Frankish’s Illusionism

Philosopher Keith Frankish's illusionism is a revisionary account of consciousness, which challenges widespread convictions about its nature. Building on earlier work on qualia eliminativism (notably that of Daniel Dennett), Frankish proposed the term 'Illusionism' as the view that what we call 'phenomenal consciousness' is a brain-generated impression, not an intrinsic metaphysical feature of the mind. While not denying that conscious experiences are real, Frankish argues that the mysterious “phenomenal properties” or “qualia” often ascribed to them are, in fact, an introspective illusion. Far from denying consciousness, Frankish aims to provide a naturalistic, scientifically tractable account of what consciousness really is and to explain why our experiences seem to possess phenomenal properties, replacing the “hard problem” of consciousness with what he calls the “illusion problem.” Frankish sees illusionism as a broad theoretical framework, which can be developed in many different ways (Frankish, 2016a, 2023).

The Basics of Illusionism

The core of illusionism is its rejection of what Frankish calls phenomenal realism—the belief that conscious experiences are marked by possession of phenomenal properties or qualia, which constitute “what it is like” to undergo them. There is debate about the exact nature of these properties, which are sometimes described as being ineffable, intrinsic, private, and immediately apprehended. However, Frankish focuses on the claim that phenomenal properties are irreducibly subjective, meaning that they are accessible only to the subject of the experience and cannot be publicly observed or characterized in third-person terms (Frankish, 2024a, 2025). Conceived in this way, consciousness is a highly anomalous phenomenon, which is inaccessible to third-person investigation and poses a “hard problem” for scientific explanation, and many philosophers argue that it is a distinct, non-physical aspect of reality.

In this light, illusionism offers a deflationary alternative, which fully acknowledges the anomalousness of phenomenal properties without requiring radical revisions to our worldview. It achieves this by proposing that phenomenal properties are merely intentional objects (Frankish, 2016a). (Frankish endorses Nicholas Humphrey’s comparison of phenomenal properties to impossible objects, which can be represented but not instantiated; Humphrey, 2011.)

Frankish readily affirms the reality of conscious experiences in an everyday sense; we undergo episodes of attentively seeing, hearing, feeling pain and pleasure, and so on (Frankish, 2023, 2024a). These states are real, potent, and have immense significance for us. His claim is that we are mistaken about what they are. They are, in reality, complex, multifaceted functional states of the brain, which sustain a rich sensory interaction with the environment and enable flexible, intelligent behavioral control. Frankish calls the distinctive functional properties of these states quasi-phenomenal properties (Frankish, 2016a). Quasi-phenomenal states are the reality behind the illusion, and phenomenal concepts (concepts of what experience is “like”) track them in a rough-and-ready way. Though not irreducibly subjective, conscious states are subjective in a psychological sense, since they manifest the organism’s individual “take” on current stimulation—the specific cluster of psychological effects it has on them (Frankish, 2024a, 2025).

What Frankish denies is the supposed “phenomenal” form of consciousness and the irreducibly subjective properties thought to constitute it. In proposing this view, Frankish sees himself as saving consciousness from depsychologization—that is, from identification with intrinsic qualities that have only a contingent connection to psychological functions and could in principle be possessed by inert objects (Frankish, 2021).

Explaining the Illusion

Frankish holds that the illusion of phenomenality is produced by introspective processes, which systematically misrepresent brain states, just as perceptual processes systematically misrepresent some environmental features. This basic explanation can be developed in many ways by positing different patterns of introspective distortion (Frankish, 2023; Gorbachev & Frankish, 2025). However, Frankish’s preferred explanation focuses on the reactive side of experience—the complex pattern of attentional, cognitive, conative, affective, and other psychological changes that are triggered by sensory stimulation (Frankish, 2024a, 2024b; Frankish & Sklutová, 2022).

Introspective systems monitor these reactive changes but do not generate detailed representations of them. Instead, they create a simplified, schematic model (a “reactivity schema”), which encodes the overall psychological impact of stimulation and expresses its subjective significance. These schematic representations are highly useful for communication and high-level self-control, but they are also deceptive. We mistake our mediated, distorted awareness of reactive complexity for direct, revelatory awareness of subjective qualities, leading us to believe in phenomenal consciousness. (Frankish frequently employs Daniel Dennett's analogy of a computer's “user illusion”—icons of files and folders that allow intuitive control over complex underlying data without having literal counterparts within the machine; Frankish, 2019a, 2023.)

Frankish also proposes that the information supplied by introspection is bound to our perceptual representations, leading us to perceive external objects as having potent sensory qualities (e.g., the redness of an apple) that reflect their significance for us (their affordances) (Frankish, 2022, 2023). The illusion of phenomenality is thus “outward-looking” (Frankish, 2016a).

Frankish stresses that, although introspective modelling of experience and the higher-level cognitive capacities it supports are important features of the human mind, they are not necessary for consciousness itself. Many creatures with limited or no introspective abilities (and hence no conception of themselves as having an irreducibly subjective inner world) still have conscious experiences and are still appropriate objects of ethical concern (Frankish, 2024a).

Motivations

Frankish offers several reasons for adopting illusionism (Frankish, 2016a, 2016b, 2019b, 2022). One is a debunking argument. If a person’s belief in something (UFOs, say) can be explained as the product of causes that have nothing to do with the thing itself, then the belief does not provide any evidence for the reality of the thing. It has been debunked. But it is likely that our beliefs about phenomenal consciousness can be fully explained as the result of neural processes, without reference to phenomenal properties. (Many phenomenal realists accept this, and it is implicit in the premise of the zombie argument against physicalism.) If so, then we should not trust our belief in phenomenal consciousness. Second, illusionism is explanatorily economical. If something is resistant to scientific explanation and only observable from one perspective (as phenomenal consciousness is), then the simplest hypothesis is that it's an illusion. Third, illusionism avoids the threat of epiphenomenalism. If consciousness were non-physical, it could play no role in a causally closed physical world, making it irrelevant to our thoughts and actions. If, however, it is a complex functional state, this threat vanishes. Moreover, the illusion of phenomenal consciousness, which is constituted by physically realized mental representations, will itself play a causal role, perhaps of a highly adaptive kind (as Nicholas Humphrey has argued; Humphrey, 2011).

Frankish also argues against versions of what he calls “weak illusionism”—attempts by physicalists to accommodate phenomenal consciousness by adopting a watered-down (“diet”) notion of phenomenality, stripped of its problematic aspects. (Versions of the “phenomenal concept strategy” are examples of this tactic.) Frankish argues that no coherent diet notion is available. No “genuinely qualitative” property remains once the problematic aspects are stripped away, and weak illusionism either collapses into his own “strong” illusionism or inflates into full-blown phenomenal realism (Frankish, 2012, 2016a).

Replies to Objections

Frankish also addresses various common objections to illusionism (Frankish, 2016a, 2016b, 2022, 2023; Frankish & Sklutová, 2022). The most basic of these (a version of Descartes’ cogito) is that beliefs about the phenomenal character of our own experiences are indubitable data. Frankish concedes that we are strongly inclined to believe this but argues that the strength of a conviction is no guarantee of its truth. Introspection, like perception, may mislead us. If we are physical organisms, all of whose knowledge is the product of evolved biological mechanisms, then this possibility cannot be ruled out. Our beliefs about our own minds are important psychological facts, which require explanation, but they should not be given the status of epistemic bedrock. (Frankish stresses that this claim is not driven by a dogmatic commitment to physicalism and that his concerns are primarily explanatory; Frankish, 2022.)

Another common objection is that consciousness admits no appearance-reality gap: if one seems to be having an experience with a certain phenomenal character, then one is having one. Frankish responds that this begs the question by assuming that “seeming” must be understood as involving acquaintance with phenomenal properties. Illusionists, however, understand it as misrepresentation. Seeming to have an experience with a certain phenomenal character means introspectively representing oneself as having one, which is possible even if one is not in fact having one. To the objection that an illusion requires an audience, Frankish responds that there is no need for an inner observer or “Cartesian theatre” of the sort associated with phenomenal realism. The subject of the illusion is the organism as a whole, and the work of appreciating the illusion and reacting to it is distributed among numerous unconscious subsystems.

Ethical Implications

Another objection to illusionism concerns its supposed ethical implications. Some philosophers take illusionists to be denying the reality of conscious experience and thus of a major, if not the sole, source of ethical value (Strawson, 2019). Frankish replies that this misunderstands the view. Illusionism denies neither the existence of conscious experience nor its ethical value. It merely invites us to rethink what conscious experiences are and what grounds their ethical value. Pain is bad, Frankish argues, not because of an “intrinsic phenomenal nastiness,” but because it consists in a complex of highly aversive psychological states, which we are powerfully motivated to avoid undergoing (Frankish, 2024a; Frankish & Sklutová, 2022). He argues that our everyday ethical practices are based on identifying paradigm cases of valenced experiential states and agreeing on their ethical value, and that these practices are not threatened by an illusionist account of the nature of the states and the grounds of their value (Frankish, 2023, 2024a).

Frankish further argues that, far from being ethically objectionable, illusionism has positive and progressive ethical implications. By conceptualizing consciousness as a complex pattern of reactive changes, which are in principle experimentally detectable, illusionism removes the epistemological barrier to understanding the conscious experiences of others, including non-humans. Instead of speculating about inscrutable phenomenal essences, we can study the objective, physically realized psychological states that constitute a creature's subjective take on the world. Illusionism thus provides a better basis for extending our ethical concern to other creatures and enables more nuanced ethical decision-making, replacing a binary “on/off” view of consciousness with a conception of “consciousness space” in which different creatures have varying degrees and forms of conscious experience. This perspective liberates us from being “prisoners of private insubstantial worlds” and encourages a wider, fairer apportionment of ethical concern to all creatures (Frankish, 2024a).

Conclusion

Frankish compares consciousness to a rainbow. He points out that, considered as optical effects caused by the illumination of airborne water droplets by a light source behind the observer, rainbows are perfectly real. But considered as spatially located multicolored arcs, they are illusory. He goes on:

• "Consciousness is like a rainbow. Considered as a set of functional processes—a hugely complex informational and reactive engagement with the world—it is perfectly real. Considered as an internal realm of phenomenal properties or what-it-is-likenesses, it is illusory. . . Consciousness is like a rainbow: wonderful but not what it seems" (Frankish, 2023).

Acknowledgement

Thanks to Paul Smart for his help with the preparation of this article.