Is Your Suffering An Illusion? -

Keith Frankish is a philosopher and writer, British-born but now living in Crete, Greece. He is an Honorary Professor in the Philosophy Department at the University of Sheffield, UK, a Visiting Research Fellow with The Open University, UK, and an Adjunct Professor with the Brain and Mind Programme at the University of Crete. He is also editor of the Cambridge University Press series Elements in Philosophy of Mind. He spent many years thinking about the nature of belief and reasoning, developing a ‘two-level’ view of the human mind that he set out in his 2004 book, Mind and Supermind. Now he focuses mostly on Philosopy of Mind and says "I now spend much of my time defending the unpalatable but salutary view that phenomenal consciousness is an introspective illusion." Check out his ‪@MindChat‬podcast with panpsychist Philip Goff.

In Sentientist Conversations we talk about the two most important questions: “what’s real?” & “who matters?” Sentientism is "evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings." The audio is on our Podcast: https://apple.co/391khQO & https://open.spotify.com/show/3c9OG5M....

00:00 Clips
00:52 Welcome
03:15 Keith's Intro
"By the way I don't think sentience is an illusion"
"I'm best known as a person who thinks consciousness is an illusion... I don't think that"
"I spend most of my time thinking about the human mind"
"I suppose I have a sort of campaigning streak"
"The state of consciousness science is unsettled... a revolutionary state"
"It's important for science... for philosophy... for knowledge... ethical implications too"
"Trying to invite people to look at things a different way"
Moving from UK academia to Greece "I moved more to the edges... I think it freed me... to spend more of time doing I think are important... devote energies to things that perhaps wouldn't have got so well rewarded in the formal academic structures"
08:23 What's Real?
Working class family
"Religion was present but in a very watered down typically sort of English way... I was baptised... go to church... Sunday School"
"It was never oppressive"
Uncle "... a wonderful example of the compassion and... the commitment to social justice that can come with religion"
Reading an encyclopaedia about the scientific scepticism about the soul "Oh right, there's no soul then... and that was it!"
"I had a very strong inclination to trust science... certainly against religious interpretations of the world"
"...there's another world in which I would have become a scientist."
Health issues "prevented me from completing my schooling so I spent a lot of time educating myself..."
"You can't really educate yourself in science but you can educate yourself in philosophy... philosophy can only be taught by self education."
"My path went somewhat away from science but I always felt that they were the people actually uncovering the nature of reality"
Engineer dad "He was fantastic at explaining how things worked and taking things apart... I loved that."
"It wasn't that science was just cataloguing a lot of facts. It was showing how things worked. Revealing the secrets."
Fascination with magic... "The mechanism never lives up to the effect... that's kind of the wonder of it... how you can get such amazing effects from such simple mechanisms."
Darwin's Evolution by Natural Selection "You can explain it on a postcard... but it explains so much... such wonderful explanatory power... that real magic as Dan Dennett would say."
"A lot of modern philosophers were doing stuff that seemed very close to science... continuous with science... particularly in philosophy of mind."
Being introspective "probably too much... I spend an awful lot of my life just sitting and thinking... often to no benefit whatsoever... A lot of time in my own head."
"Not only thinking about the world but also thinking about the thinking that was happening in my head."
Asking as a child "What are these thoughts?... what exactly are they?... where are they?... what causes them?... how are they connected?... how are they my thoughts rather than just thoughts that exist?"
First degree with the ‪@TheOpenUniversity‬ including the "Reason and Experience" course
Doing an MA at ‪@universityofsheffield‬ "Mind and Intentionality" with Peter Carruthers
01:04:55 What Matters?
01:15:10 Who Matters?
01:47:26 A Better Future?
01:58:00 Follow Keith:
https://www.keithfrankish.com/
https://bsky.app/profile/keithfrankis...
https://mastodon.social/@keithfrankish
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_F...
- ‪@keithfrankish‬

& much more... see https://sentientism.info/ for full notes.
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