Consciousness is not an illusion: It is the Theatre where Illusions Can Happen

[Ostronomos]

Consciousness is Not an Illusion: It is the Theatre where Illusions Can Happen | by Bill Giannakopoulos | Medium

For decades, certain corners of neuroscience and philosophy have advanced a bold claim: consciousness is an illusion. It feels real, they argue, but it isn’t — a trick played by the brain on itself. This position often emerges from a reductionist discomfort with subjective experience: if it cannot be observed or measured like a liver enzyme, then perhaps it does not truly exist.

But this framing misunderstands both consciousness and the informational structures that underlie it.

Consciousness is not an illusion. It is a real, measurable, and necessary process: the dynamic retention and integration of mutual information within a system undergoing entropy.

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CC continues to mislead the public with false information. Check her post on sciforums about consciousness being an illusion.

CC, how dumb are you to believe that consciousness is an illusion?

[C C]

Chuckle. So you actually think I agree with Keith Frankish and the rest, just because various stripes of eliminative materialism were the dominant philosophical position at the 2025 ICCS conference? It's just a fact -- they quantitatively were, according to the Forbes article.

It's an expected destination for physicalist philosophers and scientists, since there are no precursor properties or capacities for the manifestations of brain processing to incrementally emerge from. The only choice they have is to deny that such private visual, auditory, tactile, etc presentations are the case (exist). Materialist doctrine comes before the evidence of their own personal experiences -- it has the higher hierarchy for them.

[Ostronomos]

I had ventured to guess that you took a materialist stance. From the minimal grasp of what you just wrote I see now that your more neutral about it. I had faith in my understanding regardless of error.

[Magical Realist]

To the extent that there are appearances, consciousness is an illusion. To the extent that there are things that ARE appearing, consciousness is real. In between there are a myriad of interminglings and hybrids of these two facts. Light and shadow. Being and nothingness. Form and substance. Fact and fiction. Matter and mind. Life and death.