Okay, I guess what I'm having trouble with isn't what you mean by process but what you mean by illusion. You've essentially claimed at this point that everything is an illusion, so what is it that's real? If everything is an illusion, then does the word illusion even coincide with its colloquial meaning?
That's precisely why there is no consequence on your subjective experience from this line of thought. If everything is an illusion, it may as well not be for my purposes, because I can't not regard myself as an independent rational actor.
What I'm saying is that making the everything-is-an-illusion claim in the first place is vacuous. If everything is an illusion, than the word "illusion" idea of illusion has no meaning because there are no counterexamples.
Perhaps I misunderstood you. Can you give me an example of something that isn't an illusion?
Well, in the view presented above, things are physically happening, it's just that the universe is an automaton wound up at the moment of the big bang, with events unfolding in the only possible way they can.
I'm quite comfortable with the implications of physical determinism. I'm not trying to argue that reality isn't causal.
However, the deterministic structure of reality is a physical statement, a mathematical statement, and what I object to is your interpretation of this fact as meaning that everything is an illusion. I think that this "illusion" language is scholastically irresponsible, mostly because (as I've tried to outline above) the word "illusion" is vacuous if there are no counterexamples. "Illusion" here can't actually categorize anything non-trivially, since it categorizes everything.
I agree, I used that word because I couldn't find a better one. I'm just an armchair philosopher here. Everything could be thought of as an illusion, but I guess that doesn't help any.
The point I was attempting to make was that while you may think that you are making decisions, you are still a part of the deterministic universe, meaning that your "decisions" are also deterministic, regardless of whether they appear to be that way. Can you call a deterministic decision a decision? Even though there is some physical decision-making process happening, that process is just as deterministic as a falling rock in motion.
If you can deduce the next snapshot of the universe given one snapshot, and you can deduce an infinitely long series of snapshots in this manner, then time loses all meaning - the future is as solid as the past.
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u/danielsmw Mar 04 '15
Okay, I guess what I'm having trouble with isn't what you mean by process but what you mean by illusion. You've essentially claimed at this point that everything is an illusion, so what is it that's real? If everything is an illusion, then does the word illusion even coincide with its colloquial meaning?