The car is made of material that we can touch and it works, and takes us to where we want to go,but I still think the idea of the car is a construct.
Are the following also illusions?
A brick. Pain. Monarchy. Atoms. A recipe for fish pie. A 747. The neighbours’ cats. Romania.
Once you deem things to be illusions because, when you stare at them hard enough, they seem to not really, truly, fundamentally exist, there’s no end to that process, as Buddhist philosophers have found. Some of them bite that bullet, even to the point of declaring the emptiness of emptiness. Then, I presume, they carry on getting up in the morning and going about their days, teaching their illusory students in illusory lecture halls about the illusion of illusion.
The meta-ontological principle there is that only ontologically irreducible things “exist”, and that everything else is “illusion”. If this is to be anything more than a redefinition of the words “exist” and “illusion” that leaves the ordinary uses of these words unchallenged, some truth must be being asserted by such claims of non-existence. But what?
If things have fuzzy edges, if they come into existence and pass away, if some of them turn out to be not what we thought they were: we still have to deal with them.
What you say above is true, we can deconstruct endlessly with no useful objective, but that doesn’t mean that the process of deconstruction is wrong.
My example of the car is to illustrate that we build concepts out of “lower level” parts.
The car and the bricks are real, but sometimes we do the same thing and build a construct that doesn’t correspond to reality. I use the word illusion when this happens I guess.
I think time is an illusion because our mind puts together some observations and properties and we feel time, but I don’t think it is an object like the car.
I use the word illusion when this happens I guess.
Why not just call them “mental concepts”?
There’s a case for calling free will an illusion.
You can directly stimulate a neuron to get someone to move his arm up. If you then ask him why he moved his arm he will usually make up an explanation that explains his behavior. He will explain you why he made the free choice to move his arm. Behavior caused by posthypnotic suggestions produces the same effect. T
People makes up a plausible sounding justification for their behavior that’s different from the true cause of their behavior if they aren’t aware of the true cause. There’s the illusion that the person could have made a choice to act differently.
As a result it makes some sense to call free will a cognitive illusion. I doesn’t feel to me like “Money” is in the same class. Money is simply a concept. I don’t feel on a very primal level that a dollar bill is money the way I feel like I’m having control over my own actions. I identify a dollar bill as money because I learned from someone else that it’s money.
Given the history of money I don’t think there strong enough evolutionary pressure to have a direct experience of money the way we have a direct experience of free will.
The car and the bricks are real, but sometimes we do the same thing and build a construct that doesn’t correspond to reality. I use the word illusion when this happens I guess.
Are the following also illusions?
A brick. Pain. Monarchy. Atoms. A recipe for fish pie. A 747. The neighbours’ cats. Romania.
Once you deem things to be illusions because, when you stare at them hard enough, they seem to not really, truly, fundamentally exist, there’s no end to that process, as Buddhist philosophers have found. Some of them bite that bullet, even to the point of declaring the emptiness of emptiness. Then, I presume, they carry on getting up in the morning and going about their days, teaching their illusory students in illusory lecture halls about the illusion of illusion.
The meta-ontological principle there is that only ontologically irreducible things “exist”, and that everything else is “illusion”. If this is to be anything more than a redefinition of the words “exist” and “illusion” that leaves the ordinary uses of these words unchallenged, some truth must be being asserted by such claims of non-existence. But what?
If things have fuzzy edges, if they come into existence and pass away, if some of them turn out to be not what we thought they were: we still have to deal with them.
What you say above is true, we can deconstruct endlessly with no useful objective, but that doesn’t mean that the process of deconstruction is wrong.
My example of the car is to illustrate that we build concepts out of “lower level” parts.
The car and the bricks are real, but sometimes we do the same thing and build a construct that doesn’t correspond to reality. I use the word illusion when this happens I guess.
I think time is an illusion because our mind puts together some observations and properties and we feel time, but I don’t think it is an object like the car.
Why not just call them “mental concepts”?
There’s a case for calling free will an illusion.
You can directly stimulate a neuron to get someone to move his arm up. If you then ask him why he moved his arm he will usually make up an explanation that explains his behavior. He will explain you why he made the free choice to move his arm. Behavior caused by posthypnotic suggestions produces the same effect. T
People makes up a plausible sounding justification for their behavior that’s different from the true cause of their behavior if they aren’t aware of the true cause. There’s the illusion that the person could have made a choice to act differently.
As a result it makes some sense to call free will a cognitive illusion. I doesn’t feel to me like “Money” is in the same class. Money is simply a concept. I don’t feel on a very primal level that a dollar bill is money the way I feel like I’m having control over my own actions. I identify a dollar bill as money because I learned from someone else that it’s money.
Given the history of money I don’t think there strong enough evolutionary pressure to have a direct experience of money the way we have a direct experience of free will.
Agreed!
Why not just call them “mental concepts”?