Is reality an illusion?

This was reality checks responce to a post of mine. Lets start by considering the following as true:

There is nothing which is actually real and unillusionary occurring at any level of existence.

This is a pretty strong statement to make in my view. But many people seem to think its a possibilty. Maybe it is. But what would it really mean if this was true???

First we must understand that by the defination of an illusion the must be some agent which creates the illusion and the nature of this agent is different to the nature which is percieved by the person under the illusion.

Three vitial points must be made here:

1. There must be some agent creating the illusion

2. Its percieved nature must differ from its ‘actual’ nature

3. Illusions are subjective. You can’t have something being an illusion without it being percieved by someone.

Lets consider the secound point along with the orginal consideration.

The ‘actual’ nature must be considered as simply a different level of reality or an adjectent reality to the percieved nature. Also this ‘actual’ nature must be an illusion itself.

Then we add to this points 1) and 3). We then get to an interseting couple of questions: ‘Whats the agent creating this illusion?’ and ‘who is percieving this illusion?’

Obviously then by applying 3) again to this ‘actual’ nature illusion we can get to a third level and this dynamic repeated indefinatly.

To my mind this is just nonsense.

Unless there is some different meaning to ‘reality is an illusion’ I think its just a sentence that sounds good but if you think about what it literally means it only leads to nonsense.

But maybe I’m missing something here???

Maybe I misuderstand?

I think that what has happened is that the sentence ‘reality is an illusion’ is just a hidious mistranslation from some eastern philosophies.

maybe its just that the word ‘illusion’ should be understood in a totally different way.

I think this is maybe the problem.

I think the word illusion implies levels of reality in its actually defination. But in eastern philosophy there aren’t really any levels of reality. So what occurs in the mind and what occurs in the agent of the illusion are of the same nature. So if we say that the mind is percieving an iluusion then the nature of the mind must be an illusion and hence the nature of the agent is also an illusion and then we gey to ‘realty is an illusion’. But I think we have missed something vital here.

And really it comes back to thinking about what an illusion actually is in a very normal sense. Just think of any illusion created by a magcian. Its maddness to say that the illusion created in the mind of the audience of a girl being sawed in half is of the same nature of the reality of her not being sawed in half. Its just a trick, a trick of the mind. If we take an objective description of the mind being tricked then all we have is atoms in the brain moving around. If we take an objective view of the agent of the illusion all we have is atoms moving about again. These are clearly descriptions of the same nature. In this description we see that the illusion is nothing more than the atoms in the mind incorrectly modelling what is happening with the atoms of the agent.

From this description we gain a valuable insight. It is not that the mind and the agent are of different natures it is simply that the patterns of the mind do not match the patterns of the agent.

If we then come back to a more messy but more true objective/subjective view we can see that its just the very assumption that what goes on in our minds should be an exact match to what goes on outside our minds that causes illusions.

Our mind is what goes on in our brains. But if someone else views our brain their description is always just a projection of what is actually going on in our mind. This is pretty obvious. But maybe what is less obvious is that we should take the same view of looking at any piece of matter, not just brains. We can see an image of the matter but we are not that matter. We are not the table. Unless you want to claim that everything is one. I think its true in that we are of the same nature. But ultimatly things very much do seem to be seperated by space and time.

I guess this then gets us to maybe a deeper question is the seperation of things in terms of space and time just an illusion?
In some senses this is actually true!!! Experiments have shown this! But with one very important restriction: information is still unable to be transported over this ‘ilusionary’ reality.

To me this very interesting scientific discovery is the most profound thing that science has ever come across. Its repercusions in philosophy are yet to be felt. But I think when they are we will get some very intersting insights.

any way too much already…these are more random thoughts than beliefs btw…

I’ve noticed that everything reminds me of something. A picture reminds me of a place I’ve visited. The place I visited reminds me of a movie I saw. The movie I saw reminds me of a girl I know. The girl I know reminds me of a moonlit evening. Is there some non-referential reality that it all refers back to?

We could say “reality is an illusion” or we could tempor our enthusiasm and say “reality is like an illusion”, but the punchline is that the second version expresses one degree more illusoriness than the first.

Interesting questions. I don’t have an answer, but I’m interested in the same things.

If reality is an illusion then what is an illusion?

Is an illusion an illusion of an illusion?

No, because that is absurd.

Simply because we can never know what, if anything, lies behind our experiences that we take to be experiences of reality does not mean that those experiences are themselves illusions. As my opening sentence implies, it’s difficult to even make sense out of such a claim.

We have experiences that we take to be experiences of what we call reality. We have other, different kinds of experiences which we take to be experiences of what we call illusions. It’s important to keep in mind that we distinguish between these different kinds of experiences.

Illusion: a perception, as of visual stimuli (optical illusion), that represents what is perceived in a way different from the way it is in reality.

Reality is by definition not an illusion. Yet if reality implies totality, then there is no reason to exclude subjective experience from it. Reality minus perception of it is conjecture, even if it is a normal common sense conjecture.

The light on my wall is a reflection of the light of the moon which is a reflection of the light of the sun. I assume you’re not saying the sun is real but not the light or the moon or the wall. Illusion doesn’t mean nothing exists at all, it means we don’t perceive accurately. The implication in saying that everything is an illusion is that we see things as discrete when in fact they are interconnected and subject to further exploration. We see the moon as glowing from an inner light source, but this is not the case. The moon is rock and dust. “Science” knows that everything is an illusion of an illusion of an illusion ad infinitum, even if individual scientists hold the mistaken subconscious notion that “reality” will be arrived at.

Then you agree that the independent existence of things-in-themselves is conjecture. I agree that the experiences themselves are not necessarily illusory - we are not necessarily mistaken regarding the nature of appearances. But since we keep on assuming there is an independent reality outside of our subjective experiences it is reasonable to say that those appearances are an illusion.

How do you know if you have distinguished properly?

I dont have answers to the questions posed in the OP, but I will say that I’ve heard that reality is the new monster of our age, the same way Vampires were made up metaphorical fears of jews in eastern Europe, and Frankenstein of unchecked mechanical progress.

With virtual reality on the horizon perhaps for our grandchildren, reality shows that go through a ton of edits, special effects in all media arenas, and now with public journalism exploring every angle of the news, its harder then ever to get at the truth. Sure there are more opinions and information access, but sometimes that only adds to the confusion.

I agree that reality is the new monster, although i dont think we’ve seen a metaphor for it yet, just movies like the matrix, ect. Be the one to make that metaphor, and start a future myth, and you’ll likely be imortalized, although you’ll quite possibly have more than one identity by then.