A commonly endorsed assumption about experience – a.k.a. ‘phenomenal consciousness’ – is what I call the intrinsic epistemicity thesis (‘the IE thesis’), according to which an experience E exists only if the subject is epistemically related to it. I argue that the IE thesis is unstable. It entails a worrisome circular ontological dependency relationship between an experience E and the subject’s...
According to illusionism, phenomenal consciousness is an introspective illusion. The illusion problem (Frankish 2016) is to explain the cause of the illusion, or why we are powerfully disposed to judge—erroneously—that we are phenomenally conscious. I propose a theory to solve the illusion problem. I argue that on the basis of three hypotheses about the mind—which I call introspective opacity,...