Usually, it’s not an everyday discussion what “consciousness” is. That’s been different the last few weeks. It’s made me realize most people—even people who share my worldview in most respects—don’t share my view on consciousness. I was surprised about that.

Claude tells me there’s a term for my view and it’s “illusionism.” The idea is that the “internal experience,” the perception of feeling and thinking, is a physical process like any other. Our “window onto reality” is created by our brains and goes no deeper than that. There’s no meaningful difference between a creature that seems conscious and one that is.

I depart from illusionism in one respect, which is that I don’t think we can be sure there *isn’t* a transcendent facet to consciousness. Still, I put that nonphysical belief in the same category as any other nonphysical belief, such as that reality started five minutes ago or that only frogs really exist—we can’t disprove it, but there’s no reason to think more about it.

“Illusionism” isn’t a great term, because it just says what consciousness isn’t (transcendent or special) and doesn’t say what it is. But that latter question I do not see as a philosophical one. It seems to be mostly a sociological one—we ascribe internal experience by social convention. The humans are conscious because we agree they are.

I’ll set aside whether this is the right view. What surprised me is that it’s not the common view. Not because I think it’s so obviously correct, but because these days, everyday life is constantly telling us that everything we do is nothing more than bare atoms.

We have drugs to make us think and feel differently—and new ones designed each year, because tweaking consciousness is a whole industry. We have a scientific explanation any phenomenon we encounter—even if we don’t know it offhand, there’s a constant sense that you can just look up, e.g., why leaves turn red in the fall and there will be an answer, and the answer won’t involve ghosts or spirits.

These things seem to leave a mark on most everyday beliefs. When the government investigates a train crash, we expect they’re looking for defects and mistakes, not curses and omens.

Yet somehow consciousness has resisted these attacks. People haven’t given it up. The illusion persists.

I suspect that will soon change. If tomorrow someone invented a replicator where you could make an exact copy of yourself with the same memories and thoughts, there would be a few months of mass hand-wringing over which copy was “real.” Then we’d stop worrying and just discard the concept of human identity altogether. Once the social convention lapses, the illusion that supported it lapses too.

Consider that in times when when infant mortality was high, it was common to not name babies until they’d lived a few months. How we view human existence is contingent on circumstances. Whether we believe in an internal experience is just as contingent. The self can be removed from the outside in. You’ll barely know it’s gone.