Many of you would be aware already of illusionism, if in fact there were many readers of this blog. But in case it's needed, illusionism, exemplified by Keith Frankish and Daniel Dennett, is an approach to the philosophy of consciousness which claims that qualia (the ineffable irreducible feelings associated with conscious experience, e.g. the redness of red), are entirely illusory and do not actually exist. As such, on this view the Hard Problem of Consciousness as defined by David Chalmers simply dissolves -- we need only explain why we believe we experience qualia, we do not need to explain how it is that qualia can be produced by physical stuff. As a bonus, illusionism may claim that even the idea of qualia are incoherent.
Illusionism is, I would say, a species of functionalism, and so is compatible with and largely overlaps with other glosses on functionalism such as computationalism. There may be corner cases where some illusionists may disagree with some computationalists, especially on how best to describe things, but the stories they tell about human consciousness are mostly compatible. As such, I count myself as an illusionist, a functionalist and a computationalist.
What I wanted to write about today is a strong rhyming I've noticed between the illusionist view of consciousness and how I think of the stuff of physical reality.
