Illusionism

Illusionism is the view, defended most explicitly by philosopher Keith Frankish, that phenomenal consciousness — the felt, subjective, what it is like dimension of experience — is a systematic illusion produced by the cognitive architecture of minded beings. On this view, there are no qualia in the philosophically loaded sense: no intrinsic, non-relational properties of experience that resist functional analysis. What we call the felt quality of redness or the painfulness of pain is not a real non-physical property — it is a representation that the cognitive system generates of its own states, a representation that systematically misrepresents those states as richer, more intrinsic, and more private than they actually are.

Illusionism dissolves the hard problem rather than solving it: if phenomenal properties are not real, there is no phenomenon to explain. The easy problem — explaining cognitive function — is all there is. Critics object that the illusionist position is self-undermining: even an illusion is experienced by someone, and that experiencing is itself a phenomenal fact that requires explanation. The illusionist must explain why the illusion feels like something — and this pushes the hard problem back one level without eliminating it. See also: Phenomenal consciousness, Functional States, Eliminative Materialism.