illusion problem

Compiled with AI assistance and selectively reviewed. Please consult the cited passages; the books remain the authoritative source. About this companion

Editorial synthesis · provisional

Definition

The illusion problem is Frankish’s name for explaining why experience appears to have private, ineffable phenomenal qualities when the illusionist denies those qualities as represented. It concerns the production and force of that seeming. In the corpus it replaces the demand to manufacture an extra qualitative residue, while its philosophical premise remains distinct from the explanatory task itself.

Explanation

AB attributes the term specifically to Frankish within a deflationary tradition. The relevant question is how an embodied, self-modeling creature comes to be convinced of a quality it regards as beyond physical explanation. A successful account must explain that conviction rather than merely dismiss the person who reports it.

RB2 adopts this reframing as the author’s answerable task. It does not deny experiences or seemings; it disputes the further intrinsic and incommunicable character they are represented as possessing. This prevents the entry from redefining illusionism as the crude claim that nothing is experienced.

The overlap with Chalmers’s meta-problem must not erase disagreement. Chalmers asks all theories to explain hard-problem judgments, whereas the deflationist treats that account as sufficient. Damasio, meanwhile, explains the production of subjective experience through bodily physiology and does not accept the same reduction to report.

Scope and attribution

Retain the attributed subentry, with the unresolved philosophical opposition visible.

AB — The Actual Book

Frankish’s term is distinguished from Chalmers’s all-views question.

Occurrence locators: Notes: 241.

PB — The Possible Book

Source-verified occurrence; see the printed-page references below.

Occurrence locators: 100.

RB2 — The Real Book, Volume II: Becoming Is Being

The author’s adopted reframing retains the fact of experience and its contested status.

Occurrence locators: 36, 37, 55.

Background used in the editorial explanation

Named theories and mechanisms are distinguished from neighboring background, homonyms and the author’s own synthesis. Reproduced AI passages retain their separate voice.