Illusionism as a Theory of Consciousness

This is a reprint of an issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies about illusionism – the view that phenomenal consciousness is an introspective illusion misrepresenting experiences as having phenomenal properties. Its history includes early identity theorists and it is eliminativist in terms of phenomenal consciousness. Its proponents argue that a new research programme is timely in view of the shortcomings of the dominant physicalist approach based on realism. Another way of characterising the position is to say that it replaces the hard problem with the illusion problem. The seventeen essays that follow take a variety of positions, supportive and critical, for instance from Susan Blackmore, who replaces illusion with delusion and, Daniel Dennett who takes illusionism as the obvious default theory. It is definitely a volume for the specialist in terms of explicating many technical issues.