Illusionism

Illusionism proposes that phenomenal consciousness—the "what it's like" aspect of experience that seems so mysterious—is an illusion created by our introspective faculties. Developed most explicitly by Keith Frankish and influenced by Daniel Dennett's earlier work, illusionism is a deflationary approach that aims to dissolve rather than solve the hard problem of consciousness.

The central claim is not that we lack mental states or experiences, but that these states don't have the special, intrinsic, ineffable properties they seem to have upon introspection. When we introspect and report that our experiences have irreducible qualitative character—that there's "something it's like" to see red that can't be captured in functional or physical terms—we are being systematically misled by our cognitive systems. The apparent mysteriousness of consciousness is itself a product of how we represent our own mental states, not a feature of the states themselves.

Illusionism explains why consciousness seems hard to explain: we're trying to explain a property that doesn't exist as we conceive it. The real explanatory target is the illusion itself—why do we represent our mental states as having these seemingly non-physical properties? This can be explained in standard neuroscientific and cognitive terms. Illusionism has been called the "hard-headed" response to the hard problem, trading the mystery of consciousness for the more tractable task of explaining a representational quirk. Critics argue that the felt reality of experience cannot be an illusion, since the illusion itself would be an experience, but illusionists maintain that this objection misconstrues their position.