Jay asked:

Do you think this world is an illusion?

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I'll give you a short answer on this, because for as long as I don't know what you mean by 'illusion', I
can't properly evaluate your thinking. So I'll just assume that when you say 'illusion', you understand
this in some fashion analogous to 'fake', 'figment' or 'deception'. Then your worry about whether the
world is real or just a product of our imagination can be resolved very easily.

What we see, hear, touch, smell, taste etc. are illusions of a particular kind, namely the calibrated
responses of our nervous system to the energy output (or reflection) of objects in the world. Our
nervous system, in collaboration with the brain, evaluates that output very much as it impinges,
namely as forms of energy (or resistance to penetration etc), but translates it in the auditory, visual
and other cortices into something which we can apprehend. Thus a particular spectrum of this very
large wave bandwidth is piped through our visual apparatus where the subtle differences in output are
'coloured in', so to speak, to facilitate recognition. Colours that are meaningless to big animals like
ourselves, for instance infra red, we cannot differentiate; they remain invisible to us. But bees, which
need to recognise such frequences, can see those colours. So you see, our perceptions are
evolutionary conditioned.

I would recommend to you that if you are earnestly concerned about the possibility of the world being
just an illusory bric-a-brac with no existence other than in our minds, that you look into a good book
on the body and especially the nervous system. Rather than allowing the bite of doubt grab hold of
you, learn to appreciate the absolute marvels of adaptivity to the terrestrial environment which Nature
has produced, especially the human brain. Marvel ought to cure you of doubts. It's like good
medicine. Consider finally that unilateral illusion is a contradiction in terms: if everything is illusory,
than obviously nothing is. Neither one nor the other can possibly be true.

Jürgen Lawrenz

Sydney

No. It couldn't be because the very idea of an illusion rests on the idea that the world is well enough
known by us to distinguish between those experiences that provide us with illusions and those that
give us the real dope. For example, you could be reading these lines and because of some brain
disease could be seeing a bird wherever the letter "e" appears. But for that to be an illusion, there
must also be cases where someone can see what is actually there, namely, the letter "e." Otherwise
the question as to whether what you see is an illusion couldn't even arise.

Tibor Machan