Similar to a game of The Sims the characters actions are chosen in advance.

A string of actions were your last action effects the next one and were actions are cancelled out and changed. 

Your next action is to prepare a meal. You walk to the kitchen to start preparing the meal when you open the fridge and notice you don't have any food. The action is now cancelled and replaced with "Go to the store to buy food". 

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!

I was trying to reconcile the fact that in a deterministic universe there could be life with free will, but I am going full circle now and am starting to think that everything is really random, if not I don't see how there could be free will in a deterministic universe.

If mathematicians measure randomness with probability, then there must be some things that have a 100% occurrence probability (in the current universe above atomic levels I presume), which now I see as special cases of randomness rather than opposites to randomness, and these lead us to think that there is determinism.

I think we may have this cognitive bias (deterministic views of reality) because it is extremely helpful to use these 100% probability occurrence things to model the universe rationally, learn, and to predict the future, but it is not the whole story or at least a complete description of reality.

What do you think?

EDIT 1: Thank you all for the comments below. I recognize I am naive in this topic.

Although I am not convinced yet, I think my possible argumentative error is:

P1: I observe free will in the behavior of living things.

P2: Deterministic physical mechanical processes don't permit free will.

C: Therefore physics must include random processes.

I think I only see a solution of free will in randomness, but maybe there are other solutions ( I will read the Free Will Sequence here on LW!)

EDIT 2: After reading some articles of the Free Will Sequence I realize the problem of investing energy around free will questions if free will is just a mistake in our thinking process.

It is something like why ask about time travel if time doesn't exist? or, why explore the mechanics of randomness vs determinism if randomness doesn't exist and thus the dichotomy "randomness vs determinism" doesn't exist in the first place? 

This is intended to eventually be a Main post and part of sequences on free will and religion.  It will be part of the Free Will sequence.

Please comment if you do or do not think this post is ready for Main.  I intend to move it there eventually.  As with any post at LessWrong, I'm completely open to criticism, but I hope it's directed at improving the quality of the thinking here rather than kneejerk opposition to my ideas.

------------------------------------------------------

The main point of this post is that I intend to convince every rationalist here, and every causal reader, to commit to allowing others to have free will.

First a bit of background.  I'm a conservative christian.  Growing up I considered myself a rationalist.  Now that I've known about Less Wrong for several years and have read the sequences, I no longer think I can classify myself that way <grin>.  Nowdays I usually consider myself a pragmatist.  "Being a rationalist" now carries with it a significant weight in my mind of formal Bayes Theorem and such that I've never had time to fully follow through and practice.  I also have a little fear that completely committing to be Bayesian would eventually put a huge conflict between my faith and Bayesian reasoning - just a little fear.  I've been reading Less Wrong for years now, they've all been resolve to my satisfaction.  I also haven't simply because looking at the math that gets thrown around here in Bayes Theorem discussion seems like it would take too much time for me to understand, and I'm already very busy (and, being an engineer and not a math major, a bit intimidating).

The main reason I come here is because this community thinks about thinking, which so few people around me do.  I crave that introspection that happens here, and so I'm drawn back to it.  Not always often, but enough to generally stay abreast of what's going on.  (I also have to admit to myself that I come back because you people are very smart, and I want you to think of me as smart too, and have your approval, but I try to keep that in check <grin>)

Now that I've been here (online only - no meetups yet) and learned with you over the years, another reason I stay here is because of the clear success of Evolutionary Psychology in predicting human behavior.  The clearest example I've ever had is this:

My children and I love to chase each other around the house.  It drives my wife crazy, especially when it happens right at bedtime.  At some point after I read about evolutionary psychology, this chain of logic dawned on me: The natural genetic behavior that's successful gets reinforced over generations -> Things you love to do naturally are joyful to you -> You pass those things on to your children through play the way lions play hunt with cubs ->  Human parents and children get true joy from chasing each other because their ancestors loved the hunt and were successful at it!

Now THAT was an eye opener!  It was the answer to a question I'd never known I had, which was this.  Why do children love to chase, and why do I love to chase them?  Because their ancestors survived that way and it was passed to them genetically.  I even like to playfully almost-catch-them-and-let-them-escape.  I even playfully let them catch me, too.  And we love it.

Religion has no answer to this question.  Religion doesn't even know how to ask this question.  But it flowed naturally out of Evolutionary Psychology just by my knowing that the concept existed!  Powerful!  Now, this post isn't really about religion so I won't go into why that doesn't break my faith.  I'll handle that it other posts.  The reason why I'm talking about it now is to get you to recognize that you are a tribal hunter by ancestry, even more fundamentally than you are the descendant of conquerors.  And knowing that Politics Is The Mind Killer, you'll listen to this next part, and take it seriously.

Less Wrong rationalists are growing, and being recognized by the religious community.  As militant Atheists.  It's reported that this is a new thing among atheists, this new desire to spread atheist philosophies as strongly as any religion spreads it's beliefs.  I've seen it in a couple places now, in about the last year.

I have a huge, scary concern for the future of our world.  It's not atheism.  And it's not religion.  I fear future wars.  As a military history enthusiast and a veteran I've learned a lot about war.  A lot.  And the principle is true that those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it.  Knowing that we are tribal animals I see aetheists as one tribe and religionists as another.  Now that I see the of growth and success of LW I see a future pattern emerging in the United States:

Few atheists among overwhelming Christians -> shrinking Christianity, growing Atheism -> atheism tribalness growing well connected and strong -> Natural tribal impulse to not tolerate different voices -> war between atheists and Christians.

Don't try to say this won't happen, and that Rationalists will always allow other people to believe differently.  Coherent Extrapolated Volition, Politics is the Mind Killer, and Eliezar' success in creating the LW and rationalist movement say otherwise.  Now, today, the commitment to altruism seems like a solution, but it isn't.  You all here are so very intelligent and you seriously look down on those of faith.  I see it all over the place.  It's a real blind spot that you can't see because it's inside your mental algorithms.  Altruism is very easily perverted into forcing other people because you know what is best for them.  It's not enough by itself.  It needs something else attached.

Someday there will come a time when new leaders will come up trough the rationalist movement who don't have Eliezar's  commitment to freedom.  And power corrupts even good, compassionate people.  So now I come to my request.

This principle needs to the rationalist movement.  A guarantee of free will for others that disagree with you, EVEN IF THEY ARE WRONG.  

I know religions have not always had this either.  Be better than the religions you despise.  Recognize that they also are tribal animals trying to become civilized tribal animals.  

I ask you personally to commit to making free will for all a part of your personal philosophy.  And I ask you to formalize that as part of Less Wrong, the Rationalist community, and your evangelical aetheism.  Plant the seed now so that is has time to grow. It is my fear that if you don't your children's children, and my childrens' children, will know a brutal war of philosophies unlike any we have ever seen.

In a future post I'll cover how religions are the empirically determined solution to problems that prevented civilization from arising,  and how rationalism is the modern, more specifically planned version.  And why religion is not evil like you think it is.

Sincerely,

Troshen

This is a combination news-announcement and begging for someone with academic subscriptions to maybe jailbreak a PDF for us.

"Persistent bias in expert judgments about free will and moral responsibility: A test of the expertise defense" (emphasis added):

"Many philosophers appeal to intuitions to support some philosophical views. However, there is reason to be concerned about this practice as scientific evidence has documented systematic bias in philosophically relevant intuitions as a function of seemingly irrelevant features (e.g., personality). One popular defense used to insulate philosophers from these concerns holds that philosophical expertise eliminates the influence of these extraneous factors. Here, we test this assumption. We present data suggesting that verifiable philosophical expertise in the free will debate—as measured by a reliable and validated test of expert knowledge—does not eliminate the influence of one important extraneous feature (i.e., the heritable personality trait extraversion) on judgments concerning freedom and moral responsibility. These results suggest that, in at least some important cases, the expertise defense fails. Implications for the practice of philosophy, experimental philosophy, and applied ethics are discussed."

Linked from http://experimentalphilosophy.typepad.com/experimental_philosophy/2011/06/failure-of-the-expertise-defense-persistent-bias-in-expert-intuitions-.html which elaborates:

"For example, our research suggests that heritable personality traits predict bias in some fundamental philosophically relevant intuitions (Feltz & Cokely 2008, 2009; Cokely & Feltz, 2009; Feltz, Perez, & Harris, in press; Feltz, Harris, & Perez, 2010). In response to these findings, “philosophical expertise” has been used to shield some parts of standard philosophical practice from the worries presented by experimental philosophers (e.g., Ludwig, 2007; Kauppinen 2007; Horvarth, 2010; Sosa, 2010; Williamson, 2007, 2011). One important part of the “Expertise Defense” is that philosophers are assumed to be relevantly different from the folk (e.g., as a result of their years of training) and consequently philosophers' intuitions shouldn’t display the same (or similar) biases.

But more recently, there have been serious concerns raised by experimental philosophers about the Expertise Defense. Some have used indirect strategies suggesting that philosophical expertise is unlike expertise in areas known to result in the relevant differences (e.g., in chess) (Weinberg, Gonnerman, Buckner, & Alexander, 2010 see related discussion here). Others have opted for direct strategies showing that for many important everyday behaviors (e.g., voting, returning library books, showing common courtesy) philosophers often display the same (or similar) biases as the folk (Schwitzgebel 2009; Schwitzgebel & Rust, 2010, 2009; Schwitzgebel & Cushman, in press). In a new paper (Schulz, Cokely, & Feltz, in press), we also adopt the direct strategy and present the first evidence that personality predicts persistent bias in verifiable expert intuitions about free will and moral responsibility. These results suggest that, in at least some important fundamental philosophical debates, the Expertise Defense fails"

Nadia wanted to solve Alonzo. To reduce him to a canonical, analytic representation, sufficient to reconfigure him at will. If there was a potential Alonzo within potential-Alonzo-space, say, who was utterly devoted to Nadia, who would dote on her and die for her, an Alonzo-solution would make its generation trivial.

from True Names, by Cory Doctorow and Benjamin Rosenbaum

Warning: this post tends toward the character of mainstream philosophy, in that it relies on the author's intuitions to draw inferences about the nature of reality.

If you are dealing with an intelligence vastly more or less intelligent than yourself, there is no contest. One of you can play the other like tic-tac-toe. The stupid party's values are simply irrelevant to the final outcome.

If you are dealing with an intelligence extremely close to your own -- say, two humans within about five IQ points of each other -- then both parties' values will significantly affect the outcome.

If you are dealing with an intelligence moderately more or less intelligent than yourself, such as a world-class politician or an average eight-year-old child respectively, then the weaker intelligence might be able to slightly affect the outcome.

If we formalize free will as the fact that what we want to do has a causal effect on what we actually do, then perhaps we can characterize the sensation of free will -- the desire to loudly assert in political arguments that we have free will -- as a belief that our values will have a causal effect on the eventual outcome of reality.

This matches the sense that facing a terrifyingly powerful intelligence, one that can solve us completely, strips away our free will, which in turn probably explains the common misconception that free will is incompatible with reductionism -- knowing that an explanation exists feels like having the explanation be known by someone. We don't want to be understood.

It matches the sense that a person's free will can be denied by forcing them into a straitjacket and tossing them in a padded cell. It matches the assumption that not having free will would feel like sitting at the wheel of a vehicle that was running on autopilot and refusing manual commands.

In general, we can distinguish three successive stages at which free will can be cut off:

• The creature can be constructed non-heuristically to begin with; that is, it lacks a utility function.
• The creature can control insufficient resources to be in a winnable state; that is, it is physically helpless.
• The creature can be outsmarted; that is, it has a vastly superior opponent.

Probably the last two, and possibly all three, cannot remain cleanly separated under close scrutiny. But the model has such a deep psychological appeal that I think it must be useful somehow, if only as an intermediate step in easing lay folk into compatibilism, or in predicting and manipulating the vast majority of humans that believe or alieve it.