I agree, both P1 and P2 are false because free will is unobservable to begin with.

This post and the exchanges with you and others have helped me advance my thinking a lot about these issues.

I am reading the Free Will Sequence too.

I agree that maybe we should use a better term.

Your example above is what I would like to see, a wiki page where all the "illusions" are listed like in the case of cognitive biases (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases).

I couldn't build it because I am not a scientist or psychology professional.

This is a much more specific phenomenon than "elaborate structures"...

I agree my arguments must be grotesque. I hope to get better by participating more here and reading the sequences so I may be more useful for the community.

Your explanation above helps me fill in the blanks of things I missed of Yudkowsky's free will articles.

It is a little disconcerting not to have opinions like "free will does not exist because..." or "Free will is an illusion because..." instead of "dissolving" issues which requires much more abstract thinking and preparation for newbies like me!

Some structures are the sum of parts, and our designation of a meaning to the complete structure is the layer at which I think we may create things and sometimes we feel them very tangible. For example randomness is our lack of information of how thing operate so we feel them as random (or certain on the opposite side) and created probability to manage that.

Also, I think that we tend to group and categorize these parts into "information packets" (as constructs in our minds) so our brain doesn't have to compute the whole history of things each time we think about them. To think about time is much more efficient than to think about every earth spin and at which point in earth's orbit we are.

I think we are so used to time that our brain feels it exists as nearly a tangible thing.

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.

In the physical world we may call a set of wheels on a chassis, with a steering wheel, and a motor, a car. The meaning car is very tangible and useful, but cars are constructs in our minds. In reality it is organized metal, rubber, and fuel.

In the environment of the mind we build concepts like cars, but we put together properties like "store of value", "unit of account", "exchange mechanism", "divisibility", etc. and we call it money, but money doesn't exist per-se, although it is very useful to quantify it, manage it, and turn it into a commerce tool.

The same way we feel that time, free will, and randomness exist.

So, if we call some constructs "cognitive biases", others are calling these more elaborate structures "cognitive illusions".

So it's not clear to me what separate class you have in mind by "cognitive illusion", and I don't see how any of the examples you gave fit.

Yes, I might be naively confusing terms. I see that there are cognitive biases, fallacies, heuristics, and other mental constructs we build and use to make our thinking more efficient, although some are not very accurate, but there are some more elaborate constructs with bigger structures that I see are considered "feelings" or "illusions" that are not listed like the others (maybe because there is more controversy around them or they are not psychologically relevant).

If "stereotyping" is a cognitive bias, the more elaborate "free will" is a cognitive illusion, but that is how I read it in some blogs.

Is this an example of what you mean:

The way a belief feels from inside, is that you seem to be looking straight at reality.

Very close I got from here: How An Algorithm Feels From Inside.

The concept is that by aggregating things we observe that form parts of processes, or physical things, sometimes we end up calling them one name, or feeling them as one thing as a category or a concept.

For example, if we see a sequence of events where the first gave way to the second, which gave way to the third, fourth, etc. all the way to the 10th, because each one was not possible unless the previous one had happened we tend to "feel" as if something is passing, so we feel time, and we call it time, and create methods for measurement, and it all works in favor of our collective organizational strategy, but time by itself does not exist. The use of the word "cognitive illusion" I got it from some authors who describe it this way.

In my case I had arrived to the conclusion that time didn't exist, that it was only "movement", independently when I was in 10th grade, when a history teacher asked aloud "what would happen if everything in the universe stopped?" and I screamed "time would stop!" and she sent me to detention for acting as a smarty pants. I learned about relativity much later in my life.

Regarding free will, I had the same belief as you, but they convinced me otherwise here, when I posted about my idea of free will, randomness,and determinism.

Money, because I am in finance, I have a more closer perspective and have considered it similar to time. The addition of the properties of store of value, unit of account, medium of exchange, divisibility, portability, etc. add up to a feeling of substance or tangibility. Just like you say "I have checked banknotes in my wallet; they are real..." that is what I call above an illusion. That paper you have is just nearly worthless, but because we use it as a standard it has a subjective value and that feels like "money".

In all those cases I would feel frustration, anger, and a sense of claustrophobia I think. Maybe a deep depression.

Not to have free will would feel like when I am not conscious of the fact that free will exists. I would actually operate the same way as usual. Free will is just an idea that appears when I think about determinism and randomness in the universe. Also, I think about free will when deconstructing the universe and trying to understand how it works. This is because as a way to compare "dead" physical mechanics to "non-dead" I use as a reference the supposed free will I have in my mind (or the feeling of free will).

Summary: Free will is the name I designate to a group of activities in my mind that result in a decision. But it's not a thing or something that actually exists anywhere, but in my imagination!