This stance has recently taken on the name of illusionism: the view that phenomenal consciousness is an
illusion. The term was popularized by the philosopher Keith Frankish.[60] Frankish argues that
"illusionism" is preferable to "eliminativism" for labelling the view that phenomenal consciousness is an
illusion. More substantively, Frankish argues that illusionism about phenomenal consciousness is
preferable to realism about phenomenal consciousness. He states: "Theories of consciousness typically
address the hard problem. They accept that phenomenal consciousness is real and aim to explain how it
comes to exist. There is, however, another approach, which holds that phenomenal consciousness is an
illusion and aims to explain why it seems to exist."[19] Frankish concludes that illusionism "replaces the
hard problem with the illusion problem—the problem of explaining how the illusion of phenomenality
arises and why it is so powerful."[19]
The philosopher Daniel Dennett is another prominent figure associated with illusionism. After Frankish
published a paper in the Journal of Consciousness Studies titled Illusionism as a Theory of
Consciousness,[60] Dennett responded with his own paper with the spin-off title Illusionism as the
Obvious Default Theory of Consciousness.[61] Dennett has been arguing for the illusory status of
consciousness since early on in his career. For example, in 1979 he published a paper titled On the
Absence of Phenomenology (where he argues for the nonexistence of phenomenal consciousness).[70]
Similar ideas have been explicated in his 1991 book Consciousness Explained.[71] Dennett argues that the
so-called "hard problem" will be solved in the process of solving what Chalmers terms the "easy
problems".[16] He compares consciousness to stage magic and its capability to create extraordinary
illusions out of ordinary things.[72] To show how people might be commonly fooled into overstating the
accuracy of their introspective abilities, he describes a phenomenon called change blindness, a visual
process that involves failure to detect scenery changes in a series of alternating images.[73] He
accordingly argues that consciousness need not be what it seems to be based on introspection. To address
the question of the hard problem, or how and why physical processes give rise to experience, Dennett
states that the phenomenon of having experience is nothing more than the performance of functions or the
production of behavior, which can also be referred to as the easy problems of consciousness.[16] Thus,
Dennett argues that the hard problem of experience is included among—not separate from—the easy
problems, and therefore they can only be explained together as a cohesive unit.[72]
Eliminativists differ on the role they believe intuitive judgement plays in creating the apparent reality of
consciousness. The philosopher Jacy Reese Anthis is of the position that this issue is born of an
overreliance on intuition, calling philosophical discussions on the topic of consciousness a form of
"intuition jousting".[74] But when the issue is tackled with "formal argumentation" and "precise
semantics" then the hard problem will dissolve.[74] The philosopher Elizabeth Irvine, in contrast, can be
read as having the opposite view, since she argues that phenomenal properties (that is, properties of
consciousness) do not exist in our common-sense view of the world. She states that "the hard problem of
consciousness may not be a genuine problem for non-philosophers (despite its overwhelming obviousness
to philosophers)."[75]
A complete illusionist theory of consciousness must include the description of a mechanism by which the
illusion of subjective experience is had and reported by people. Various philosophers and scientists have
proposed possible theories.[76] For example, in his book Consciousness and the Social Brain
neuroscientist Michael Graziano advocates what he calls attention schema theory, in which our perception