> I don't understand what you mean by sleight of hand.

He means that it implicitly smuggles in a certain conclusion. For instance, "I think therefore I am" seems logically sound, but actually begs the question in presupposing "I" to then conclude that "I" exists.

Or ask an innocent person a question like, "when did you stop beating your wife?"

> There are many synonymous ways of phrasing the question: e.g., describe the subjective experience of a bat.

If you can describe a subjective experience in a way that is not circularly tied to experiencing it, is it really subjective experience? If you can formulate an objective description, then the subjective experience was an illusion all along, because "subjective" doesn't mean what we think it means, ie. "non-objective".

This is the linguistic game the OP is referring to. Natural language can lead you into all sorts of traps like, thinking there's something there but it's really just a conceptual mirage we've sort of invented.

I'm afraid this is far too clever for me to understand. I know what I mean by subjective experience, and no amount of linguistic hair-splitting will convince me it doesn't exist.

You mean you think you know. If I put an object in your blind spot, you'll also swear up and down there's nothing in front of you.

I think everyone knows what they mean when they refer to their own subjective experience. That is entirely separate from the question of what that experience corresponds to in the external world. If you put an object in my blind spot, I know that my subjective experience will be of no object. I couldn't make that statement if I didn't know what I meant by subjective experience.

When you say, "I know what I mean by subjective experience, and no amount of linguistic hair-splitting will convince me it doesn't exist", you are not simply saying you are perceiving X and that, even if X is an illusion, X at least refers to a persistent and predictable illusion, and so you know what you mean by anytime you refer to X.

You are actually saying is that X corresponds to something real, that you are directly perceiving some aspect of reality, because how else could you conclude that nothing could convince you that X doesn't exist?

It is to that, that I say no, you don't know what you mean by subjective experience.

Are you asserting you don't have any subjective experience? Or that you only feel like you have a subjective experience and it doesn't actually exist?

I am arguing that subjective experience is not what we perceive it to be. The qualities that we perceive of it are deceptive, and not necessarily reflective of anything real.

>The qualities that we perceive of it are deceptive, and not necessarily reflective of anything real.

This claim only makes sense given a particular definition of "real", but if (the qualities of) our subjective experiences are outside of that definition, why should we take (the qualities of) subjective experience to not be real, rather than the definition to be impoverished? What is real should encompass every way in which things are or can be. The qualities of subjective experience included.

The problem isn't with taking subjectivity to be real, but with taking everything that is real to be object based. There are no qualia "things" in the world. But we should not see this as implying there are no qualia.

Would you take a "day job" to be ontologically real? It is a way in which the aggregate of particles that make up your body regularly behave on a semi periodic schedule. That would seem to fit your definition of "encompassing every way in which things are or can be".

If it is real, isn't there still a need to distinguish ontological primitives from aggregate properties like the above? Why shouldn't this be what we mean by "real"?

>Would you take a "day job" to be ontologically real?

I do. I'm quite pluralistic with what I deem "real". Quarks are real as well as chairs and day jobs. Roughly speaking, I take all fundamentals and all invariants in space and time over the fundamentals to be real. Invariants seem to be attractors in conceptual space that are apt to be picked out and labeled by cognitive systems like us. These invariants play various explanatory roles in our conceptualization of the world, and so they are real.

>If it is real, isn't there still a need to distinguish ontological primitives from aggregate properties like the above? Why shouldn't this be what we mean by "real"?

Definitely. I just use the qualifier fundamental to make that distinction. Real is a term that plays a key explanatory role in our conceptualization of the world and so how we define it for the purposes of theory should respect this pre-theoretical usage. The idea of ontological primitives distinct from everyday existence is a result of theory and so should use a distinct term. When people say chairs exist, they mean it in this broad pre-theoretic sense. There's no reason to blow that up.

> When people say chairs exist, they mean it in this broad pre-theoretic sense. There's no reason to blow that up.

I'm not sure switching to, "qualia do not fundamentally exist", really buys us much. Saying they're illusory is already acknowledging the existence of some process that yields a false conclusion.

Pluralistic existence also seems to inevitably run head first into the Sorites paradox.

What you gain is not having to defend your terminology or confusions derived from disagreements on the meaning of key terms. Following Kieth Frankish on twitter, it seems like he spends far more time defending against misconceptions about illusionism than actually defending the content of the theory. And it's an entirely self-inflicted wound. (Though it works for him as it raises his h-index.)

When your terminology results in you saying things like "consciousness is an illusion (doesn't exist)" and "the existence of qualia (features of our subjective experience) is false", you're just undermining your own project. I mean, you're literally engaging in a verbal dispute with the other guys in this thread. I just don't see the point. There would be far more agreement if we could align the usage of key terms with how most people understand them.

I agree there would be far more agreement, in the sense that fewer people would object and less forcefully, but I think it would be because they don't understand the substance.

If I explain that chairs don't really exist because there's no such thing in physics, I get nodding heads all around. If I say the same about consciousness, people are all up in arms.

The challenge here is the implicit assumption that their perception of subjective experience is a direct perception of reality, where they can accept that their perception of chairs is mediated by other things.

This is the assumption that must be challenged and I think your approach just lets people think they understand a position when they really don't.

> I think it would be because they don't understand the substance.

Fair point. This is a danger.

>If I explain that chairs don't really exist because there's no such thing in physics, I get nodding heads all around. If I say the same about consciousness, people are all up in arms.

The difference is that with chairs people immediately know you're speaking in jargon. No one in their right mind would say something like "chairs are an illusion". This isn't the case when it comes to phenomenal consciousness.

>The challenge here is the implicit assumption that their perception of subjective experience is a direct perception of reality

I'm in favor of challenging these kinds of assumptions. But saying phenomenal consciousness doesn't exist isn't a good way to do it. It (correctly) invites such strong resistance that it makes communicating the more subtle point nearly impossible. Although perhaps there really isn't a more subtle point in the case of illusionism. Frankish views seem to have evolved towards a straightforward eliminativist account, which is disappointing. I was originally very sympathetic to illusionism when I first looked into it, but it is much less appealing now. I go into some detail about my problems with it here[1] if you're interested.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/naturalism/comments/zr6udy/a_challe...

> No one in their right mind would say something like "chairs are an illusion". This isn't the case when it comes to phenomenal consciousness.

Au contraire! I did something like this recently by arguing that solidity is basically illusory. It went ok.

Solidity simply doesn't have the properties that we naively attribute to it given our perceptions (even solids are mostly empty space!), and analogously, neither does our qualitative experience. The qualities we attribute to solids simply changed as we understood more of what was going on.

But this is just more jargon. At the end of the day, you're still going to sit on a chair to rest your legs and fully expect that your backside remains off the floor. But you have no expectation that an illusory cup of water will quench your thirst. Your interlocutor knows this and so feels no need to press you on terminology. This is an example of where the jargon obscures the meaning. I feel like something similar is going on with illusionism. Frankish wants to use the illusion jargon, but still make use of the fact that what's being picked out by phenomenal properties has explanatory efficacy in the world (at least before I started to read him as a plain old eliminativist).

> He means that it implicitly smuggles in a certain conclusion. For instance, "I think therefore I am" seems logically sound, but actually begs the question in presupposing "I" to then conclude that "I" exists.

That's not correct.

It means if something-- anything-- is in the act of reflecting about thinking-- that is, reflecting about thinking about anything at all, including questioning existence-- then that thing exists only in that it is an entity capable of reflecting upon its own existence. And only during the act of reflecting on thinking is this true. And, most importantly, this notion is ineluctably cordoned off from any and all evidence-based logic which requires potentially illusory sensory input.

The part in italics came from others who read and critiqued Descartes. In any case, his basic logic is sound. Hume did the clearest job of critiquing it, and even he didn't claim Descartes had made a logical fallacy here.

It's been awhile since I've read it, but Descartes probably implied his notion was more powerful than it turns out to be-- i.e., that he could build an epistemology on it. Nevertheless, the basic notion is certainly not a logical fallacy.

> It means if something-- anything-- is in the act of reflecting about thinking-- that is, reflecting about thinking about anything at all, including questioning existence-- then that thing exists only in that it is an entity capable of reflecting upon its own existence.

Still presupposing an entity. Why would a thought need an entity at all to think it? Don't you see that this is an implicit assumption that hasn't been justified? Why can't thoughts simply exist without a thinker? A thought can certainly refer to itself, much like a mathematical expression can be recursive.

Here's the fallacy free version: this is a thought, therefore thoughts exist. No entity implied or needed.