Reddit mentions of Illusionism (Journal of Consciousness Studies)

The Hard Problem:

The 'hard problem of consciousness' is Chalmers' way of isolating an issue that arises when we try to understand or explain consciousness. You can listen to him explain it here.

A good heuristic for assessing our understanding of \<x\> is our ability to predict, intervene, manufacture and explain \<x\>. If we substitute vision in for \<x\>, we see that in many ways we can reliably do each of these; however we are least reliable when addressing the phenomenal character of vision. The same is true when we replace vision with any other mental function. One way to interpret and classify this is as the "hard problem". There are countless arguments and thought experiments that pull on the same intuition, that there is a hard problem of consciousness.

Many scientists and philosophers at least partially accept the distinction between the hard and easy problems as accurate or useful. Folks disagree about how hard the hard problem is.

On your comments:

Your comments don't accurately track the 'hard' vs 'easy' problems. For instance, it's not the case that veritical perception applies to the hard problem whereas non-veritical perception does not (what you call "actually seeing" and "seeing", respectively).

Your argument against absurd feelings is just that, against absurd feelings. It also applies to absurd functions. I.e. it's insane to talk about 'the motor functions of tasting Purple' and the best argument would be that there is no motor function for such absurd things. But this is not an argument against motor functions per se, its an argument against absurd motor functions. So it is with consciousness as well.

Further info:

If you would like to familiarize yourself with some contemporary arguments against the Hard Problem of Consciousness, check out this collection of essays.

An easier read, and one of my favorites, is this series of conversations by Susan Blackmore. She shares some of your skeptical intuitions and offers penetrating questions for some of the biggest names studying consciousness.

lastly, in this interview Blackmore recommends 5 other books, and spends a bit of time discussing Dennett's approach to the Hard Problem:

>Many people – myself and Dan Dennett included – would say that this is an ill-posed problem. We can’t actually pose the problem better yet, though we can ask better questions. Where I really agree with Dan Dennett is that this is the job that we need to do first. We need to expose all the illusions and delusions that we have about our own minds before we can even begin to know what the right questions are to ask about experience. What we’re talking about is this: this subjective experience…We’re doing this interview by Skype, and it’s your experience of staring at me on a computer screen, and my experience of staring at you on a screen. That’s what we’re trying to account for.
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>Dennett is not saying that that experience doesn’t exist. He’s saying it’s not what you thought it was. He begins the book with him sitting in a rocking chair and experiencing the light on the leaves and so on. That’s what he’s talking about. People accuse him of explaining consciousness away, but he’s actually talking about immediate experience and trying to understand it. He’s saying here are all the illusions, let’s get them out of the way first.