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.
After I posted my great idea that "Determinism Is Just A Special Case Of Randomness" because "if not I don't see how there could be free will in a deterministic universe" I was positively guided by the LW community to read the Free Will Sequence so I am learning more about our biases and how we build illusions like free will and randomness in our minds.
But I don't see a list on LW or Wikipedia of a list of cognitive illusions and I think it would be great to have one of those just as it is useful for many people to visit the List Of Cognitive Biases page as a study reference or even to use in day to day life.
I think these are some cognitive illusions that are normally discussed as such:
- Free will
- Randomness/probability
- Time
- Money
There must be many more, but I don't find a list with summaries and that would great (to help me avoid writing posts like my "great idea" above!).
EDIT: The majority of comments below are about questioning if they are illusions or not and if they should be called cognitive illusions.
I guess there is no list of cognitive illusions because there is no academic agreement about these issues like in cognitive biases which are generally accepted as such!
Thx for the comments!