it might be. It’s only the judgment that such character must be non-physical that they need deny. As noted above, it’s perhaps understandable that such content might generate the intuition of its being non-physical, but that doesn’t impugn the non-conceptual reality of the appearance; a commitment to physicalism needn’t require us to discount it or its qualitative character as illusory. Rather, its metaphysical status is an open question, to be answered by a settled theory of consciousness (see note 2), but not, I think, its very existence. And indeed, many philosophers of the physicalist persuasion are phenomenal realists, not illusionists, e.g., Byrne (2001), Papineau (2014), and Tye (2014).

7. Conclusion

I hope to have shown that reactivity schema theory, proffered as an account of why we mistakenly judge ourselves to be phenomenally conscious, needn’t require us to make that judgment and indeed might help explain the appearance of qualities in consciousness. Such qualities – visual, auditory, tactile – can (and do) function as the non-conceptual format in which concepts and propositions are thought about and communicated. That illusionists such as Frankish might discount the reality of qualities due to their commitment to physicalism is the equal and opposite mistake illusionists sometime attribute to dualists: that their fear of physicalist disenchantment of consciousness drives their anti-physicalist intuitions about qualia. As Dennett puts it

We want our minds to be “inspired” and “uncanny,” and we tend to view attempts to dissect these, our most precious gifts, as impertinent assaults (and philistine to boot). “Anybody who is foolish enough to think our minds are all just so much neural machinery must have a pathetically impoverished acquaintance with the magic of our minds!” Dennett 2017, p. 318. (original emphasis)

Dualists, Dennett says, want to keep consciousness safe from physicalist reduction.  Illusionists, it seems to me, might want to keep physicalism safe from qualities. Both stances derive from metaphysical commitments that are neither here nor there when investigating the nature of consciousness using science kept honest by philosophy.

Unicorns are mythical beasts about which we form beliefs, none of which refer to anything real on Earth. Qualia, the qualities that characterize sensory experience are, I suggest, real, non-conceptual contents of consciousness about which we form beliefs involving concepts, e.g., that they might be non-physical. Illusionists, usually in the physicalist camp, claim, mistakenly in my view, that they don’t exist, even as they adduce some interesting hypotheses about how they manifest themselves in consciousness. As the investigation of consciousness proceeds, we should remain metaphysically agnostic about the main explanatory target – phenomenal experience – until such time as it gets explained.

Tom Clark, August 2024

 

References
 

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Clark, T.W. (2019) Locating consciousness: why experience can’t be objectified. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 26 (11-12):60-85.

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Notes