J. B. S. Haldane’s refutation (reductio ad absurdum) of ‘illusionism’

?

J. B. S. Haldane’s refutation (reductio ad absurdum) of ‘illusionism’*

There was a faith-healer of Deal
Who said: ‘Although pain isn’t real,

When I sit on a pin

And it punctures my skin
I dislike what I fancy I feel.’

Haldane, J. B. S. (1932) ‘Some Consequences of Materialism’, in The Inequality of Man (Harmondsworth: Penguin).

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

*‘Illusionism’ is the view that consciousness is an illusion, i.e. doesn’t really exist.

I once proposed, in print (‘Cien años de la conciencia: “una larga formación en el absurdo”’ (‘A hundred years of consciousness: “a long training in absurdity”’)), that the view that consciousness doesn’t exist is the silliest view that has ever been seriously defended in the whole history of human thought. (It means, for one thing, that no one—no creature—has ever suffered in any way; let alone felt anything good.)

That proposal was probably too quick. Professor Uriah Kriegel put it to me, in Paris once, that there is a sillier view: the view that nothing exists.

That was clearly a good move. The best I could do by way of reply was to say that illusionism was perfectly silly. I defined perfect silliness as follows: perfect silliness is silliness that, on a scale from 0 to 1, has a silliness index of 1. The idea was that although the claim that nothing exists is in fact stronger, and so, arguably, sillier, than the claim that consciousness doesn’t exist (the former entails the latter, while the latter doesn’t entail the former) they are in fact equal in that they both have a silliness index of 1. So the former claim isn’t actually sillier than the latter claim, although it is stronger.

Even so I had to give ground. The claim that consciousness doesn’t exist is at best the equal silliest view that has ever been seriously defended (if, that is, the view that nothing exists has ever been seriously defended; Prof. Kriegel assures me that it has been).

Many have said airily that all is illusion. But then illusion, at least, must exist. In which case it isn’t an illusion that illusion exists. And then again, if illusion exists, someone-or-something must exist in order to be subject to illusion. So, again, it isn’t true that nothing exists.