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by pcwalton 1601 days ago
I always found illusionism completely nonsensical, for the reasons that Galen Strawson put forth in "Realistic Monism" [1] (emphasis mine):

> Some of them — Dennett is a prime example — are so in thrall to the fundamental intuition of dualism, the intuition that the experiential and the physical are utterly and irreconcilably different, that they are prepared to deny the existence of experience, more or less (c)overtly, because they are committed to physicalism, i.e. physicSalism.

> "‘They are prepared to deny the existence of experience.’ At this we should stop and wonder. I think we should feel very sober, and a little afraid, at the power of human credulity, the capacity of human minds to be gripped by theory, by faith. For this particular denial is the strangest thing that has ever happened in the whole history of human thought, not just the whole history of philosophy. It falls, unfortunately, to philosophy, not religion, to reveal the deepest woo-woo of the human mind. I find this grievous, but, next to this denial, every known religious belief is only a little less sensible than the belief that grass is green.

[1]: https://www.sjsu.edu/people/anand.vaidya/courses/c2/s0/Reali...

1 comments

By contrast, Strawson is so enthralled with the primacy of experience that he can easily dismiss the demonstrable facts that literally everything his experience is telling him is a fiction (the world is not classical, there is no continuity of self, that our perceptions reflect evolutionary fitness and not truth, etc., etc.), and yet still maintain that experience itself must somehow be an exception. Pretty absurd indeed.
It can't be "literally everything". It is experience that enables us to correct those misconceptions in the first place. It is by experiencing that we discovered and experimentally confirmed quantum theory i.e. that "the world is not classical". It is by reflecting on his experiences that Dennett came to his conclusions.
It is reason that permits us to correct those errors, not phenomenal experience. Our perceptions and "experiences" deceive us all of the time, and through reason we have found many of those flaws. Consciousness is the final boss fight, and the battle has begun:

http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00...