Calling it an illusion is not interesting. We define consciousness and subjective experience to match the very experience we understand.
There is literally no way for it to be an illusion, the definition itself precludes it. No matter how consciousness and subjective experience are implemented in the hardware of our brains, it is still a concept that we use to describe the experience, and the experience is real no matter what.
> No matter how consciousness and subjective experience are implemented in the hardware of our brains, it is still a concept that we use to describe the experience, and the experience is real no matter what.
What does it mean for something to be "real"? Physics says your car is not actually real. There is no "car" particle or field in the physics ontology, there is no physical experiment we can run to definitively test whether something is a car or is not a car, such that aliens that evolved on another planet would agree perfectly with your assessments. If physics is our best theory of what actually exists, then your car doesn't really exist.
Analogously, this is the crux of the hard problem of consciousness: is the qualitative experience of consciousness actually real, or is it reducible to third-party objective facts, like every other phenomenon we've encountered, and so the irreducible properties it seems to have are actually an illusion that is reducible to non-conscious particles and fields?
Given the way you've phrased your post, that the brain "implements" consciousness, I expect you might agree that such a reduction is ultimately possible. In that case, you too might be an eliminative materialist, which asserts that consciousness does not really exist.
That said, all materialists agree that phenomenal experience requires an explanation, it's just that they assert that explanation will come from neuroscience. Antimaterialists assert that no such explanation is possible.
And yet most people call it a car, consider it real, and at the same time don't see a problem in reducing it to its physical properties.
"is the qualitative experience of consciousness actually real, or is it reducible to third-party objective facts"
Why not both?
The "real" refers to our subjective experience. That there is something that is like to be me. Something that is like to be a bat. And at least under certain definitions, that's what we call conscience. That something I know I experience and that I doubt a computer is experiencing too.
Why would this be incompatible with reducing this experience to third party objective facts? We simply don't know but I don't see why we couldn't.
After posting my comment yesterday, I read some of your other comments and I don't think we actually disagree.
The problem is probably the definition of "real".
I'm not arguing that consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe when I say it is real. The jury is still out but that's not what interests me the most. When I say "real" I'm talking about my subjective experience. It is real in the sense that it is something that I know I experience, regardless of the mechanisms involved.
Ultimately, what I'm interested in is finding out how it arises. Explaining it. Reducing it to its "third-party objective facts" if possible. Being able to look at a machine that mimics us and tell if that machine is experiencing something comparable to what we experience.
Exactly! The illusion argument (let us call it ArgIllusionCons) that applies to consciousness can be applied with just a few extra steps to everything we perceive, including ArgIllusionCons itself.
Perhaps, but there's no guarantee that it's anything more than a transient state, that lasts at most until you next lose consciousness. The consciousness that you have today may have no relation to that of yesterday or tomorrow, apart from running on the same brain "hardware" and having access to the same memories.
There is literally no way for it to be an illusion, the definition itself precludes it. No matter how consciousness and subjective experience are implemented in the hardware of our brains, it is still a concept that we use to describe the experience, and the experience is real no matter what.