Or in the words of Spanish playwright Pedro Calderón de la Barca:

“What is life? A frenzy.
What is life? An illusion,
A shadow, a fiction,
And the greatest profit is small;
For all of life is a dream,
And dreams are nothing
but dreams.”

Link to Slide Show

6 Comments

1. 1. quantumcipher 01:52 AM 10/16/08

   This article was particularly interesting, informative, but ultimately pessimistic. Although our perceptions of the world around us reside solely of our neurons, you have to remember that your perceptions and subsequent microcosm of thought is not where that world ends nor begins. Life, and the world around us, is more than just an illusion created by our neurons, and we should take time to appreciate the beauty & complexity of this "illusion" we see around us.

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2. 2. sentience_iza_virtue 12:56 PM 10/16/08

   Based on the title, I expected a more detailed explanation of the inner workings of optic/neural interactions. Maybe the title should have been - "A history of 3-D illusionists"? The slide show was fascinating, but would have been more illuminating had they added secondary gif animations, moving a single line from one to the other to convince the skeptical. (I did it myself just to prove to my brain they were!)
   I also expected the talented sidewalk painter to get more than a one line credit - "Even today artist Julian Beever creates perspective illusions in his sidewalk art." Surely not the way to inspire readers to check out his work, which is pretty awesome. No honorable mention of bodypainting illusions, either, though some are not just sexy but creatively deceptive to the mind's eye.
   Final rant- the layout of SciAm articles is not user-friendly. IMHO, there was no good reason to strew this over 3 pages.

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3. 3. rosabrand 09:56 PM 10/16/08

   Its bad enough that this nonsense is being inculcated in academia philosophy classrooms. Its an entirely different thing to suggest that reality is a figment of our imagination. Just try telling a starving child that his/her hunger is a figment of his/her imagination or a cancer patient that their condition is simply chemical in the brain not anything concrete as reality. Both the philosophical and scientific implications of his thesis are more devastating than any abuses people could suffer, because it suggests that not only should we accept on scientific grounds that nothing is real but that we couldnt possibly perceive anything real if it hit us in the face. A person is then left to whim or the loudest voice that forces an agenda. Sorry, Mr. Macknik and Ms. Martinez-Conde, you can fool all of us with this rhetoric. Try some sciences that actually help mankind, not blind and deafen him to the truth.

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4. 4. WarDog927 in reply to rosabrand 02:02 PM 10/17/08

   to rosabrand. i think you read into it too much. lol.

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5. 5. ralphskinner@hotmail.com 03:59 PM 10/19/08

   hunger and pain are subjective reality, they are real to the person experiencing them.
   That is different from oblective reality, or how our brains interpret outside reality

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6. 6. fostvedt 06:02 AM 6/7/10

   It's just as provoking as always to read about how the "real world" is somehow disconnected from the experience of the human mind. They both exist in context of one another and are intricately bound together. I pose that you could might as well say that the "real world" is an illusion conjured up by an experiential founding as well as you could pose the statements made by this article. I think the way the terms 'illusion' and 'real' are used in sciences of the mind in general undermines this philosophical possibility. Besides, people feel a little miserable about being some caleidoscopic error factory floating around in the nowhere ever disconnected from what is 'real'.

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