Celebrity Legs and Feet in Tights: Katy Perry,2020 Pantyhose Queen-Part One

Celebrity Legs and Feet in Tights: Katy Perry,2020 Pantyhose Queen-Part One:  The celebration for our 2020 queen continues with a brand new post,which will be up shortly

Paul King

fmr UC Berkeley Redwood Center for Theoretical NeuroscienceUpdated 6y

Is consciousness an illusion?

Yes, consciousness is an illusion.

That does not mean it does not exist, or that it is not real!

An illusion is something that is not what it appears to be. Merriam-Webster says an illusion is something that "misleads intellectually." A hologram is an illusion because the 3D object you see is not really "there" (but it was somewhere, e.g. in the original photography studio; and the holographic plate in front of you is real).

Consciousness appears to us to have properties that it does not really have. Consciousness appears to be a seamless, high-fidelity, complete, and accurate direct experience of the world. And yet countless psychology experiments and visual illusions demonstrate that consciousness does not actually have these properties. Consciousness is fragmented, internally inconsistent, lower resolution, and more distorted than we think.

Yohan John makes a great point in asking the question "to what is consciousness an illusion"? The answer to that question is "to itself", a circular answer that highlights one of the core paradoxes of consciousness. Awareness, or self-awareness, presents the feeling that we are simultaneously and synchronously both the subject and object of our perception; and yet both roles cannot be logically simultaneous due simply to the time-lag required to process information and form a point of view. Who we perceive ourselves to be is who we were a few hundred milliseconds ago. But hopefully we haven't changed much.