Bill Vallicella, in “Bull Meets Shovel: Could Consciousness Be a Conjuring Trick?”, regarding the claim that consciousness is an illusion, says that
it is self-evident that illusions presuppose consciousness: an illusion cannot exist without consciousness. The 'cannot' expresses a very strong impossibility, broadly logical impossibility. The Germans have a nice proverb, Soviel Schein, soviel Sein. "So much seeming, so much being." The point is that you can't have Schein without Sein, seeming without being. It can't be seeming 'all the way down.'
My purpose here is to offer a simple example of the reality of consciousness.
I enjoy playing four word games offered by The New York Times: Letter Boxed, Connections, Wordle, and Spelling Bee. Sometimes — especially in the cases of Letter Boxed and Spelling Bee — I will abandon a game before finishing it. I do that because coming back to it fresh often yields a word that leads me to victory. In the case of Letter Boxed, its the word that enables me to use twelve different letters to form two words (the sought-after minimum). In the case of Spelling Bee it’s a word that has eluded me but which I know should be added to the list of words that I’ve created from seven letters — sometimes a word that uses all seven letters, finding which is a prerequisite to victory (listing all of the words that can be made with the seven letters).
What happens is this: I abandon a puzzle and sometime later (if I’m lucky) the “right” word pops into my head. What that means, of course, is that my mind has been pondering the problem while I have been doing other things, and then — as if out of thin air — the answer, which must have been lurking in my subconscious mind, suddenly pops into my conscious mind.
That’s not an illusion. I have had so many similar experiences in my lifetime that I can say this with confidence: There is a real separation between thoughts of which I am aware (consciousness) and those of which I am unaware but which are occurring (subconscious mental operations).
Related post: Intuition vs. Rationality