[fusion event]"X" is an Illusion

X is an illusion

There are a large number of philosophy views that hold that major features of what we think is real, is instead an illusion.

Examples:

Solipsism. The ultimate of “illusion” movements is the belief that oneself, and one’s mind, is the only thing that is real in the world, and that everything else, including everyone one supposedly knows, is an artifact of one’s own mind.

Great Deceiver or Long Dream. Similar to solipsism, but with an added wrinkle of a Trickster God, or a Trickster Dreamer leading to everything being illusion.

Buddhism. Similar to Long Dream, but the illusion is shared between all of us, with the added wrinkle that our own selfhood and identity is also part of the illusion.

Delusionism. We are not actually conscious, and do not have experiences, or a self. We are instead a meat machine computer, which creates and backdates all of our supposed internal experiences when our neural net computer’s choices are written into long term memory. Consciousness is an accidental byproduct of that memory writing process. (This is Daniel Dennett’s model of Consciousness, spelled out in Consciousness Explained).

Eliminative Materialism – We are fundamentally confused about consciousness and selfhood, and all of our “folk psychology” is simply wrong. Explicitly our views that we are: self-conscious, hold beliefs, have emotions, and have the power of reason – are wrong. Instead, we are a neural net, and all of our wrong beliefs simply reduce to neural net functions (this is very similar to Delusionism, but with a different version of theory -- this time Paul Churchland’s).

Free Will Illusionism – we think we have free will, but are deluded about this. See The Illusion of Conscious Will, by Daniel Wegner for an example.
Time passing illusionism. In Einstein’s 4-D Block time, the passage of time is only apparent – and is very location and travel direction dependent. One can plot graphs in all sorts of axes in the 4-D space, and there is nothing special about the ones that appear to create the passage of time.

Idealism – The universe is fundamentally mind, or abstractions (there are two significantly different versions of idealism), and all appearances of matter (and sometimes of selfhood) are just illusions of the fundamental mental or logic/math reality.

"Illusion" is a common enough claim that I think it is important to have a method to evaluate Illusion claims.
I have a method I use, that is based on my approach to epistemology. I don’t think there is a general method across philosophy, and I welcome suggested alternative to mine.

My Epistemology
I start with empiricism, assisted with reasoning, as my base method.
We have data inputs to empiricism, they are intuitions. They include our perceptions of the world, perceptions of selfhood and mental state, and intuitive knowledge and reasoning’s.

I use the 2-system model of our minds from thinking Fast and Slow – that we have a fast intuitive neural net and a slow rational reasoning process, and the 2nd of these is conscious and the first unconscious. I also use the “trick the CEO by using a few props” model from David Eagleman’s Incognito, that system 1 misleads System 2 into thinking it came up with system 1’s ideas, and fully understands the world. The ideas and props of our intuitions are themselves generally highly processed hypotheses about the world, which are presented to our consciousness as unsupported intuitions.

SOME of our intuitions are therefore raw data, and basically fundamental. These include that we have two systems, that we can perceive, emote, and act, that we experience time, and that we can reason. Much of the rest is – probably true. We have tuned our system 1 neural net pretty well after all – but it can be mistaken. That is why System 2 needs to check it.

As an empiricist, who treats data as king, and theories as what gives way to data, the “illusion” theories that claim our base data is an “illusion” – I am strongly suspicious of. Illusion claims about more complex processing – are more intrinsically believable.
However, I am a falliblist. I maintain an open mind that we could be mistaken about everything. Including this apparent base data. The criteria for rejecting basic data, however, comes with a very high Burden of Justification.

My criteria: Is there a massive increase in the accuracy of our models and ability to understand the world, by adopting a philosophy that treats basic data as an illusion? If not, then dismiss the theory.

Applying my standard:
Solipsism, Long Dream, and Buddhism hypotheses do not seem to carry a significant life advantage over treating the world, others and one’s self as real.

Interestingly, Susan Blackmore actually wrote a book, her “Very Short Introduction to Consciousness”, that tried to meet my criteria for delusionism. She claimed that physicalism was so well established it must be true, and all physicalist theories of consciousness failed one test or another, therefore consciousness must be an illusion. I disagree that physicalism is unquestionably true, which left her book unable to meet my criteria.

I have not encountered a free Will, time passage, or material world illusionist who has come even as close as Blackmore to meeting my criteria. So for all of the above Illusion theories – I tend to respond – “your philosophy is simply not complex enough to capture our world. Simpler theories, that are wrong, are pretty common. And we don’t throw out our data, but the theories, when we find they are wrong.”

This is me.

Questions:
What do you folks think of my approach?

I am a skeptic of illusion claims, do others find them more useful/insightful than I do?

I went down the pragmatic empiricist path early in my philosophic career, and sometimes have difficulty Groking how other philosophic traditions will address some fundamental issues. Analytic philosophy, phenomenologists, existentialists, Thomists – all could take a very different approach. Any other methods to address these claims anyone would like to share?

There are lots of other possible “illusion” claims. Other examples anyone wants to share?

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