Here it is, our regular Friday diet of suggested readings for the weekend:
Is consciousness an illusion? I always thought that’s a very bizarre idea, and there is no good reason to believe it.
Why we believe obvious untruths (and we can hardly do much about it).
Turns out, there is more than one way to destroy democracy. Hitler tried two, and it worked the second time.
How to find meaning in the face of death: community, having goals, coherent self narrative.
If you want to read just one essay on the perils of “political correctness,” this ought to be the one.
Why the free will problem isn’t one.
Making (ancient) Athens great again — the parallels with modern America.
Footnotes to Plato 
Hi Massimo,
I think this idea is misunderstood. Since you think the idea is so bizarre, I’ll try once more to explain it, at least how I interpret it.
I take it that the problem is that this is supposed to be an oxymoron — that in order for something to be an illusion, it must first be perceived by a conscious mind.
But I don’t think the idea is oxymoronic at all. Indeed there are three distinct but mutually-supporting ways to make sense of this idea.
First, the idea that there is a hard problem to explain — that there has to be something missing in the idea that to be conscious is just to be a machine built to process information the way our brains do — this idea is an illusion. I gather you agree with this much.
There is also an illusion in how our consciousness represents itself to itself. We are not aware of our neurons firing and other low level details of how we process information. Our brains create a model not only of our environment but of our own thought processes — and this model is simplified and inaccurate. It is, as Dennett says, a “user illusion”. Many of the supposed problems of consciousness arise out of this user illusion and the mismatch we perceive between what the operation of the brain looks like when we introspect and what it looks like when we adopt a third person perspective, e.g. looking at fMRI scans etc.
But finally, I would take issue with the notion that illusion necessarily presupposes consciousness. Of course I accept that this is your view, and Dan’s view, and perhaps the view of most people on this forum, but the contrary view (i.e. Dennett’s) is not an oxymoron. Just as Dennett would view the mechanical information processing of autonomous agents such as robots as a precursor to consciousness, he would view mistakes in interpretation committed by such an agent as precursors to illusion. For instance, a robot may not perceive a glass wall as an obstacle but as an open space and so drive headlong into it — and when I say “perceive”, once more I am not presupposing consciousness but simply speaking of how the robot treats its sensory input in its internal model of the world and so determines how to behave. Similarly it may perceive itself in a mirror as a distinct robot and so attempt to signal to it.
In Dennett’s view and in my own, these misinterpretations by the robot are illusions or at least proto-illusions. You may disagree with this (and I expect you will), but I don’t think it’s fair to say this view is oxymoronic. The view goes on to suppose that we are essentially just more complex robots who are under an illusion that there is something mysterious about our consicousness that cannot be explained simply with reference to how we process information. This illusion has other manifestations too. We think we experience qualia that have ineffable properties which cannot be articulated and invent thought experiments involving inverted qualia to attempt to explain our misguided intuitions.
It is not that we are not conscious — we are indeed conscious, but to be conscious in the way a human is conscious is just to be a complex agent under this sort of illusion.
I’m not trying to convince anyone that Dennett is right. That is never going to happen. But I hope I might convince a few that the idea is not bizarre, contradictory or nonsensical.
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I think certain aspects of consciousness may be to some degree a user illusion, but I don’t go nearly as far as Dennett. His idea also suffers from the problem that it ignores animal consciousness, the evolution of consciousness and the fact that, thus, it’s on a sliding scale, not an on/off switch.
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Given that Goldstein starts by ignoring Socrates’ support for the two coups against democracy, leaving her essay not a lot better than her Googleplex book, I’m not impressed by that Atlantic piece. Nor am I impressed by her literary analysis of how Plato used Socrates, near the end.
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Hi Socratic,
Really? I don’t think that’s right! I’m sorry, but this comment really seems to come from a place of ignorance of Dennett’s work. I gather that he topic of his latest book (I am yet to read it) is just this — how consciousness evolved and how it is a sliding scale, not an on/off switch.
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Hi DM,
Sorry, you have failed to convince me the idea is not bizarre, contradictory and nonsensical.
Yes, a non conscious robot can have illusions. A Tesla self driving car can see grey sky where there is really a white van and kill its driver.
That makes the case worse for Dennett. All the kinds of illusion he is talking about don’t require consciousness any more than the Tesla needed to be conscious of the colour of the sky, so nothing he says really touches on consciousness.
If there was an illusion of consciousness, that ‘illusion’ would be what we call consciousness.
I can’t have the illusion of feeling pain. You can’t say that I am not really feeling pain, that my brain has simplified the neural activity and presented it to me as the illusion of pain, because when I say ‘pain’ that ‘illusion’ is exactly what I am referring to.
And you can’t say that pain is ‘not what it seems’, because pain is exactly what it seems. Because the word is referring to what pain seems to be and not to anything else.
Also, when I hit my thumb really hard with a hammer or get my finger caught between the door and the jamb I have a really good idea of the difference between first person and second person experience.
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The word “illusion” does not real mean “not real” or “doesn’t exist”, it means “different from how its superficial appearance might suggest”. [OED: “An instance of a wrong or misinterpreted perception of a sensory experience”, “A deceptive appearance or impression”.] I’d suggest that consciousness is almost certainly an “illusion” in that sense. Indeed things like Libet experiments show that at least some aspects of consciousness are illusory.
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With the ‘meaning’ article, it is all lost on me. I don’t find any meaning in my life and don’t really care. It doesn’t depress me or send me into pits of despair. I am not sure what it even means for me or my life to have ‘meaning’.
And I am not interested, as some seem to be, in creating my own meaning. I wouldn’t know how to go about it as, again, I don’t know what it means to create meaning for myself, and I would not be gaining anything of which I feel the absence.
I remember from my teenage years reading people say that their atheism made them feel that life was ‘absurd’, but I could only think how much more absurd it would be to be creations of a God.
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DM,
Pretty much what Robin said. None of the things you list are “illusions” in any sensical understanding of the word. The fact that I’m not aware of the inner workings of my car doesn’t make my driving an illusion, for instance. And no, there simply cannot be an illusion without a conscious subject to experience it, period.
Coel,
The meaning of “illusion” is precisely “not real” or “doesn’t exist.” It is most definitely NOT “different from how it appears,” because otherwise pretty much everything, not just consciousness, is an illusion. Which means Dennett is either incorrectly using the word out of ignorance (not likely) or to make an outrageous claim that attracts attentions to his ideas but is, upon close inspection, insubstantial (which I think is exactly what’s happening).
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Hi Coel,
As I said that doesn’t really work. When I hit my thumb with a hammer, what I feel is pain. You can’t say that what I am feeling is not what it seems to be, because the ‘what it seems to be’ is exactly what I am referring to when I say ‘pain’. When I say ‘it hurts’ I am not referring to some other thing that doesn’t hurt. I am referring to the thing it seems to be – that it hurts.
Consciousness is, almost by definition, what it seems to be. When we refer to consciousness we are referring to the ‘seeming to be’.
I know some people say ‘oh, but pain is 95% anxiety’. Yes, but even knowing that I still experience it as pain. It still hurts.
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Saying that consciousness is not what it seems to be is to say that the way things seem to us is not really the way things seem to us.
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Hi Robin,
Exactly. And that is what Dennett and I are saying consciousness is.
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Nagel review is excellent. Too kind, perhaps, as the view is not just bizarre but indicates that people are suffering under a basic misunderstanding of the implications of the words they use in their own native languages. I suspect that this latter problem is due, in part, to people importing bits and pieces of technical dialects into their common thinking and speech, which can only ever produce a muddle. (I explore the weirdness of a similar sort of claim in my own piece that you linked to, for which I am grateful.)
The Nation piece is also top notch. Reminds me a lot of this piece by Frum in the Atlantic.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/03/how-to-build-an-autocracy/513872/
The piece on political correctness and the analogy with religious schools is also sharp. I like that they didn’t focus on the really egregious, obvious cases, which are too easy to lampoon and don’t really get at the problem which is the creation of a general climate in which humanistic learning cannot occur.
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DM,
“Exactly. And that is what Dennett and I are saying consciousness is.”
That sounds to me like the definition of sophistry.
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Hi Massimo,
Well, I would disagree, sort of. But that’s not such an easy analogy to work with, because the illusions are not straightforward. If you drive an automatic car, you have an illusion that accelerating and decelerating is a lot more straightforward than it actually is. You might not guess that the car is shifting gears all the time, for instance.
There are better examples from the field of Human Computer Interaction. When you drop a file into a folder, your mental model of what is happening bears very little relation to what is actually happening in the file system. It seems like you’re moving a document from one physical location to another, but what is really happening is just that an index in a file registry is being altered.
Oh, well I guess if you say “period” that settles it!
What you may not realise is that this is in some respects a semantic disagreement. To you, the word “illusion” presupposes consciousness. To Dennett, it doesn’t. An unconscious robot can have an illusion in Dennett’s language — and that illusion is just the kind of thing I described. You may not agree with this use of language, but if this is just semantic disagreement you can’t really say Dennett is wrong. Hence Dennett’s idea is not bizarre if you understand him correctly.
You are clearly mistaken here.
Oxford English Dictionary a good enough source for you?
illusion
NOUN
An instance of a wrong or misinterpreted perception of a sensory experience.
‘stripes embellish the surface to create the illusion of various wood-grain textures’
1.1 A deceptive appearance or impression.
‘the illusion of family togetherness’
More example sentencesSynonyms
1.2 A false idea or belief.
‘he had no illusions about the trouble she was in’
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Too bad that people who claim illusions are not what illusions actually are (or should that be “actually are not”?) are not themselves illusions, eh?
I love going “meta.”
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DM,
Cute, but no, obviously something isn’t settled just because I say “period.” That simply indicated that I have no patiente for going over the same points over and over with you, Coel, and so on. So this is going to be my last comment on the matter.
And as I just said, if you take the broader meaning of “illusion” then literally everything is an illusion, since tables are, really, collections of atoms, and so forth. The word loses meaning.
And if the disagreement with Dennett is just semantic then it seems to me he is contributing nothing of substance to the discussion.
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I found the piece on group thinking and group beliefs interesting. From what I’ve read, in the world at large, many animals who are fairly social appear to “outsource” some of their thinking, and in turn, reduce brain sizes. Social woodpeckers are the latest I’ve seen on this.
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Crap, okay, one more comment, DM.
You are obviously wrong in interpreting Dennett’s meaning of the word “illusion.” His analogy is with the folder icons on a desktop computer. Those are not simply “misperceptions.” They are complete illusions. They don’t exist in anything at all like the way they appear. Unlike pain. Try it. Get a hammer, crash it on your toe, and then talk to me about having the illusion of pain.
Notice that of course you will feel a lot of pain while being entirely unaware of the C-fibers that actually bring that sensation from your toe to your brain; or of all the goings on inside your brain; etc. But that is NOT an illusion, and to insiste in calling that is, as I said before, sophistry.
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Andrew Sullivan wrote a similar piece to the American Scholar one a week ago, in the wake of the Murray incident at Middlebury College. He called intersectionality a religion.
And, wait, there’s a psychologist named Breitbart, in the death and dying piece? Jokes aside, I taught a class in that when I was an adjunct instructor, lifespans ago. It was very interdisciplinary, and we had a chance to look at developing world death and dying customs, too. I’d recommend people do that as part of a better preparation for death in the modern West. In addition to finding meaning, “reframing” can help.
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Hi DM,
“Exactly. And that is what Dennett and I are saying consciousness is.”
Exactly, all Dennett is doing is using a different word, not saying anything about consciousness.
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Hi Massimo,
Sure, lots of other things are illusory as well. And if you’re trying to elucidate the fundamental nature of something like consciousness it may well be worth pointing this out.
Dan Dennett may well be using the term “illusion” differently from how you interpret it (I’ve not read his book yet). The meaning I gave is entirely in line with normal English usage and is indeed the primary meaning recorded by the OED.
Hi Robin,
Pain is only one aspect of consciousness, so your argument doesn’t rebut the suggestion that consciousness has illusory aspects. Anyhow, pain can have illusory aspects itself, as in referred pain and phantom-limb pain. (Note that that is not saying that the pain is not real or not being experienced!)
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The semantic trick here is that consciousness presents us with illusions, so consciousness is an illusion.
We feel that we make certain kinds of decisions consciously, but Libet type experiments may show us that the brain has taken these decisions already. So consciousness is an illusion, right? No, because Libet type experiments show that there are illusions in our conscious experience, not that our consciousness is an experience. In all these experiments it is not an illusion that we have the conscious experience that we appear to be making these decisions.
It is like saying that it seems to me that the lady on the stage is floating in mid air with no support, whereas in reality there is a strong steel frame from which my perception has cleverly been misdirected and therefore consciousness is an illusion.
No one doubts that the things we are conscious of may be illusions. In fact I may, for all I know, be a small compact black box sitting on a rack somewhere with all of my thoughts, experiences and ostensible actions preprogrammed.
And let me hastily forestall complaints – I don’t think I am a compact black box sitting on a rack, but I could be for all I know.
Then everything would be an illusion. Except my consciousness.
That hammer on the thumb would still hurt. The Thali Deluxe in Ronaks of Forest Gate would still be delicious. The yellow sunlight of a Sydney winter afternoon would still be sublime They would be illusions, but it would not be an illusion that I had these conscious experiences.
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Hi Coel,
“Pain is only one aspect of consciousness, so your argument doesn’t rebut the suggestion that consciousness has illusory aspects. Anyhow, pain can have illusory aspects itself, as in referred pain and phantom-limb pain. (Note that that is not saying that the pain is not real or not being experienced!)”
But no one is denying that there are illusory aspects to consciousness. Stage magicians have been making a good living for centuries out of this fact.
But, as you say, the phantom limb pain is real pain. It is not an illusion that the patient is feeling pain. So the consciousness itself if not an illusion.
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Hi Robin,
So we then need to be very clear what we mean when we say “consciousness is an illusion” or anything like that. If I were to say it. I’d mean something like “there are illusory aspects to consciousness”. As for what Dennett means by it in that book, I’ll defer opining until I’ve read it.
But then, again, to me (backed up by the OED), something can both be real and an illusion. Those are not antonyms (and phantom pain would be an example of something that is both). This thread is in big danger of being an endless and frustrating disagreement originating from people interpreting terms such as “illusion” in different ways.
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What Robin put, is well put. And, to extend it — optical illusions are indeed illusions. The consciousness that perceives them as illusions is no illusion.
(The claim that Rebecca Goldstein is a good explicator of philosophy is another illusion.)
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Dennett is sort of caught between his own rhetoric and confuses people, and I have disagreements with his particular way of thinking about Consciousness (I prefer Thomas Metzinger’s framework), but how Massimo explains Dennett is just falling into the same trap of the underlying Cartesian intuitions (intuitions, not empirical claims) that Dennett is trying to criticize. The “illusion” he speaks of is actually the conceptual framework for how we speak of consciousness (“the experiencing subject”) rather than conscious experiences themselves, and it’s very difficult to do speak about mental states without implying they’re somehow separate the material states of the world because it’s so embedded in our language. He’s being read of proposing what seems like outright contradiction ( “minds and conscious experiences exists” “the experiencing subject is an illusion” ), by people such as Nagel because they are more interested in making consciousness ineffable than what is being argued about consciousness.
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Couple of addendum notes to the Nation piece.
First, the “Special Courts,” not regular courts (nor military courts-martial for officers involved), tried conspirators after the July 20, 1944, plot failed.
Second, the “men-only” policy (not to mention Jewish and sympathetic scientists who fled the Reich) crippled Germany when it went to war. Until early 1943, after Stalingrad, Germany, unlike the Allies (unknown on Japanese, by me) was not at “total war mobilization.” Even after that, the drive to get women in the labor force was halfhearted at times.
Third, the repeated use of referenda did not originate with Hitler. Look westward, across the Rhine, to the development of the First Empire and Second Empire.
Fourth, Kershaw’s name is mentioned in conjunction with a British TV program, but no note of his benchmark two-volume bio?
Fifth, also not mentioned was Hindenburg’s death in 1934. With him out of the German presidency, Hitler had one last restraint removed. (Contrast this to Victor Emmanuel III remaining king throughout the era of Mussolini, and, once the Allied invasion of Siciliy started, looking for alternatives to the Duce as the country’s political leader.) Hitler had the presidency consolidated with his office. Wiki has good info on the “dance” between the two during the 18 months between Hitler taking office and Hindenburg’s death: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_von_Hindenburg#The_Machtergreifung
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“With the ‘meaning’ article, it is all lost on me. I don’t find any meaning in my life and don’t really care. It doesn’t depress me or send me into pits of despair. I am not sure what it even means for me or my life to have ‘meaning’.
And I am not interested, as some seem to be, in creating my own meaning. I wouldn’t know how to go about it as, again, I don’t know what it means to create meaning for myself, and I would not be gaining anything of which I feel the absence.
I remember from my teenage years reading people say that their atheism made them feel that life was ‘absurd’, but I could only think how much more absurd it would be to be creations of a God.”
Bingo, sort of….
I think that if we take to say “create meaning in our lives” in really simple terms, it doesn’t mean much more than aiming towards a fulfilling life and being involved with things that are of worth mattering. But religious folks take it to mean that life has to be legitimized by something beyond what is to described within the context of simple lived experience, a sort of “metaphysical meaningfulness” that has to be a product of the world we find ourselves in. I think this is nonsense for similar reasons that Robin lays out.
For one thing, it’s bizarre why such a thing is desirable and what it actually adds to our lives besides comforting our egos (which is not always a bad thing if it helps you endure horrendous suffering) But I think it can be even worse than that. Any dependence on something that is purported to beyond the significance of lived experience is an illusion that can have impose dangers, because they aim towards thing that are outside the context of lived experience and thus have no real value to it. It’s chasing after images rather than anything concrete.
How many people have chased fame, glory, and pride only to end up in misery in contrast to those who were nothing to the world, who will never be written down in history, but have remained one of the happiest people alive just from the comforts of a humble life and home?
How many people have seeped into nationalism and chanted the glorious reign of their nations, but have imposed tremendous cruelty of their Empire’s rule when it terms of the reality of actual people’s lives, there were existed horrendous suffering under systems of oppression.
I bring this logic to the theological account. Does it really matter that we’re only accidental accounts of physical matter rather than uniquely shaped being specially by God’s hand? Why chase images of glory? Why not be sufficient with humble simplicity?
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“By political correctness, I do not mean the term as it has come to be employed on the right—that is, the expectation of adherence to the norms of basic decency, like refraining from derogatory epithets. I mean its older, intramural denotation: the persistent attempt to suppress the expression of unwelcome beliefs and ideas.” This is where I stopped reading. The term was supposed to refer to Communists disavowing any statements that didn’t follow the Party line as “politically incorrect.” Criticizing PC has always been a right wing exercise, which is why PC as an implicit requirement for abjuring racial insults as humor etc. is not a novelty. If the writer doesn’t know this much, it is seems unlikely he really has anything substantive to contribute.
I did actually finish Rebecca Goldstein’s article on Socrates and Athens, sort of. It sort of claimed to be about politics and philosophy and greatness, but Goldstein’g discussion of the relationship between Socrates and the leader of the Thirty Tyrants, Critias (or for that matter with pro-Spartan figures like Xenophon, author of the Anabasis, and Memorabilia about Socrates,) was inadequate. As is, it appears one should consult an amateur classicist like I.F. Stone for more information. One wonders what the point of stuff like this is.
Unfortunately, the same has to be said of The Nation article. Unlike Goldstein, the article at least alludes to the political context of the times, openly citing the existence of Social Democratic and Communist opposition. It however refuses to draw any consequences from the way reputable people preferred Nazis to Communists. This was true of democratic opinion in England, France and the US, as shown by those nations’ refusal to support the legitimate government of Spain, because Communists had too much influence in the coalition government and the nation at large. Hitler personally got his start in the counter-revolutionary movement in the aftermath of the war. But at the same time, the Social Democrats were killing many more Communists than the embryo Nazi party. Their regime, Weimar democracy, was premised just as much on absolute refusal to accept Communism no matter what. A commitment to Weimar democracy precludes a refusal to accept Hitler. The writer thinks there’s a point in saying Hitler’s accession to power was legal, but the only real point, there was something terminally wrong with Weimar democracy it refuses to accept. There’s nothing here but confusion.
The report on Breitbart’s work omits any comparisons, even qualitatively, to end of life satisfaction due to religion. It’s not even very helpful on unsatisfactory end of life experiences, which seems to be all self-reporting. Unchecked self-reporting isn’t useful at all. This sort of thing strikes me very much as a cross between self-help and devotional, neither of which I esteem very highly.
Fernbach and Sloman are correct I think: True knowledge about the world is inherently collective, not individual. They don’t go any further than sketching out a few consequences, primarily that oriented and alert people can nonetheless accept crazy ideas. The next step, figuring whether there are social reasons for lies to be propagated they avoid. I’m afraid I think this is timidity, not prudence.
Nagel refers to “non-physical factors to account for consciousness.” That’s the failed program! If the crazy idea that “consciousness” is an illusion keeps from that mistake, it’s not so crazy. If the idea that consciousness is an illusion keeps you from confusing it with an actual thing, perhaps it is a downright useful approach. Personally I spend much of my time unconscious. And other times my consciousness is shockingly warped. No doubt that is because my consciousness is inferior to the sage’s.
Lastly, it is so gratifying to know that I can exercise my agency to remove hunger when I want to lose weight. I think I’ll start by exercising my agency on something small, like not blinking. Besides the obvious jokes, though, there is the issue of whether something that is indeterminate is real in any meaningful sense of the word? And how you could possibly know when something is self-determined?
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Robin,
Glad to see you back. You save me quite a bit of typing.
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