Is consciousness an illusion? Is it just a complex set of cognitive processes without a central, subjective experience? How can we better integrate philosophy with everyday life and the arts?
Keith Frankish is an Honorary Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sheffield, a Visiting Research Fellow with The Open University, and an Adjunct Professor with the Brain and Mind Programme in Neurosciences at the University of Crete. Frankish mainly works in the philosophy of mind and has published widely about topics such as human consciousness and cognition. Profoundly inspired by Daniel Dennett, Frankish is best known for defending an “illusionist” view of consciousness. He is also editor of the journal Illusionism as a Theory of Consciousness and co-edits, in addition to others, The Cambridge Handbook of Cognitive Science.
KEITH FRANKISH
Daniel Dennett didn't see philosophy as a specialism remote from everyday life or distinct from the work of scientists. He saw it as an attempt to see how science and everyday reality fit together, how the same world could be a world of subatomic particles, obeying strict physical laws, and a world of free conscious agents with thoughts and hopes and dreams.
Some said he was an eliminativist who denied the reality of belief, consciousness, and free will, but he wasn't. He would say that, of course, thoughts and experiences and choices are real, as real as threats and opportunities and dances and jokes and cuteness and love and all the other things that populate our everyday ontology, our manifest image of the world... Dan had the mind of an engineer. He wanted to understand how things work, had no sympathy for those who prefer embracing mysteries to solving puzzles. That was just lazy, Dan felt, wasn't it? Dan was never lazy. Dan was many other things as well as a philosopher – a devoted husband and father, a farmer, a sailor, a sculptor, a cider maker, and an inveterate tinkerer.
He could turn his hand to pretty much anything, and he approached philosophical problems in the same practical spirit, devising thinking tools that would help us crack difficult problems. Some people felt that his practical outlook blinded him to the magic of the world, but this couldn't be further from the truth. He saw the world as full of magic, real magic, he would say, the sort that is not really magic, but a natural effect so finely crafted as to be wondrous to us.
Excerpt from "Daniel Dennett: The man who saw reality's patterns"
originally published by the Institute of Art and Ideas
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There is magic everywhere. There's wonder everywhere. There's wondrous complexity that is so complex, so difficult to conceptualize, to grasp, to articulate that it might as well be magic for all intents and purposes, but we can gradually start to unpick how the tricks are done, how nature learned to do these wonderful tricks. And that's the wonder of science, gradually learning what's happening behind the scenes and how these marvelous effects are produced.
I'm probably best known for my work on consciousness. My view about this is often caricatured, I think, as a kind of heartless, materialist one, because I'm resistant to all forms of dualism about the mind. I think that's a very unhelpful way of thinking.
Some people think that I do that because I have a sort of crass materialist attitude to the world, that there's only things you can measure and weigh and bump into and everything else is just nonsense and fancy and different. What I like about the sort of view I have is that it represents us as fully part of the world, fully part of the same world. We're not sealed off into little private mental bubbles, Cartesian theaters, where all the real action is happening in here, not out there. No, I think we're much more engaged with the world.
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It's not all happening in some private mental world. It's happening in our engagement with the shared world, and that seems to me a vision that I find much more uplifting, comforting, and rewarding. Another one of my heroes is Daniel Dennett's great friend, Nicholas Humphrey, who has a wonderfully rich range of experience. He's been described as a scientific humanist. What he does is he knows his science, including cognitive neuroscience and psychology, but he's also steeped in literature, art, music, and painting, and he brings all this together in his wonderful book on consciousness Soul Dust, published in 2011, suggests the idea that the soul is actually made of dust, which is a fantastic concept.
AI, Communication and The Game of Language
Generative AI, particularly Large Language Models, they seem to be engaging in conversation with us. We ask questions, and they reply. It seems like they're talking to us. I don't think they are. I think they're playing a game very much like a game of chess. You make a move and your chess computer makes an appropriate response to that move. It doesn't have any other interest in the game whatsoever. That's what I think Large Language Models are doing. They're just making communicative moves in this game of language that they've learned through training on vast quantities of human-produced text.
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Imagination has a central role in teaching philosophical thinking because it's only imagination that can get us out of our biases and out of the fixating on the patterns that we've been tuned to.
Reflections on Living in Crete
One thing I love about living in Crete is that the sense of the presence of nature is always here. I walk out the door and I can see the mountains around the city. I can see the White Mountains (Lefka Ori), which for half the year are covered in snow. I can see the sea. If you walk out in the summer, you're immediately aware of your physicality. You become dehydrated very quickly. It's not necessarily a kind environment for humans. It's not if you engage in any vigorous activity, but it's one that makes you feel vividly alive, I think. Compared to the area where I grew up, which is a very low-lying area, in a river valley, it was a landscape where nature felt very dormant. The skies would be gray. The landscape would be flat. There was also a lot of human activity in it. Canals, railway lines, coal mines. It was a land that felt as if it had been depressed, as if it had not been allowed to express itself somehow. And it's been carved up into fields and so on by humans.
And so now here, it's the opposite. Although there is a lot of building in the particularly tourist areas, drive five minutes out of the city, and you're in a land of rugged land with almost desert in places. A land where you couldn't survive very long without proper water, in particular. It's a land where you feel the presence. And, also, another thing you feel here is periods of frequent earthquakes, and that again, is quite a salutary thing. When the Earth shakes like that, and you suddenly realize that this building, which seems wonderfully strong and well-equipped, is suddenly moving from side to side under Poseidon's influence. It makes you see how people could animate this landscape. It's a landscape that feels animated with presences, with gods, with non-human entities. There's a way of living, which involves engaging more deeply with the meaning of things, engaging not just living life on the surface, but trying to look for the deeper, for the real patterns, and living with that, not without pleasure, not without relishing life, but with relishing it for its complexity.
