Is mental content an illusion?

When we perceive, there is something we perceive. When we think, there is something we thinkof. When we dream, something is dreamt. These seem all platitudes: obvious and unproblematictruths. And, given that the things perceived, thought of, or dreamed are what philosophers call themental contents of our states, few things should seem as obvious and unproblematic as theexistence of mental contents. And yet, I shall here argue that, when closely examined, mentalcontents appear to be illusions. Just like the proverbial sawn-in-half assistant on the magicianstage, they merely appear to exist, without actually existing. To substantiate this view I will first fixthe reference of “mental content” and “illusion” in an innocent, theory neutral manner - that is, byrelying on paradigmatic positive and negative examples of them (sections 2 and 3). I will also showthat such paradigmatic examples allow us to extract a list of features that such examples allow usto identify features that paradigmatically identify contents and illusions as such, enabling us torecognize them. With these features at hand, I will thus argue that mental contents bear all thefeatures that paradigmatically identify illusions. Otherwise put, I will argue that mental contentsare anomalous, causally insulated, systematic, persistent and bound to a single mode of access inthe same way paradigmatic examples of illusions are (Section 4). Having argued for my main claim,I will defend it from a couple of intuitive objections; namely that it is to silly to be taken seriously,given that mental content is given in a way that does not permit to seriously doubt of its existence(section 5), and that my claim is incoherent (section 6). I’ll show that, intuitive as they are, theobjections are not compelling, and indeed they can be easily answered. Lastly, I will conclude thepaper sketching the possible developments of an illusionistic view of content (section 7).