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I do not mean simply that I* disagree* with the [illusionism], ... I mean, rather, that there is no position there to disagree with. It does not exist, because it cannot, except as a mirage. Illusionism is an illusion of grammar.

Unlike the useful visual trick our optical neurology plays on us, however, illusionism is not a natural structural condition of how we perceive the world, but rather a very particular and eccentric theoretical construct, imposed upon our understanding of nature and forcibly held together by the pressures of a metaphysical ideology [materialism].

Perhaps I should explain, though, what illusionism is, or what it imagines itself to be. In simple terms, it is the denial that we possess phenomenal consciousness in the way we think we do.

Our ordinary understanding of our experiences, which philosophy of mind translates into the extraordinary question of the ‘Hard Problem of Consciousness’, tells us that we have access to private, qualitative states of subjective awareness: the ‘what it’s like’ of the personal experience of colors, tastes, tones, even internal titillation or aversion or frissons of excitement. Rather, we are intricate neural and cognitive systems engaged in filtering data and translating them into behaviors, operating at a level of such complexity that our brains, in order to monitor and facilitate that flow of information and orientation, must create for themselves the illusion of a rich inner world of phenomenal experience, which then serves as a user-illusion or interface that allows us to function with economy and efficiency.

There are no real intrinsic qualia, says this theory, but only a system of mental states and propensities by which a brain ‘tracks’ its activities. That is not to deny that there are experiences, supposedly. At least, illusionists assure us that it is a caricature of illusionism to depict it as a denial of the mental states associated with our brain events; illusionists believe in pain and color perception and all the other affects of our interactions with the world

they simply do not believe that these are irreducible and intrinsic states of inner, private experience whose phenomenal natures are really distinct from the mechanical processing of data.

Now, obviously, the riposte to this position that seems most plausible, and even inevitable, is to dismiss it out of hand as an absurd redoubling of the problem rather than a solution. In the case of phenomenal consciousness, one is immediately tempted to say, there can be no illusion here, because qualitative experience is a tautology, however it might be explained in functional terms

a first-person, unified, continuous subjective immediacy that cannot simply be explained away in third-person terms of mechanical operation and interactivity.

Form is like a lump of foam, feeling like a bubble, perception like a mirage, formations like a plantain trunk, and consciousness like a magician's illusion — so taught the Kinsman of the Sun. However one may examine them and carefully investigate them, they appear but empty, hollow, void.

More than ever before, I was convinced by his [Frankish] careful and persistent case for the illusionist view that he has chiefly succeeded in persuading himself that he believes in something he does not—because he cannot—believe, any more than he can believe in a square circle.

intrinsic experience is uniquely ontologically irreducible in itself and hence definitely real.

I have written often enough and at sufficient length on those aspects of mental agency that I think resistant to physicalist reduction

But the quantitative event and its variable reception as cognitive data do not in any way qualify the enigma of experience as such, which remains equally mysterious in either case.

Mental agency may vary in the relative degree of awareness achieved, but no aspect of it exists apart from the totality of its action, which becomes a conscious action always and only within a movement of intentionality both proceeding from and appearing to a unified subjective apprehension. That agency can be conceptually articulated into distinct aspects, as part of a general phenomenology of its structure, but it certainly cannot be decomposed into separable functions, even if the physical apparatus of cognition and sensation can be. (emph aded)

And yet, every time we pronounce or presume the designation ‘I’, we invoke an immediate experience of a unifying totality within the space of consciousness, prior even to any reflective differentiation of subject and object.

That does not mean there are not plural functions at work behind the curtain or below the threshold or beyond the high vaulted ceiling of that space, but within that space itself there is something unifying and directing that array of forces.

Consciousness of any kind exists as just this order of first-personhood, which cannot result from any mere combination of mechanical forces, because it is the prior condition of any combined effect as that which appears.

The translation of plurality into a genuinely indissoluble unity of apprehension—not a composite or synoptic compilation, but an actual unity of the awareness of this event of cognition within this continuum of experience—is simply impossible in mechanical terms

And let us be clear: this unity is not merely some agreement of sensible data in a synchronous and symmetrical whole, which the brain need merely keep in proper alignment as a cognitive event. It is instead a positively transcendental capacity and orientation that subtends both the conjunctions and disjunctions of data within its always already detached survey of the world and the senses, in self-present immediacy.

So it is with ‘plural drafts’ of consciousness: there may not be a substantial soul-substance of the Cartesian variety there, lodged incongruously in a mechanical body, but there is definitely a continuous ‘I’, if only in that instant—let’s be Buddhists about this for a moment—to whom and by whom and in whom there is a presentation, a Darstellung, that defies mechanical analysis.

what principally concerns me here, which is that aforementioned first-personhood and its inherently regressive structure—if, that is, one tries to explain it in mechanical terms rather than grant, as one ought, that it must necessarily be present prior even to introspection.

To be conscious is to be conscious of being conscious; consciousness is always already its own intentional orientation and unified field as, once again, a transcendental condition of all experience.

This is one of the points in the performance at which the illusionist relies on an especially distracting bit of prestidigitation. Supposedly, once one removes all the cognitive apparatus—neurological, cerebral, what have you—and all the discrete processes of third-person filtration, synthesis, and systemic surveillance, all at once, abracadabra, presto, one finds that nothing remains that needs to be explained, and the entire spectacle of qualitative representation will simply vanish away in a scrim of smoke as nothing other than a stage effect.

there is in fact the experience itself, which is indeed something different from the flow of data, precisely because of this irreducible introspective regressiveness that is the structure of reflective awareness

There is a reason why grammar refuses to give us a language that does not rely upon the anchor of the ‘I’. That anchor need not be conceived of in quite the essentialist form of the Cartesian ego, but it is present in every mental act that is aware of being aware of itself, and in every account we attempt of the nature of such acts.

when Frankish reprises Dennett’s circular attempt to dismiss subjectivity as no more than a narrative constructed by the brain

The mechanical philosophy began merely as a methodological bracketing, for the purpose of ‘tracking’ discrete physical phenomena, and it was produced through the systematic subtraction of all the obvious marks of mental agency from the model of nature being employed: purpose, form, subjectivity, and so forth. To make room for that model, all the manifest phenomena of the mental were assigned to a separate sphere of God, spirits, and souls, discontinuous from and antithetical to the mechanical order. ... The humble method soon became an imperious metaphysics, even in disavowing the name, and began to see itself as the shape of reality, within whose configurations everything that really exists could be fully explained. Thus the mechanistic picture of nature was advanced ever more deeply into the precincts of the Cartesian ego...

Frankish is a Cartesian sub contrario, granted, but he is one nonetheless, and he is consequently unable to think through the mysteries of mind according to any paradigm other than an opposition between our pictures of mental agency and our pictures of mindless nature.

And illusionism is at once the most consistent and most quixotic form of mechanistic thinking, the inevitable and utterly absurd cul-de-sac at the end of the materialist leg of the Cartesian itinerary

Still, the citadel has not been taken: of necessity, the irreducibly non-mechanistic first-personhood of the subjective ‘I’ remains, even if reduced to the most tenuous of whispers