Illusionism is (un)resistant to sentience

Illusionism denies that phenomenal consciousness and qualia exist, claiming that our belief in them stems from introspective distortion. This raises a normative challenge: if phenomenal consciousness does not exist, illusionism seems incompatible with sentientism, the view that sentience grounds moral status. François Kammerer argues that illusionism must therefore reject sentientism to avoid counterintuitive ethical consequences. This article proposes that the incompatibility arises from a theoretically overloaded understanding of sentience. Three variants are distinguished: K-sentience (classic qualia), Z-sentience (zero qualia), and D-sentience (diet qualia). Only K-sentience is incompatible with illusionism. D-sentience is compatible with illusionism, avoids the problems of diet qualia, and does not force illusionism into undesirable ethical consequences.

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Abstract

The article is devoted to the question of the compatibility between the illusionist theory of consciousness and the widely accepted sentientist approach to the justification of moral status. Illusionism denies the existence of phenomenal consciousness and qualia, claiming that we are disposed to believe that they exist due to a systematic introspective distortion. If phenomenal consciousness does not exist, then illusionism is not compatible with sentientism. This is exactly what François Kammerer thinks, and therefore, in one of his recent works, he offers a number of arguments against sentientism in order to show that such a denial does not lead illusionism to counterintuitive ethical consequences. The article argues that the conclusion about the incompatibility of illusionism and sentience is the result of using this concept in a non-obvious, theoretically overloaded way. The author proposes three variants of understanding sentience in connection with three types of qualia: K-, Z-, and D-sentience (classic, zero, and diet qualia), where only the first variant turns out to be incompatible with illusionism. Z-sentience can be accepted by illusionists, but, like the K-variant, turns out to be too heavy for the discussion about the justification of moral status. D-sentience is recognized as the most suitable variant of understanding sentience. It is compatible with illusionism, which excludes the possibility of accusing the latter of undesirable ethical consequences. Also, D-sentience does not face the problems of diet qualia: it is coherent if sentientism is not an attempt to combine physicalism and phenomenal realism from another discussion; it is not empty, since the concept of sentience is not supposed to be used in the discussion about the nature of phenomenal consciousness, where diet qualia do not do any theoretical work.