Um...religious taboo.

I'm not being serious here, just nailing the original crazy idea to the wall and seeing what confabulations accrete round it.

Good money is easy to transfer. Those huge stones aren't easy to transfer.

Somebody should explore if Stonehenge, Carnac stones, and other megalithic formations were banking and payment systems.

More recently, in the isle of Yap, they used big Rai stones as money.

Many megalithic buildings are tombs, places of worship, or served as calendars, but many big stones aligned in open spaces have no conclusive explanation.

I suggest they could have been a way of storing value and were used for payments too. There is evidence that there was trade across the European continent and into the middle east in those times (~6000 BC). Central marketplaces where they raised the stones and met to trade could have been a use case. The stones obviously stayed there, with a consensus of who owned them, and the next season of trade they would use them as money again.

To move huge stones and align them takes a lot of time and effort, but greed may be a strong incentive to have built those formations.

We get instead definitive conclusions drawn from thought experiments only.

As a relatively new user here at LessWrong (and new to rationality) it is also curious to me that many here point me to articles written by Eliezer Yudkowsky to support their arguments. I have the feeling there is a general admiration for him and that some could be biased by that rather than approaching the different topics objectively.

Also, when I read the article about dissolving problems and how algorithms feel I didn't find any evidence that it is known exactly how neuron networks work to create these feelings.

That article was a good way of explaining how we might "feel" the existence of things and how to demystify them (like free will, time, ghosts, god, etc.) but I am not sure if the "extra dangling unit in the center" is something that we know exists or if it is another construct that was built to refute things by thought experiment rather than by empiric evidence.

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? 

The conceptual dichotomy still exists, even if reality sides with one horn of the dilemma.

It's important to realise that you are not dealing with a dissolution here. A dissolution roughly means that an "A or B" questionis conceptually invalid. Empirically settling an A-or-B isnt a dissolution, and isnt a waste of time.

But determinism isnt a fact ... its an open scientific question ... and EYs argument for determinism isnt empirical, and isnt valid

I use the word illusion when this happens I guess.

Why not just call them "mental concepts"?

There's a case for calling free will an illusion.

You can directly stimulate a neuron to get someone to move his arm up. If you then ask him why he moved his arm he will usually make up an explanation that explains his behavior. He will explain you why he made the free choice to move his arm. Behavior caused by posthypnotic suggestions produces the same effect. T

People makes up a plausible sounding justification for their behavior that's different from the true cause of their behavior if they aren't aware of the true cause. There's the illusion that the person could have made a choice to act differently.

As a result it makes some sense to call free will a cognitive illusion. I doesn't feel to me like "Money" is in the same class. Money is simply a concept. I don't feel on a very primal level that a dollar bill is money the way I feel like I'm having control over my own actions. I identify a dollar bill as money because I learned from someone else that it's money.

Given the history of money I don't think there strong enough evolutionary pressure to have a direct experience of money the way we have a direct experience of free will.

others are calling these more elaborate structures "cognitive illusions".

Who calls things like time and probability cognitive illusions?

One should distinguish between common-sense concepts, and their formalization. But since they have the same name, many people fail to see the difference.

For example, people perceive time. Time flow is a thing that everybody feels and knows about; I have a hard time imaging living in a world without it (it's easy to imagine such a world -- just as some static object -- but what it means to live in a static world? consciousness thing seems to be very connected to the time concept). Then, people invent some physical theories; in those theories, time is somehow formalized -- for example, in relativity theory time is considered an additional dimension. Note that there are two concepts -- common-sense-time, and physics-time.

Now a new cool physical theory appears, which declares that the time dimension (or whatever) is redundant, that only spatial positions of particles are required, thus rendering physics-time concept an illusion.

So physics-time is an illusion; but common-sense-time isn't -- it's still here, in our lives, it hasn't gone anywhere. Now it just has a different formalization in physics.

Pretty much the same thing is true for other cases: there is a real-world solid fact, and then there are formalizations, theories and concepts built on the top of it; some of them can be wrong.

Money have a subjective value -- one can go and exchange it for goods and services; the (obvious) fact that money is paper is irrelevant here. We can consider various economical theories about what money is and how it all works, and conclude they are false (or not), but money itself is certainly a thing and it works somehow. The cake isn't a lie if you can eat it.

What you are searching for isn't a list cognitive illusions of things; rather, it is a list of wrong, yet widespread theories of them. Common-sense time exists, but time as an additional dimension, maybe, doesn't. Common-sense-free-will exists, but philosophical-free-will, maybe, doesn't. And so on.

Regarding free will, I guess I was probably one of those people who tried to convince you otherwise :)

I'd consider personal identity to be an illusion in the same way as free will. I would not consider the other three to be illusions. Time goes hand-in-hand with free will and personal identity, but it's still a thing. If you start with differential equations and boundary conditions, you will get time, where complex things emanate from the simple boundary conditions.

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.