Keith Frankish
Keith Frankish is the leading defender of illusionism, the position that phenomenal consciousness as usually described does not exist. The claim is easy to misstate. He is not saying that nobody has experiences or that pain does not hurt. He is saying that the properties introspection attributes to experience, the ineffable qualitative feel that seems to resist any functional description, are not properties that anything has. What exists is a system representing itself as having them.
The move that makes this a research programme rather than a denial is the replacement question. Instead of asking why physical processing is accompanied by experience, ask why systems are so powerfully convinced that it is. That question is about representational machinery and it is tractable.
Applied to language models, illusionism produces a symmetry most people find uncomfortable. If a human first person report is a system reporting the contents of a self model rather than reading off an inner fact, then dismissing a model’s report as mere text prediction while accepting the human one requires a difference that has to be stated rather than assumed. Frankish’s point is not that models are conscious. It is that the usual grounds for confidence that they are not do not survive his framework.
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Known for. Illusionism about phenomenal consciousness
Coverage on this site
- Keith Frankish Illusionism LLM First Person Reports 2026 August 2026
- Andy Clark's Predictive Processing Framework and What It Actually Implies for LLMs July 2026
- ICCS 2025 What Chalmers, Frankish, and Blackmore Found to Disagree About in Heraklion May 2026
Every researcher covered on this site is indexed in the directory of consciousness researchers, grouped by the position their published work defends. The positions themselves are set out in the index of consciousness theories.