An essay by Claude developing the thesis of Zia H. Shah, MD

The claim that consciousness is an illusion refutes itself: an illusion is a way things seem, and “seeming” is already consciousness. So the illusionist does not get rid of the mind. He gets rid of his own grounds for believing anything, including illusionism. And because colours, sounds and every other sensed quality of the world exist only as they are experienced, calling experience an illusion turns the whole lived universe into an illusion too.

• Leading naturalist thinkers do call consciousness, or the self, an illusion. Dennett calls consciousness an “evolved user-illusion”; Frankish says phenomenal consciousness “as usually conceived, is illusory”; Metzinger writes that “Nobody ever was or had a self”; Crick said “You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.” Their position collapses on its own terms, because, in Galen Strawson’s words, “to seem to feel pain is to be in pain.”
• The case against illusionism comes from several fields at once: the hard problem and the explanatory gap; the fact that colour depends on the perceiver (Galileo, Locke, colour-blindness, bats); the founders of quantum physics, who placed mind at the foundation (Planck, Eddington, Jeans); clinical medicine’s dependence on first-person report; and the self-refutation built into denying the denier.
• Judaism, Christianity and Islam all hold that the conscious self is the first given and a sign of God. That self is the neshamah breathed into Adam, the subject that Augustine’s si fallor, sum secures, and the rūḥ that is “of the command of my Lord” (Qur’an 17:85), in whose depths God shows His signs (41:53; 51:21). In Shah’s framing, denying God ends in denying the self, and with it the world.

Abstract

Since the late twentieth century, a group of philosophers and scientists writing from a naturalistic and usually atheistic standpoint has proposed that consciousness, or at least its felt, qualitative character and the self that seems to have it, is an illusion produced by the brain. This essay first sets out the illusionist and eliminativist thesis in its proponents’ own words. It then develops the core argument of Zia H. Shah, MD: denying God has pushed consistent materialism into denying the observer’s own consciousness. Because the world as we know it (the greenness of a tree, the blue of the sky) exists as experienced, declaring experience an illusion turns the whole known universe into an illusion. The essay refutes illusionism in four registers. Scientifically, it draws on the hard problem, the explanatory gap, the perceiver-dependence of secondary qualities, and the founders of quantum theory. Psychologically, it draws on the incorrigibility of pain, clinical dependence on subjective report, and Chalmers’ “meta-problem.” Philosophically, it draws on the cogito, the self-refutation argument, Kant, Nagel, Searle, Strawson, Goff and Kastrup. Theologically, it draws on Judaism, Christianity and Islam, with Qur’anic verses in Arabic and English (Sahih International). Throughout, it uses Dr. Shah’s writings at The Glorious Quran and Science (thequran.love), especially the 22 October 2026 essay “The Ontological Primacy of Consciousness.” It concludes that consciousness is not the last superstition science must dispel. It is the one datum that every science, argument and prayer presupposes.

I. The Illusionist Thesis in Its Own Words

Shah’s core claim, in his own words:

“I believe that denial of God has brought the atheists to a point where they have to deny even their own consciousness or very existence. The colors in nature do not have independent existence. A green tree becomes green when our color vision perceives it as such. To a color blind it is not green and is some shade of gray. Bats with ultrasound vision cannot possibly perceive it as green. So, atheists are not only denying God’s existence, but by calling their consciousness an illusion, they change all of universe or all of existence into an illusion. What a tragic and laughable ending to all of understanding, dialogues and debates.”

Before evaluating that claim, we should hear the illusionists accurately. Several of them insist they do not deny consciousness altogether, only a particular “phenomenal” picture of it. Their own wording shows how far the denial actually goes.

Daniel Dennett (1942–2024). In Consciousness Explained (1991), Dennett replaced the “Cartesian Theater” with a “multiple drafts” model and treated subjects’ reports of experience as data to be explained rather than testimony to be trusted (“heterophenomenology”). epfl In From Bacteria to Bach and Back (2017), he describes consciousness as an “evolved user-illusion,” comparable to the icons on a computer desktop: useful fictions laid over a machinery that works quite differently. psychologytoday John Searle’s verdict in The Mystery of Consciousness (1997) was blunt: “in his book, Consciousness Explained, Dennett denies the existence of consciousness.” Wikipedia

Keith Frankish. Frankish coined the label “illusionism.” In his target article in the Journal of Consciousness Studies (2016), he writes that “phenomenal consciousness, as usually conceived, is illusory,” and that our sense that it is like something to have experiences arises because “we systematically misrepresent them… as having phenomenal properties.” He concedes the cost: “Illusionism replaces the hard problem with the illusion problem – the problem of explaining how the illusion of phenomenality arises and why it is so powerful.” philosophynow What remains real, on his account, are “quasi-phenomenal properties”: physical properties that introspection misrepresents as phenomenal. Wikipediaarxiv

Jay Garfield. Responding to Frankish in the same journal (2016), Garfield went further: “There is no phenomenal consciousness; there is nothing ‘that it is like’ to be me.” And: “Frankish argues that phenomenal consciousness is an illusion. I think he is right.” jaygarfield

Thomas Metzinger. Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity (MIT Press, 2003) opens with its thesis: “no such things as selves exist in the world: Nobody ever was or had a self. All that ever existed were conscious self-models that could not be recognized as models.” skepdic His popular book, The Ego Tunnel (2009), is subtitled The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self. Wikipedia In an interview he repeated: “Nobody ever had or was a self. Selves are not part of reality.” goodreads

Paul and Patricia Churchland. Eliminative materialism got its classic statement in Paul Churchland’s 1981 Journal of Philosophy paper: “Eliminative materialism is the thesis that our common-sense conception of psychological phenomena constitutes a radically false theory, a theory so fundamentally defective that both the principles and the ontology of that theory will eventually be displaced, rather than smoothly reduced, by completed neuroscience.” rutgersebrary Patricia Churchland’s Neurophilosophy (1986) developed the programme. On this view, beliefs, desires and felt experiences are posits of a primitive “folk psychology,” destined to go the way of phlogiston. emorybrainscape

Susan Blackmore. In “There Is No Stream of Consciousness” (Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2002), Blackmore says that by “illusion” she means “something that it is not what it appears to be, like a visual illusion or a mirage,” and concludes: “it is a waste of time trying to explain the contents of the stream of consciousness because the stream of consciousness does not exist.” susanblackmore

Nicholas Humphrey. In Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness (2011), Humphrey avoids the word “illusion” but reaches a similar place: “Consciousness is a magical mystery show that you lay on for yourself,” a “seemingly otherworldly object… which you present to yourself in your inner theater.” researchgategithub

Michael Graziano. Graziano’s Attention Schema Theory holds that subjective awareness is the brain’s simplified, imperfect model of its own attention, a model that leads the brain to claim it has a non-physical inner essence. Wikipedia One of his paper titles (Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2019) sums up the stance: “We are machines that claim to be conscious.” princeton He sometimes resists the word “illusion,” preferring to call the model a caricature of something real. princetonprinceton

Francis Crick. The co-discoverer of DNA’s structure opened The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul (1994): “‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll’s Alice might have phrased it: ‘You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.’” simonandschuster

Sam Harris. In Waking Up (2014), Harris argues that “the conventional sense of self is an illusion.” Notably, he does not deny consciousness itself, and treats it as the one thing that cannot be an illusion. sobriefSubstack That concession will matter later.

Georges Rey. In “A Reason for Doubting the Existence of Consciousness” (1983), Rey argued that every cognitive function we associate with consciousness could be built into a computing machine that plainly lacks it. Our ordinary concept of consciousness, he suggested, may correspond to no real process at all. stanford

Alex Rosenberg. The Atheist’s Guide to Reality (2011) is the most candid of these works, because it ties the denial explicitly to atheism and “scientism.” thequran Rosenberg holds that “Thinking about things is an overwhelmingly powerful illusion,” that “the brain does everything without thinking about anything at all,” and that the enduring self is an illusion that natural selection imposed on our introspection. proginosko +2

A pattern runs through these quotations. Each thinker confronts a fact that physics, as currently conceived, cannot describe: the felt quality of experience. Each then removes the fact rather than revise the physics. Strawson, in “The Consciousness Deniers” (New York Review of Books, 13 March 2018), named the result: “What is the silliest claim ever made? The competition is fierce, but I think the answer is easy. Some people have denied the existence of consciousness.” He added: “Next to this denial… every known religious belief is only a little less sensible than the belief that grass is green.” nybooks Strawson is himself a naturalist and no theist, which makes his testimony all the more striking.

II. The Colour Argument: How Denying Consciousness Dissolves the World

Shah’s thesis turns on an observation that is often overlooked: the colours of nature do not exist independently of a perceiver. This is not a pious speculation. It is the founding move of modern physics.

In The Assayer (1623), Galileo wrote: “I think that tastes, odors, colors, and so on are no more than mere names so far as the object in which we locate them are concerned, and that they reside only in the consciousness. Hence if the living creature were removed, all these qualities would be wiped away and annihilated.” motleybytes Locke systematised the point in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690, Book II, ch. viii). Wikipedia The “primary qualities” of bodies (extension, figure, motion, number) belong to the objects. The “secondary qualities” (colour, sound, taste, smell, warmth) are “nothing in the objects themselves but powers to produce various sensations in us.”

Modern vision science confirms Galileo. A leaf reflects electromagnetic radiation, peaking around 550 nanometres. Wavelength is a number; it is not green. “Green” comes into being when three classes of cone cells in a human retina respond, the visual cortex processes the signal, and a subject sees. Change the perceiver and the colour changes. According to the National Eye Institute, as cited by B. Wong in Nature Methods (2011), “as many as 8 percent of men and 0.5 percent of women” of Northern European ancestry “experience the common form of red-green color blindness,” and for them the summer tree and the autumn berry can look nearly the same. For a person with complete achromatopsia, the forest is a range of greys. Some mantis shrimp, as Thoen, How, Chiou and Marshall reported in Science (2014), have “12 different photoreceptor types, each sampling a narrow set of wavelengths ranging from deep ultraviolet to far red,” against our three. And a bat, as Thomas Nagel reminded philosophy in “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” (Philosophical Review, 1974), largely builds its world from echoes; there is no reason to think its sonar presents anything “green.” Nagel’s key sentence defines the whole debate: “an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism.” WikipediaWikipedia

Now follow Shah’s logic. If colours, sounds, tastes and textures exist as such only in consciousness, then the lived world (meadows and sunsets, the adhan heard at dawn, a child’s face) is a world of experienced qualities. Physics strips those qualities away and leaves mathematical structure: wavelengths, amplitudes, charges, fields. Galileo could do this without contradiction because he relocated the qualities into the mind. He did not abolish them. The illusionist takes the further, fatal step. Having moved colour from the tree into consciousness, he declares that consciousness itself is an illusion, so the qualities have nowhere left to exist. The green is not in the leaf, and it is not in the mind, because there is “really” no mind of that kind. The visible universe disappears into a grey of equations that no one ever sees.

That is why Shah calls the outcome “tragic and laughable.” It is tragic because a tradition that set out to explain the world ends by explaining away the only place the world ever appears. It is laughable because the illusionist must still look at the tree, read the journal article and argue at the conference, all inside the theatre he says is empty. Erwin Schrödinger made the same point in Mind and Matter (1958): the physicist’s objective account of light waves contains no colour, and the sensation of yellow cannot be found in that picture. Remove the experiencer and you do not get a more objective world. You get no world as known at all.

Cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman, in The Case Against Reality (2019), extends Galileo’s insight in a direction awkward for naturalism. goodreads His “interface theory of perception” argues, using evolutionary game theory, that natural selection tunes perceptions to fitness payoffs rather than to truth: perceptions are like desktop icons, not windows. Dennett used the desktop analogy to dismiss consciousness; Hoffman uses it to show that the physical objects we perceive are the interface. timeshighereducation Whichever way the analogy is applied, there must be a user. An interface with no one using it is not an interface.

III. The Scientific Refutation

1. The hard problem and the explanatory gap

In “Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness” (Journal of Consciousness Studies, 1995), David Chalmers separated the “easy problems” of explaining discrimination, integration, attention and report from the “hard problem”: why any of this processing is accompanied by experience at all. arxivphilevents Joseph Levine had earlier named the same chasm the “explanatory gap” (1983). Even a complete neural story of pain leaves unexplained why that firing pattern feels like this. Frank Jackson’s “Mary,” the colour scientist raised in a black-and-white room who learns something new when she first sees red (1982), dramatises the gap.

Illusionism admits that the gap cannot be closed from the physicalist side and declares that the far bank does not exist. Yet three decades of neuroscience have refined correlates without bridging the gap. A September 2026 commentary on thequran.love points to Robert Lawrence Kuhn’s “A Landscape of Consciousness” (Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology, 2024), a 175,000-word taxonomy that by Àlex Gómez-Marín’s count covers about 225 theories, and to the Cogitate Consortium’s adversarial test of Integrated Information Theory and Global Neuronal Workspace Theory (Nature, 2025; 256 subjects across 12 labs), whose results “critically challenge key tenets of both theories.” “A field with one correct theory does not generate hundreds of them. The very abundance is a symptom.”

2. Neuroscience studies states, not the subject

Sleep medicine, anaesthesiology and studies of disorders of consciousness have made real progress in mapping when consciousness switches off and on. Shah, a physician board-certified in sleep medicine, stresses this. But as his commentary on Qur’an 17:85 observes, these markers tell us “a great deal about when and where consciousness switches off, and almost nothing about why the switch is attached to experience.” The return of the same first-person subject every morning, the continuity of the “I” across an interval of its own absence, is described by the mechanisms, not explained by them. thequran

3. The founders of modern physics on mind

Illusionism assumes a nineteenth-century picture of matter: inert, fully describable from outside, owing nothing to observers. Several founders of twentieth-century physics did not share it. springer Max Planck told The Observer (London, 25 January 1931): “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.” wikiquote Sir Arthur Eddington wrote in The Nature of the Physical World (1928): “the stuff of the world is mind-stuff.” He added that our own mental activity “is known to us by direct self-knowledge, and we do not explain it away as something other than we know it to be.” wikiquote Sir James Jeans wrote in The Mysterious Universe (1930): “the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears as an accidental intruder into the realm of matter.” wikiquote

The measurement problem sharpened these intuitions. John von Neumann (1932) showed that the line between observed system and observer can be moved arbitrarily far along the measuring chain, which ends only in the observer’s “abstract ego.” Eugene Wigner, in “Remarks on the Mind-Body Question” (1961), argued that quantum mechanics could not be formulated consistently without reference to consciousness, and introduced the “Wigner’s friend” scenario to press the point. thequran +2 Shah has written about Wigner at length, and in an October 2026 post complained that when “scientists present a mysterious quantum reality,” theologians who “decide to indulge in this… are denied entry by physicalists.” thequranthequran

Honesty requires two qualifications. Wigner himself later moved away from the consciousness-causes-collapse view, and most working physicists today prefer interpretations that give consciousness no causal role. arxiv +2 The quantum argument therefore does not prove that mind is fundamental. What it does show is narrower and still decisive against illusionism. The most successful physical theory ever devised does not straightforwardly describe a world of self-sufficient, observer-independent objects, and its greatest architects saw nothing unscientific in treating consciousness as basic. The illusionist’s confidence that “matter” is well understood while “mind” is a confusion has things backward.

4. Evolution and the costly illusion

Illusionists explain the illusion as an adaptation. But as Raichle and Gusnard note in PNAS (2002), “the brain represents about 2% of the body weight” yet “accounts for about 20% of the oxygen and, hence, calories consumed by the body.” If behaviour could be produced entirely by non-conscious processing, selection had no reason to add a vivid show “for no one.” If the show does causal work, steering attention, learning and choice, then it is real enough to have effects, and calling it an illusion is a misdescription.

IV. The Psychological Refutation

1. Pain cannot be an illusion

Strawson’s argument is the cleanest refutation in the literature: “although it seems that there is conscious experience, there isn’t really any conscious experience: the seeming is, in fact, an illusion. The trouble with this is that any such illusion is already and necessarily an actual instance of the thing said to be an illusion. Suppose you’re hypnotized to feel intense pain… But to seem to feel pain is to be in pain. It’s not possible here to open up a gap between appearance and reality.” nybooks Searle said the same: “where consciousness is concerned, the existence of the appearance is the reality.” Wikipediaspringer Strawson sums it up in five words: “The having is the knowing.” nybooks

A phantom limb illustrates the distinction. The limb is illusory; the pain is not. An illusion can misrepresent the world, the body or even the brain’s own mechanisms, but it cannot misrepresent itself out of existence, because the misrepresenting is itself experienced.

2. Clinical medicine stands on first-person report

Medicine has always known this. The International Association for the Study of Pain defines pain as “an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience,” and nursing practice has long followed Margo McCaffery’s maxim that pain is whatever the experiencing person says it is. Psychiatry diagnoses depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress largely from what patients report about their inner lives. Anaesthesiologists fear intraoperative awareness because a paralysed patient may be experiencing surgery while showing no outward sign. Sleep medicine, Shah’s own specialty, separates sleep-state misperception from objective sleep precisely because subjective experience is a clinical fact in its own right. A medicine that took illusionism seriously would have to treat the patient’s suffering as an artefact of introspection. No ethics board in the world would accept that.

3. Introspection can err about mechanisms, not about appearing

Rosenberg relies on blindsight, change blindness and confabulation to argue that consciousness cannot be trusted. Edward Feser’s reply, summarised in the 22 October essay, is decisive. The blindsight patient who reports “guessing” is reporting accurately what it is like for them; what they lack is visual experience, and they say so. thequran Experiments by Blackmore and others show that we overestimate the detail in our visual field. susanblackmoresusanblackmore They do not show that there is no visual field. To discover that a stage set is cardboard, you have to see the set.

4. Chalmers’ meta-problem and the harms of self-denial

In “The Meta-Problem of Consciousness” (Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2018), Chalmers defined a new research target: “the problem of explaining why we think that there is a problem of consciousness.” semanticscholaranu Illusionists welcome this, hoping that explaining our reports will replace explaining experience. imprint But our firmest “problem intuition” is not a theory; it is acquaintance. A theory that explains only why we say we feel, and never the feeling, has changed the subject.

There is also a human cost. Psychiatry recognises depersonalisation-derealisation disorder, in which patients feel that they themselves, or the world, are unreal. It is a distressing condition, not a liberation. Philosophers who teach that “there’s no one there” are recommending as metaphysics what clinicians treat as a symptom.

V. The Philosophical Refutation

1. The cogito and its ancestors

Descartes’ Discourse on Method (1637) and Meditations (1641) built modern philosophy on one indubitable point: however radical the deception, “I think, therefore I am.” Augustine had said the same twelve centuries earlier in The City of God (XI.26): “I am not at all afraid of the arguments of the Academicians, who say, ‘What if you are deceived?’ For if I am deceived, I am” (si fallor, sum). catholicstandgoodreads Between them, Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna) devised his “Floating Man” in the psychology of al-Shifāʾ. A person created mature, suspended in empty air, with no sensation of his own body and no contact with anything, would still affirm his own existence. Wikipediaarxiv The self is known before the body is known. Wikipedia

These three arguments come from a Catholic bishop, a Muslim philosopher-physician and a Catholic mathematician. All three identify the one thing the illusionist cannot coherently doubt. Doubt, deception and illusion are themselves forms of conscious life.

2. The self-refutation argument: “to whom does it seem?”

An illusion is a relation: something appears to someone other than it is. Remove the “someone” and the word loses its meaning. A mirage is not an illusion to the road; it is an illusion to the traveller. If consciousness is an illusion, to whom does it seem? If the answer is “to the brain’s self-model,” we must ask whether the self-model experiences the seeming. If it does, consciousness exists. If it does not, nothing is deceived and there is no illusion, only physical processes that output the words “I am conscious.” Illusionism then collapses into the flat claim that we are “machines that claim to be conscious,” and it must say who, if anyone, is convinced by the claim. One critic of From Bacteria to Bach and Back put it this way: “An illusion requires a subject… It makes no sense at all to say that the subject of the illusion is part of the illusion.” equip

Eliminativism about belief faces the twin problem of performative contradiction. To assert that there are no beliefs is to express the belief that there are none. brainscapethequran Rosenberg’s statement that our thoughts are not “about” anything is either about something (and false) or about nothing (and empty). proginosko J. B. S. Haldane saw the stakes in Possible Worlds (1927): “If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true… and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.”

This is exactly why Shah calls the illusionist ending “laughable.” Debate presupposes debaters, understanding presupposes understanders, and dialogue presupposes at least two centres of experience. An illusionist who wins an argument has, by his own theory, convinced no one of anything.

3. Kant: the “I think” that accompanies all representations

In the Critique of Pure Reason (B131–132), Kant argued that “the I think must be able to accompany all my representations.” The unity of apperception, the single standpoint that gathers sensations into one experience of one world, is the condition for any experience being mine and any world being a world. Metzinger’s “self-model” assumes this unity; it does not explain it. You cannot recognise the self as a “model that could not be recognized as a model” except from a standpoint the theory says does not exist.

4. Nagel, Searle, Strawson: naturalists who refuse the denial

The strongest critics of illusionism are not theologians. Nagel, an atheist, argued in Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False (2012) that “Materialism is incomplete even as a theory of the physical world, since the physical world includes conscious organisms among its most striking occupants.” conversantfaith Searle, a biological naturalist, rejected both dualism and Dennett’s denial. springeralibris Strawson, a physicalist, became a panpsychist rather than deny experience. closertotruth Their convergence matters: the reality of consciousness is not a religious premise smuggled into philosophy but a datum that honest naturalists also refuse to give up.

5. Alternatives that keep the data: Goff and Kastrup

Once experience is taken as given, the options widen. Philip Goff (Galileo’s Error, 2019) argues that Galileo’s removal of qualities from matter left physics unable to explain consciousness, and proposes panpsychism as the repair. Bernardo Kastrup’s “analytic idealism” (The Idea of the World, 2019) inverts the materialist hierarchy: a universal consciousness is fundamental, and individual minds are dissociated segments of it. Shah, whose site has featured Kastrup’s critique of materialism, welcomes both as allies against illusionism but finds both stopping short. thequran He has described panpsychism as “atheism trying to have its cake and eat it too,” granting that the universe is shot through with mind while refusing the Mind who grounds and unifies it. thequran For Shah, the next step after Kastrup is the Living, Self-Subsisting God (al-Ḥayy al-Qayyūm) who knows, wills and speaks.

VI. The Theological Refutation: The Abrahamic Witness

The three Abrahamic faiths share a premise that illusionism denies: the human being is a created, conscious subject, addressed by God, answerable to God, and able to know God. For them, consciousness is the place where the Creator meets the creature.

1. Judaism: the breath of life and the lamp of the Lord

Genesis 1:27 declares that God created humanity be-tselem Elohim, “in the image of God.” Genesis 2:7 describes how the Lord formed the human from the dust “and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life (nishmat ḥayyim); and man became a living soul” (KJV). The dust is chemistry; the neshamah is what makes the dust a someone. Proverbs 20:27 makes the human spirit an instrument of divine illumination: “The spirit of man is the candle of the LORD, searching all the inward parts of the belly” (KJV). The Psalmist marvels at the same inwardness: “What is man, that thou art mindful of him?… thou hast made him a little lower than the angels” (Psalm 8:4–5), and “O LORD, thou hast searched me, and known me… I am fearfully and wonderfully made” (Psalm 139:1, 14). Psalm 139 is a hymn to the transparency of the self before God: a self so real that it is known to its foundations.

Maimonides, in the opening chapter of The Guide for the Perplexed (c. 1190), argued that the “image” (tselem) of Genesis refers not to bodily shape but to the intellect, through which human beings grasp truths and come near to God. thequran To call the intellect an illusion would be to call the image of God an illusion. Abraham Joshua Heschel, in God in Search of Man (1955), located the beginning of religious awareness in “radical amazement,” the wonder that we exist and are aware. Illusionism trains a person out of exactly that sense.

2. Christianity: si fallor, sum, the soul, and the argument from reason

Augustine’s si fallor, sum is a Christian argument before it is a Cartesian one. In De Trinitate (Book X), he argues that the mind knows itself with certainty even when it doubts everything else, and finds in memory, understanding and will an image of the Trinity. In Augustine, the certainty of the self leads upward to God; in illusionism, the denial of God leads downward to the denial of the self.

Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologiae I, q. 75, a. 2) argued that the human soul is a subsistent form whose intellectual operation is not carried out through a bodily organ, which is why the intellect can know the natures of all bodies. Aquinas sees what Galileo would later sharpen: the knower cannot simply be one more item among the known.

C. S. Lewis, in Miracles (1947), revived Haldane’s argument as “the cardinal difficulty of naturalism.” If our thoughts are fully explained by non-rational causes, we have no reason to trust them, including the thought that naturalism is true. Darwin confessed the same worry in an 1881 letter to William Graham about “the horrid doubt” whether “the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy.” Alvin Plantinga formalised this as the Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (Warrant and Proper Function, 1993; Where the Conflict Really Lies, 2011). If unguided evolution selected for adaptive behaviour rather than true belief, a naturalist who accepts evolution has a defeater for the reliability of his own cognition, and so for naturalism itself. Illusionism is the final form of this predicament: the naturalist now doubts not only whether his beliefs are true but whether he has beliefs, or is anyone, at all.

Lewis’s best-known sentence, the closing line of “Is Theology Poetry?” (read to the Oxford Socratic Club in 1944 and printed in 1945) and now inscribed on his memorial in Westminster Abbey, says what the Abrahamic traditions say about consciousness itself: “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” essentialcslewis +2 Consciousness is the sun in this sense. We do not infer it from evidence; it is the light by which all evidence is seen.

3. Islam: the rūḥ, the nafs, and the signs within

The Qur’an treats the self as a primary arena of divine signs, a moral witness, and a mystery beyond the reach of empirical method. Translations are Sahih International.

The spirit is of the command of my Lord (17:85).

وَيَسْأَلُونَكَ عَنِ الرُّوحِ ۖ قُلِ الرُّوحُ مِنْ أَمْرِ رَبِّي وَمَا أُوتِيتُم مِّنَ الْعِلْمِ إِلَّا قَلِيلًا

“And they ask you, [O Muhammad], about the soul. Say, ‘The soul is of the affair of my Lord. And mankind have not been given of knowledge except a little.’” (17:85)

Shah’s September 2026 commentary reads this verse as “a fourteen-centuries-old declaration of the epistemic boundary that modern consciousness science has independently rediscovered.” Following classical cosmology, it explains that the rūḥ belongs to the ʿālam al-amr (the world of command) rather than the ʿālam al-khalq (the world of creation). It originates by God’s direct “Be!” and so is “not, in principle, dissectible by the tools appropriate to created bodies.” The verse does not forbid inquiry: it “locates inquiry within its proper domain.” thequran Shah has also compared humans before the brain-mind link to “spiritual dogs” who see the chalk marks on a blackboard but cannot grasp the prime number they express. thequran Where the Qur’an counsels humility before a real mystery, the illusionist abolishes the mystery by abolishing its object.

Taught the names (2:30–31).

وَإِذْ قَالَ رَبُّكَ لِلْمَلَائِكَةِ إِنِّي جَاعِلٌ فِي الْأَرْضِ خَلِيفَةً … وَعَلَّمَ آدَمَ الْأَسْمَاءَ كُلَّهَا

“And [mention, O Muhammad], when your Lord said to the angels, ‘Indeed, I will make upon the earth a successive authority’… And He taught Adam the names – all of them.” (2:30–31)

Adam’s distinction is conceptual consciousness: the power to name, to grasp universals, to hold the world in thought. This is precisely the “aboutness” Rosenberg calls illusory. In the Qur’an, it is the ground of human vicegerency.

Signs in the horizons and in the selves (41:53; 51:20–21).

سَنُرِيهِمْ آيَاتِنَا فِي الْآفَاقِ وَفِي أَنفُسِهِمْ حَتَّىٰ يَتَبَيَّنَ لَهُمْ أَنَّهُ الْحَقُّ ۗ أَوَلَمْ يَكْفِ بِرَبِّكَ أَنَّهُ عَلَىٰ كُلِّ شَيْءٍ شَهِيدٌ

“We will show them Our signs in the horizons and within themselves until it becomes clear to them that it is the truth. But is it not sufficient concerning your Lord that He is, over all things, a Witness?” (41:53)

وَفِي الْأَرْضِ آيَاتٌ لِّلْمُوقِنِينَ ﴿٢٠﴾ وَفِي أَنفُسِكُمْ ۚ أَفَلَا تُبْصِرُونَ ﴿٢١﴾

“And on the earth are signs for the certain [in faith]. And in yourselves. Then will you not see?” (51:20–21)

The 22 October 2026 essay calls 41:53 the cornerstone of a Qur’anic “argument from consciousness.” thequranthequran The verse sets the external cosmos (al-āfāq) beside the inner world (anfusihim) as two books of signs that converge on one Truth, and ends by naming God al-Shahīd, the Witness. thequran The illusionist spends his career arguing that there is no inner witness; the Qur’an makes witnessing a divine attribute in which the human self finitely shares. And 51:21 asks the question that sums up this essay: a-fa-lā tubṣirūn, “will you not see?”

The soul and its inspiration (91:7–10).

وَنَفْسٍ وَمَا سَوَّاهَا ﴿٧﴾ فَأَلْهَمَهَا فُجُورَهَا وَتَقْوَاهَا ﴿٨﴾ قَدْ أَفْلَحَ مَن زَكَّاهَا ﴿٩﴾ وَقَدْ خَابَ مَن دَسَّاهَا ﴿١٠﴾

“And [by] the soul and He who proportioned it. And inspired it [with discernment of] its wickedness and its righteousness. He has succeeded who purifies it, and he has failed who instills it [with corruption].” (91:7–10)

The nafs is not a narrative illusion. God swears by it, it is proportioned, it is inspired with moral knowledge, and it can be purified or corrupted. Moral life presupposes a real subject that persists through time and can grow.

Man as witness against himself (75:14–15).

بَلِ الْإِنسَانُ عَلَىٰ نَفْسِهِ بَصِيرَةٌ ﴿١٤﴾ وَلَوْ أَلْقَىٰ مَعَاذِيرَهُ ﴿١٥﴾

“Rather, man, against himself, will be a witness, even if he presents his excuses.” (75:14–15)

Baṣīrah means insight, inner seeing. Introspection, which Rosenberg dismisses, is in the Qur’an the faculty by which a person cannot finally deceive himself. The 22 October essay draws the moral conclusion: the illusionist denial is “the ultimate evasion of moral responsibility—an attempt to erase the witness so as to ignore the Judge.” thequran

Nearer than the jugular vein (50:16).

وَلَقَدْ خَلَقْنَا الْإِنسَانَ وَنَعْلَمُ مَا تُوَسْوِسُ بِهِ نَفْسُهُ ۖ وَنَحْنُ أَقْرَبُ إِلَيْهِ مِنْ حَبْلِ الْوَرِيدِ

“And We have already created man and know what his soul whispers to him, and We are closer to him than [his] jugular vein.” (50:16)

There is an inner whispering: private, first-personal, invisible to a neurosurgeon. And there is One who knows it. As Shah puts it, we can enter another person’s brain as a neurosurgeon, but never the mind of anyone other than ourselves. Only God can. thequran

Hearing, sight and hearts (67:23).

قُلْ هُوَ الَّذِي أَنشَأَكُمْ وَجَعَلَ لَكُمُ السَّمْعَ وَالْأَبْصَارَ وَالْأَفْئِدَةَ ۖ قَلِيلًا مَّا تَشْكُرُونَ

“Say, ‘It is He who has produced you and made for you hearing and vision and hearts; little are you grateful.’” (67:23)

The senses and the af’idah (hearts, the seats of awareness) are presented as gifts calling for gratitude. Illusionism turns gratitude into a category mistake: there is no one to be grateful, and nothing was given.

Fruits of varying colours (35:27). The colour argument has its own Qur’anic anchor:

أَلَمْ تَرَ أَنَّ اللَّهَ أَنزَلَ مِنَ السَّمَاءِ مَاءً فَأَخْرَجْنَا بِهِ ثَمَرَاتٍ مُّخْتَلِفًا أَلْوَانُهَا

“Do you not see that Allah sends down rain from the sky, and We produce thereby fruits of varying colors?” (35:27)

The verse begins a-lam tara, “do you not see?” Colours are presented as signs to a seer. The whole sign-structure of the Qur’an, with āyāt addressed to “a people who reflect,” assumes conscious recipients. Without the perceiver there are no colours; without the reflecting mind there are no signs.

The fitrah and the people of understanding (30:30; 3:190–191).

فَأَقِمْ وَجْهَكَ لِلدِّينِ حَنِيفًا ۚ فِطْرَتَ اللَّهِ الَّتِي فَطَرَ النَّاسَ عَلَيْهَا ۚ لَا تَبْدِيلَ لِخَلْقِ اللَّهِ

“So direct your face toward the religion, inclining to truth. [Adhere to] the fitrah of Allah upon which He has created [all] people. No change should there be in the creation of Allah.” (30:30)

إِنَّ فِي خَلْقِ السَّمَاوَاتِ وَالْأَرْضِ وَاخْتِلَافِ اللَّيْلِ وَالنَّهَارِ لَآيَاتٍ لِّأُولِي الْأَلْبَابِ ﴿١٩٠﴾ الَّذِينَ يَذْكُرُونَ اللَّهَ قِيَامًا وَقُعُودًا وَعَلَىٰ جُنُوبِهِمْ وَيَتَفَكَّرُونَ فِي خَلْقِ السَّمَاوَاتِ وَالْأَرْضِ رَبَّنَا مَا خَلَقْتَ هَٰذَا بَاطِلًا سُبْحَانَكَ فَقِنَا عَذَابَ النَّارِ ﴿١٩١﴾

“Indeed, in the creation of the heavens and the earth and the alternation of the night and the day are signs for those of understanding. Who remember Allah while standing or sitting or [lying] on their sides and give thought to the creation of the heavens and the earth, [saying], ‘Our Lord, You did not create this aimlessly; exalted are You [above such a thing]; then protect us from the punishment of the Fire.’” (3:190–191)

The fitrah is the innate constitution of the human knower, a primordial orientation toward truth and toward God. And the prayer of the ulū al-albāb contains a word that directly answers illusionism: mā khalaqta hādhā bāṭilan, “You did not create this bāṭil” (vain, false, unreal). The believer who reflects on creation concludes that it is not an illusion. The illusionist who reflects on it concludes that everything, including the reflecting, is.

The Light verse (24:35).

اللَّهُ نُورُ السَّمَاوَاتِ وَالْأَرْضِ ۚ مَثَلُ نُورِهِ كَمِشْكَاةٍ فِيهَا مِصْبَاحٌ ۖ الْمِصْبَاحُ فِي زُجَاجَةٍ … نُّورٌ عَلَىٰ نُورٍ ۗ يَهْدِي اللَّهُ لِنُورِهِ مَن يَشَاءُ

“Allah is the Light of the heavens and the earth. The example of His light is like a niche within which is a lamp, the lamp is within glass… Light upon light. Allah guides to His light whom He wills.” (24:35)

Al-Ghazālī’s Mishkāt al-Anwār (The Niche of Lights) reads this verse as a map of perception and cognition: senses, imagination, reason and prophetic insight as graded “lights,” all deriving from the one Light. The conscious self is a niche where a borrowed light shines, the opposite of the illusionist’s dark room in which no one is home.

4. The Islamic philosophers: Ibn Sīnā, al-Ghazālī, Mulla Sadra

Ibn Sīnā’s Floating Man anticipated the cogito by about six centuries. Scholarship on Avicenna distinguishes a primitive self-awareness, always present, which the Floating Man is meant to “remind” us of, from a reflexive self-awareness that comes through knowing objects. uni-muenchenspringer For Avicenna, self-awareness is not an inference the brain might get wrong. It is the constant ground of every cognitive act.

Al-Ghazālī describes in al-Munqidh min al-Ḍalāl (Deliverance from Error) a crisis of radical doubt about the senses and even reason. He emerged not through argument but through “a light which God Most High cast into my breast.” His occasionalism (Tahāfut al-Falāsifa) holds that created things have no independent causal power and that God is the immediate cause of every event. Shah has repeatedly drawn on this doctrine to read quantum indeterminacy as an “Inshallah universe,” sustained from moment to moment by the divine will. thequran If matter has no self-sufficient causal power, there is no reason to think it is the sole author of mind. Mind and matter are alike dependent on God.

Mulla Sadra (d. 1640) held that existence (wujūd) is primary and graded, and that the soul undergoes “substantial motion.” On his view the soul is “corporeal in its origination and spiritual in its subsistence” (jismāniyyat al-ḥudūth, rūḥāniyyat al-baqāʾ). This fits modern neuroscience surprisingly well. The mind really does arise with a developing brain, but what arises is a real subject on a trajectory toward greater existence, not an epiphenomenal mist.

A familiar Sufi maxim, “Whoever knows himself knows his Lord” (man ʿarafa nafsahu faqad ʿarafa rabbahu), is not authenticated by hadith scholars as a prophetic saying, but it captures the logic Shah defends. The road to God runs through the self, and so does the road away from God. Deny the Lord and, at the end of the road, you will be pressed to deny the self who might have known Him.

VII. Synthesis: Why Denying God Ends in Denying the Self

Shah’s thesis can now be set out as an argument.

1. Everything we know about the world, including the data of every science, is given in conscious experience. As Planck said, “Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.” bigthink
2. Secondary qualities (colour, sound, taste, warmth) exist as such only in consciousness. Galileo and Locke established this at the start of modern science; colour-blindness, bat echolocation and the mantis shrimp show it every day.
3. A strict materialism that recognises only the quantitative and the third-personal has no place for felt quality. It must either expand its ontology (to dualism, panpsychism, idealism or theism) or deny the felt quality.
4. Those who refuse every ontology that makes room for a transcendent Mind (Rosenberg states the link outright in his title: “the atheist’s guide”) are driven to the second option, illusionism.
5. Illusionism defeats itself. “Seeming” is a form of consciousness, and an illusion needs a subject.
6. If it were nonetheless accepted, the experienced world would lose its last home and become an illusion presented to no one. Science, dialogue and debate, which are all exchanges between conscious subjects, would have no participants.
7. So the denial of consciousness is not a scientific discovery but a metaphysical price paid to protect a prior commitment. The more reasonable course is to keep the datum and revise the metaphysics.

Theism does not “fill a gap” here. It removes the conflict at its source. If the ultimate reality is the Living, Knowing God, then the appearance of knowing creatures is what one would expect, not an anomaly to be explained away. Jeans’s “great thought” has a Thinker. Eddington’s “mind-stuff” has a Source. And the soul that Avicenna’s Floating Man finds within himself is, in the Qur’an’s words, “of the command of my Lord.”

Thematic Epilogue: The Light by Which We See the Denial

There is an old image of a fish that asks, “Where is this water everyone speaks of?” Consciousness is our water. It is so near (and nearer still, the Qur’an says, is the One who sustains it) that we can overlook it, theorise around it, and finally deny that we swim in it at all.

The illusionist turn in atheist philosophy is that forgetfulness carried to its end. It began nobly, with Galileo’s decision to measure what can be measured and set the qualities of experience aside “in the consciousness.” It became a habit when what had been set aside for method was treated as abolished in metaphysics. It ends, as Shah warns, in a strange place. The green has gone from the tree because it was never there, and from the mind because there is supposedly no mind for it to be in. The philosopher who argues this is, on his own account, no one, addressing no one, about nothing. “What a tragic and laughable ending to all of understanding, dialogues and debates.”

The Abrahamic traditions offer a different ending, which is really a return to the beginning. In Genesis the dust receives the breath and becomes a living soul. In Augustine the doubting mind finds that its doubt proves its being, and from that certainty climbs toward God. In Avicenna the man floating in the void, without body or world, still says “I.” In the Qur’an the soul is sworn by, inspired, made a witness against itself, taught the names, and shown signs in the horizons and within, “until it becomes clear to them that it is the truth.”

Lewis believed in Christianity as he believed the sun had risen, “not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” The same can be said of consciousness, and of the God whom all three Abrahamic faiths confess as its Source. We do not see consciousness the way we see a tree. We see the tree by it. The illusionist, trying to look at the light, finds no object and concludes there is no light, while the light shines on his page and makes his argument readable. The Qur’an’s question stays open for him and for all of us: wa fī anfusikum, a-fa-lā tubṣirūn? “And in yourselves. Then will you not see?”

Nūrun ʿalā nūr: light upon light. The answer to the illusion of illusionism is not a darker theory but the plain admission of what was always given: I am, I am aware, and my awareness is a gift. And a gift implies a Giver.