We have already met one version of this in Dennett’s zimbo (Chapter 2). The zimbo
is a self-monitoring zombie, and because it can monitor its own internal states, it
ends up speaking like we do about, for example, its thoughts, imaginings, and
intentions. It believes it has phenomenal consciousness even if it doesn’t. This is
clearly an illusionist description and indeed Dennett goes so far as to call illusion-
ism ‘the obvious default theory of consciousness’ (2016, p. 65).
Another version is Chris Frith’s view that ‘our brain creates the illusion that our own
mental world is isolated and private’ (2007, p. 17). On such theories, conscious-
ness is not something extra with functions of its own. It is not a new emergent
property on which natural selection can act. What has evolved is our capacity for
thought and language, and our intuitions about ourselves, which may themselves
be useful even though they also lead us astray. For example, being a dualist may
have advantages even if dualism is false. So natural selection acts on the ability to
think, talk, and monitor internal states, and the result is what we call a conscious
creature. To the extent that such a creature believes something else about its own
consciousness, it is suffering from an illusion.
Guy Claxton argues that consciousness started out as a rare phenomenon of
super-alertness, a marvellous mechanism for spotting and responding to basic
emergencies.
It did not emerge ‘for a purpose’. It came along with the developing
ability of the brain to create these transient states of ‘super-activation’ as a
useless by-product, of no more functional interest than the colour of the
liver, or the fact that the sea, under certain conditions, bunches up, rolls
over and turns white.
(1994, p. 133)The sad thing, says Claxton, is that while consciousness began as a rarity, we now
live in an almost perpetual state of low-grade emergency, and it has become
‘a mechanism for constructing dubious stories whose purpose is to defend a
superfluous and inaccurate sense of self ’ (p. 150). This suggests the interesting
conclusion that if we could learn to lead calmer and more mindful lives, our con-
sciousness might not just change but even dissolve away (Chapter 18).
Our last theory, Graziano’s attention schema theory, is hard to classify, because
Graziano says that it has a lot in common with illusionism and belongs in the
same category. But he, like Humphrey, baulks at actually using the term ‘illu-
sionism’ because it risks creating confusion and unwarranted backlash (2016,
p. 112). On this theory, the brain doesn’t just use attention, it constructs an
internal model of it. This model, the attention schema, first evolved as a simple
model of the organism’s own state of attention. From there it evolved to mod-
elling the attentional states of others and thereby predicting, understanding,
and relating to them more effectively (see also Graziano and Kastner, 2011).
This development was adaptive for three main reasons: integrating infor-
mation, allowing increasingly efficient control of attention, and improving
social skills. So the schema does exist and is firmly rooted in evolved brain
mechanisms but is never literally accurate. Consciousness is what the internal
model depicts, and what it depicts is a caricature, ‘a cartoonish, somewhat
inaccurate model of something real’ (Graziano, 2013). Nonetheless, this is not
‘It came along [. . .] as a
useless by-product’(Claxton, 1994, p. 133)‘To call consciousness an
illusion risks confusion
and unwarranted
backlash’(Graziano, 2016, p. 112)