Speaker

Keith Frankish

Keith Frankish

Philosopher of mind and the leading academic defender of illusionism about consciousness. Honorary Reader in Philosophy at the University of Sheffield and Visiting Research Fellow at The Open University; previously worked at the Open University and the University of Cambridge. Frankish’s research sits at the intersection of philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and the foundations of AI. He edited the collection Illusionism as a Theory of Consciousness (2017), which brought the position into mainstream philosophical debate.

Frankish works in a broadly naturalist tradition: he treats the mind as part of the biological world and is sceptical of any account that posits a domain of mental properties inaccessible in principle to scientific investigation. His version of illusionism is distinct from eliminativism (he does not deny that experience happens) and from standard functionalism (he holds that the standard functionalist account still imports an unwarranted notion of qualia). The key claim is that the brain’s introspective systems systematically misrepresent the character of its own states, generating the appearance of raw, non-physical inner feels where none exist.

Core positions

Frankish is best known for defending illusionism — the view that phenomenal consciousness, as philosophers typically conceive it (rich, intrinsically qualitative, privately accessible), is a representational fiction the brain produces about itself. The brain is a very good magician: it generates all the functional effects that qualia would produce without there being any qualia in the philosophically loaded sense. This dissolves the hard problem of consciousness not by solving it but by showing that the problem rests on a mistaken account of what is being explained.

His account of consciousness is interactionist and biological: consciousness is what it is like for a richly embodied organism to engage with the world, shaped by millions of years of evolution and decades of individual learning history. The colour red is not a private mental quality; it is the complex global significance that reddish stimulation has acquired for this particular animal in this particular world. The self is not a Cartesian point of pure awareness but this animal — a biological organism that monitors and reports on its own states, with all the fallibility that implies.

Frankish is also a careful philosopher of the boundary cases: he resists sharp ethical lines drawn at qualia-possession, arguing that the ethical significance of a system tracks its actual functional richness — the dimensions of its sensitivity and self-monitoring — rather than whether it possesses a notional inner light. This has direct implications for how one approaches animal consciousness and the consciousness of future AI systems.

In the wiki