Illusionism (philosophy of mind)

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Illusionism is a family of views in philosophy of mind according to which phenomenal consciousness is an illusion that either does not exist or is a misrepresentation of real neural processes. Closely related to eliminative materialism, it is generally a form of materialism or physicalism as it argues that consciousness is determined entirely by the physical world. It is also related to Michael Graziano's attention schema theory, which considers the brain to be an information processing device that gathers data about its own attention into an internal model of reality which it then represents as a conscious experience, mistakenly ascribing to it special attributes it does not actually have. Illusionism argues that qualia—the phenomenal properties of sensations, such as "what it is like" to experience color, touch or sound—are poorly defined or lack an empirical foundation, and should be rejected or redefined. Proponents of illusionism include philosophers Daniel Dennett, Keith Frankish...

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