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 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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Dan meant a lot to me personally, partly because I respected him so highly, even before I met him. We met in 1996, nearly 30 years ago, but even before that I'd read his work, and he was an intellectual hero. As our relationship grew, particularly over the last years, his belief and encouragement meant a huge amount to me. I hope I've conveyed something of the richness of his mind, because he wasn't just a philosopher. That's the important thing about him. He lived a very rich life. I found something of a kindred spirit there in Dan.
On Consciousness and Magic
I don't like this idea that the mental world is completely sealed off from the public world, that you can never really know, for example, whether a fish stays conscious because that's entirely subjective. The idea that there's no possible access we could have to the fish's mentality - I don't think that's right. I think the mental world is more like an interaction with the public world. It's the creature reacting to the world as if it was striking the creature like a hammer, and the creature responding to that. It's that vibration that is the mind, I think, and that opens up the possibility of getting to know people better. It's not always going to be a mystery to us what fish feel. We just need to pay a great deal of attention to fish.
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 same world. We're not confined 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.
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.
Real magic is the sort that isn’t really magic. There is magic everywhere. There's wonder everywhere. There's wondrous complexity that is 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. This is the way I think of consciousness.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
When you were growing up, near Doncaster, you had a long convalescence. Many of us don't have that opportunity to step back and ask those important questions about the world.
FRANKISH
It was a very difficult time. I didn’t really have a youth, at least in the conventional sense. I was quite unwell for a long time. My parents were fantastic, and they supported me through thick and thin, but that did give me a sort of “time-out” of life. I didn't get a formal education in the traditional sense until I went back to university in my late twenties. And so I just decided I was going to read. I thought, well, I can't do much else, so I'll read. And my father bought me this wonderful book - it was a facsimile of the first folio Shakespeare - and I just sat and read it. It was a very naive way, but also a very unfiltered way of approaching it. There was nobody between me and the text, nobody presenting it to me, nobody telling me, “You need to study this, you need to learn about these themes, look for these particular techniques.” I would do the same with Dickens and George Eliot and Fielding, and I would read translations of the classics. And I actually learned some Latin and ancient Greek, because I was convinced I had to read those in the originals. And so I read all this, but I read it without that institutional framework, without studying it. I just read it. I think one of the negative consequences of that was that it gave me an over inflated view of the importance of all this. Now, I'm happy to describe myself as a philosopher. Well, you know, I've got a PhD, so that's a stamp and I can say I'm a philosopher. But to say I was a writer, a poet or painter? How could I do that? And so maybe my philosophy is an attempt to get into writing, in a way that I felt a bit safer.
Navigating a World of Illusion
I love illusions. I think illusions are where we live - I think we live in a world of imagination. I love theater and poetry, which is, in a sense, illusory. Calling these things illusory isn't to denigrate them and to say we should stop seeing them that way. It's just a note of caution that there are certain areas, particularly in science, in philosophy, and in ethics - I've just written a paper about the ethical implications of my view where I think it can be harmful. And so I'm not asking you to give up the illusion. I'm saying, just understand that it is an illusion. Don't trust it. It would be like someone who thinks that when they see Macbeth, they're actually witnessing a murder, and that would be disastrous. And so it doesn't mean you should stop acting the play, it means you just understand what it is. While you're in the play, while you're watching it, let it flourish and do all the things that it does. Just don't then take that as a serious basis for metaphysics, or a scientific study of consciousness, which people do.
Illusions are not bad things. They're wonderful things - they are distinctively human things that we've created to make sense of stuff that is really too complex to make sense of in any other way. But I think if we don't understand that that is their nature and function, then they can seriously mislead us, because if we take the illusion for reality, we're missing what this is really doing for us, and we're misunderstanding our relation to the world. We're never going to prosper by having a distorted picture of reality. There's a mind of independent reality and I think we need to know it, and we need to be able to live in a flourishing way within it. Having distorted ideas about reality is not going to help us, and so we need to be quite clear about what these illusions are doing for us. Not get rid of them, but just not treat the illusions in too reductive a way as simple windows on the fundamental nature of the world.
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.
