Implications of illusionism in consciousness studies: the case of feeling pain in human and non-human animals
Mikołaj Kotuła
Philosophical Psychology July 30, 2026 DOI: 10.1080/09515089.2026.2711817 (opens in new tab)
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Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper Qualitative Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Topics | Philosophy of mind |
| Key points | Argues that adopting illusionism simplifies the methodology for judging animal sentience by treating phenomenal consciousness as a physical illusion, thereby eliminating the need for empirically unverifiable inferences and dissolving the boundary between conscious and non-conscious animals. |
Abstract
From an epistemological standpoint, attributing sentience to non-human animals poses significant challenges. The apparatus that records the electrical activity of the brain can only demonstrate that a certain specific neurological state is taking place. It is impossible to empirically prove that an organism has subjective, qualitative consciousness. Whether an animal has this kind of consciousness is a matter of inference that requires assumptions beyond the methodological framework of science. In this article, I propose to simplify the methodology of judging sentience in animals by assuming illusionism – the view that phenomenal properties of sensations do not exist but are a type of brain-generated illusion. To demonstrate how this approach could work, I present a model of pain sensation based on illusionism. By adopting the given model, we do not have to make empirically unverifiable inferences, because the illusion of subjective consciousness is a fully physical process accessible to intersubjective observation. As a result, the animal world is no longer divided into those animals that are conscious and those that are not, because in a sense none of them are. The boundary of the breakthrough – the appearance of the “inner light” – also disappears. The research program about phenomenal consciousness is explanatorily complete.
Comparable studies
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| The phenomenology of deep brain stimulation-induced changes in OCD: an enactive affordance-based model. | 2013 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| Looking for the Self: Phenomenology, Neurophysiology and Philosophical Significance of Drug-induced Ego Dissolution | 2017 | Theoretical or philosophical paper |
Citations in the library
Cites 12
- On a confusion about a function of consciousness Behavioral and Brain Sciences June 1, 1995
- Dimensions of Animal Consciousness. Trends in Cognitive Sciences August 20, 2020
- Can you believe it? Illusionism and the illusion meta-problem Philosophical Psychology October 25, 2017
- Neural Computations Underlying Phenomenal Consciousness: A Higher Order Syntactic Thought Theory. Frontiers in Psychology 2020
- Profiles of animal consciousness: A species-sensitive, two-tier account to quality and distribution. Cognition February 21, 2023
and 7 more in the library