Consciousness is in the business of producing illusions.

(by Joe)

Gary Williams, whose blog Minds and Brains I enjoy very much (although don't always agree with), has just written a post on the possibility of partial epiphenomenalism. The idea seems to be that the "feeling of consciousness" could be an epiphenomenal 'illusion' without consciousness itself being epiphenomenal. For one thing, this would solve the problem raised by the Libet experiments (which I mentioned briefly here) by allowing the apparently epiphenomenal experience of volition to be preceded by a casually active conscious decision, just one that has yet to be experienced. There's some similarity here with Dennett's interpretation of Libet in Consciousness Explained (1991: 154-67), where he argues for something like the distribution of consciousness into different 'strands'.

I need to give it a bit more thought, but I'm quite tempted by the idea of divorcing the epiphenomenal experience of consciousness from the functional process of consciousness itself. I particularly liked Williams' suggestion that we might want to say that "consciousness is in the business of producing illusions". That is to say, part of what consciousness does is make extremely convincing illusions of, for example, free will, moral agency, or self hood.

Anyway, just some quick thoughts on a post I found interesting. Proper post coming up soon, so watch this space!

Dennett, D. 1991. Consciousness Explained. Little, Brown and Company.