Hieronymus Bosch and workshop, The Conjurer, c. 1502. Musée Municipal, Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Every eye is on the pearl in the conjurer's fingers. Nobody watches the man at the back, who is stealing a purse.Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
An illustrated guide
Is consciousness a magic trick?
You seem to have an inner world: a private show of colours, sounds and feelings that no brain scan could ever capture. Daniel Dennett argued that this is how the brain's work seems from the inside, not how it is. The task is to explain the trick, not to be dazzled by it.
This site starts from Dennett, and from one short essay in particular, "Illusionism as the Obvious Default Theory of Consciousness" (2016). In it he compares the philosophy of mind with stage magic. We know a conjurer has not really sawn a woman in half, even when we cannot see how it was done. Dennett says we should treat the apparent magic of experience the same way.
From there, each major view of the mind gets its own page: what it claims, what drives it, and where it parts company with Dennett. His closest allies come first, then a long history running from Aristotle's soul to Ned Block's nation of China, and finally the thinkers who reject his picture outright. Each page has an interactive figure of its own, from Leibniz's mill to Mary's black-and-white room.
