Hello, everyone. I'm Stephen West. This is philosophize this. Thanks for making the podcast possible for the last 10 years.

Anniversary was a week ago. I'm going to keep doing my best to create something here that adds value to your life to the people around you.

Thanks to everyone who contributes and keeps this a free resource for everybody that wants to access it.

People on Patreon, patreon.com slash philosophize this, philosophize this.org for everything else.

If you never do this without all of you, so thank you. Quick update. I'm going to give you the abridged version of it here.

But I'm kind of tired of not posting episodes of this podcast as frequently as I'd like to be posting them.

Long story short, it's really just been a matter of poor planning by me. I just may actually be the worst person at estimating what 30 minutes of a podcast discussion is going to look like.

Today's episode is a perfect example of that. This was supposed to be an episode on illusionism as an answer to the hard problem, as well as a discussion on free will being an illusion.

That was going to be 30 minutes of talking in my head.

Ended up being an hour and a half. And then for the last two weeks, I've been sitting here trying to cut things out, trying to make it into an episode.

I don't want to do that anymore. There's too much good stuff that I'm cutting out. I'm just going to post more episodes of the podcast.

So in the interest of giving you people more, as well as the fringe benefit of maintaining my sanity, today's episode is going to be on illusionism.

Another episode I did on free will hard determinism, Susan Wolf Laplace. I'll release that here in about a week.

Anyway, I hope you have a great week, and I hope you love the show today.

So throughout the last couple episodes we've been doing on the philosophy of mind, there's been an idea that we've referenced multiple times and really just glossed over it as something that's practically self-evident.

The idea is that when we think about consciousness, we can split it into two different types. There's access consciousness on the one hand and phenomenal consciousness on the other.

This is what we've been saying. When it comes to access consciousness, that's the stuff we can explain with neuroscience, things like memories, information processing, our field of visual awareness.

We can clearly explain a bit about how all that stuff works. But in this conversation so far, what keeps on being said is that what we can't seem to explain is phenomenal consciousness.

The subjective experience that underlies conscious thought, that it feels like something to be me.

There's this idea that this phenomenal consciousness is something separate, something fundamental, something in a category all its own that needs to be explained.

The idea is you can explain a lot of stuff about access consciousness, but you can't explain phenomenal consciousness at least not yet.

But if you are a good materialist, listen to the discussions on this series so far, and you're sitting in the back of the room, being super patient, not saying anything, trying to be respectful to all the other ideas being presented.

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