Thankyou for a fantastically lucid exposition of this tricky terrain! I myself am a strong illusionist, and I really appreciated your analogy of phenomenal conscious being more like the plot of a story, rather than the film on the screen (cartesian theatre). This feels like one of Dennett's 'strange inversions of reasoning' - a critical inversion if strong illusionism is the right way forward - like the Necker cube, where a perspective-shift out of the thicket of conceptual baggage of theories of consciousness with which our introspective, self-reflective ... (read more)
Another strong illusionist here. Perhaps similar to you, I ended up here because I kept running into the problem of 'everything is made of matter'.
Because ultimately, down at the floor, it's all just particles and forces and extremely well understood probabilities. There's no fundamental primitive for 'consciousness' or 'experience', any more than there's a fundamental primitive for 'green' or 'traffic' or 'hatred'. Those particles and forces down at the floor are the territory; everything else is a label.
As I was going through the process to get here, I kept running into parts of me with the internal objection of "But it feels real! I feel like I'm conscious! I have conscious experience!" The "what does it feel like to be wrong" post was of significant help here; it makes blatantly clear that feelings and intuition don't necessarily map the territory accurately, or even at all (in the case of being wrong and not knowing it.)
So the final picture was 1) hard materialism all the way down to fundamental physics, and 2) explicit demonstration that my feelings didn't necessarily map to reality, no matter how real they felt. There was only one conclusion to make from there, though it did take me a few months of mulling over the problem for the majority of my cognitive apparatus to agree.
Thankyou for a fantastically lucid exposition of this tricky terrain! I myself am a strong illusionist, and I really appreciated your analogy of phenomenal conscious being more like the plot of a story, rather than the film on the screen (cartesian theatre). This feels like one of Dennett's 'strange inversions of reasoning' - a critical inversion if strong illusionism is the right way forward - like the Necker cube, where a perspective-shift out of the thicket of conceptual baggage of theories of consciousness with which our introspective, self-reflective ... (read more)