Everyday Illusions and Their Relationship to Free Will

In the previous post, “The Fallacy of Free Will,” we discussed the reasons why free will doesn’t actually exist. We explained that it is an illusion created by our brains to help us manage the overwhelming amount of stimuli we encounter every second.

I believe many readers view this argument as sophistry, convinced they possess free will. They experience it directly; they act on their desires and feel that nothing compels their actions.

The reason illusions are powerful is their compelling nature..

The best-known visual illusions are television and movies.

A television screen displays two-dimensional sequences of flashing colored dots, which your brain interprets as convincing, three-dimensional, continuously moving scenes.

A movie consists of a series of rapidly appearing, still, two-dimensional images. Your brain’s shortcut allows you to “see” a three-dimensional, continuously flowing scene.

Another common illusion is the railroad stop sign, which is composed of two alternately flashing lights.

Although the lights don’t move, the alternating flash gives the strong impression that a light is moving back and forth.

In both cases, your visual system sees every photon, but rather than take the time and the monumental effort to translate each one, your brain uses shortcuts. It translates the stream of individual photons into patterns you believe are motion.

It converts the flow of individual photons into patterns that you perceive as motion. You look at the stop sign, and you experience a moving light. No matter how hard you try, you cannot unsee that image.

Only if you cover one light will you see, or rather not see, motion.

That is how we always see. The brain combines trillions of photons entering the visual system every second into a coherent image we perceive as reality. However, that reality consists only of those trillions of photons. Everything you see is an illusion created by your brain.

Our vision is a miracle of evolution. Plants can sense photons, but they don’t see. They don’t put those photons together into a moving, three-dimensional world.

Visual illusions are common, but all sensory systems rely on shortcuts to illusions—experiences where perception diverges from external reality.

I asked AI to give me examples of other, non-visual illusions. Here is what it came up with.

1. Auditory Illusions

Shepard Tone: A series of tones that sound like they’re endlessly rising in pitch, but actually aren’t. Your brain gets tricked by overlapping frequency layers.

McGurk Effect: If you see a face mouthing “ga” while the audio says “ba,” your brain might hear “da.” The illusion comes from conflicting visual and auditory inputs.

Phantom Words: Repeating a short, meaningless audio loop causes people to start “hearing” actual words or phrases—your brain imposes meaning on ambiguous input.

Auditory Continuity Illusion: A sound briefly interrupted by noise is perceived as continuing through the noise. Your brain fills in the gap.

2. Tactile (Touch) Illusions Thermal Grill Illusion: Interlacing warm and cool bars creates a burning sensation, even though neither is dangerously hot.

Pinocchio Illusion: If you close your eyes, hold your nose, and vibrate your biceps tendon, you may feel your nose stretching. Your brain merges proprioceptive and tactile inputs into a bizarre body image.

Cutaneous Rabbit: Taps delivered rapidly at the wrist and then the elbow make people feel taps hopping up the arm. Your brain “fills in” where no contact occurred.

Phantom Vibration Syndrome: Feeling your phone buzz in your pocket when it didn’t. A culturally recent but neurologically real tactile illusion.

3. Auditory-Tactile Crossovers

Sound-Induced Flash Illusion: Hearing two quick beeps can make you see a single flash as two flashes. Cross-modal illusions show how senses interact and co-create perception.

4. Olfactory (Smell) Illusions

Harder to pin down, but they do occur—often as context effects.

Imagined Smells: People in a “smelly” environment (e.g., told there’s gas or perfume in the air) often report odors even when none are present. Strong suggestion can conjure real olfactory experience.

Flavor Manipulation: Since taste is largely smell, context and expectation can warp it. The same smell labeled as “parmesan” vs. “vomit” will be perceived differently, even if physically identical.

5. Gustatory (Taste) Illusions These are typically context- or suggestion-based.

Miracle Fruit: This berry binds to taste receptors, making sour things taste sweet for a while. Not an illusion in the strictest sense, but the interpretation of taste is warped.

Color Influence on Flavor: The color of a drink (say, red) can make people taste “cherry” or “strawberry” even if it’s lemon-flavored. Visual input overrides chemical reality.

6. Proprioceptive Illusions These involve body position and motion.

Rotating Room Illusion: In a slowly rotating room, people feel as though they are tilting even when stationary. Your internal sense of gravity gets confused.

Out-of-Body Experiences (in lab settings): Through clever VR or mirrored feedback setups, researchers can induce a feeling of disembodiment, where your sense of self floats away from your body.

In summary, what you see, hear, taste, smell, and feel is not reality. Your brain translates photons into images, vibrations into sound, chemicals into taste and smell, and pressure into touch, whether it is light and shiver-inducing or hard and painful.

None of it is reality. It is translations, often faulty and misleading, though even when as accurate as humanly possible, they still are translations, just as the words “ice cream” or a photo of a sundae are not ice cream.

Here is how that relates to so-called “free will.”

1. Everything we see, hear, smell, taste, and feel is an illusion created by our brain and body. It is as real as a movie, a film, or a TV show.

2. Like all illusions. It may or may not represent some elements of reality, but we cannot know which. Our brain tries to represent enough reality so we will have heirs and they will have heirs.

3. We are not the result of survival of the fittest; rather, we represent the minimum needed for survival, more accurately described as the survival of just barely enough.

4. When it has excess energy, a life form’s population expands to meet the energy supply. That has been true of the human species, which has expanded because, for certain brief times, it has been more than barely enough. We may be nearing that limit.

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PS. Reader “tetrahedron720″ recently wrote to me saying: “I am free to shout in a library, but I can’t do anything about the sequence of reactions of the people around me who will Shhh me or toss me out.”

He is not free to shout in the library.

His brain has translated trillions upon trillions of stimuli into illusions that prevent him from shouting. No matter what he considers doing, the illusions created in his brain will be responsible.

Why are these experiences considered illusions? Tetrahedron720 relies solely on his unique history of receiving photons and other stimuli, which his brain has organized into his unique memories and beliefs. From these stimuli, he has created a distorted reality that influences his actions.

Had those same photons been received by another brain, they would have had a different effect, and produced a different reality.

He believes he is making a decision, but the decision is being made by his brain. There is no supreme “he” that overrides his brain’s actions.

He does not control his brain. His brain controls him.

And now, a question: (I enjoy posting rebuttals or questions about my own opinions, and I welcome them from you, so long as they aren’t simply, “You’re wrong, goodbye.”)

QUESTION: Everything I see, hear, smell, feel, and taste is nothing more than photons, atoms, and other stimuli translated by my brain. Those photons, etc., are the reality.

I’m conscious of the translations, not of the reality. For me, everything is an illusion, like seeing a movie of Hawaii while I sit in Florida.

Yet, while I live my life in an illusion, I still manage to move from point A to point B. I’m not surprised to awaken in point Z.

My life seems to have logical continuity. If this is all an illusion, who or what is the “script girl” that keeps everything in order?

(The old term “script girl” refers to the person on a movie set responsible for ensuring that details, like a cigarette held in the right hand in one scene, do not suddenly change to a handkerchief in the same hand in a subsequent scene.)

ANSWER: Predictive Coding Theory suggests the brain minimizes surprise by anticipating what’s about to happen.

The brain is not a passive receiver of data. It’s a prediction machine. It constantly compares incoming sensory input with past experience. Then it updates its predictions.

The Hollow Face Illusion A concave face looks convex because your brain expects faces to bulge outward. That expectation overrides the actual depth cues.

The dress (white/gold vs. blue/black): The brain guesses the lighting condition (cool shadow vs. warm light), then reconstructs the colors accordingly. It’s not just perception — it’s interpretation.

Memory 

I do not perceive reality; I perceive the interpretation of the present plus the memory of the past. Continuity depends heavily on the consistency of memory.

Memory lets me link this moment to the one before it. Without memory, I’d still have perceptions, but they wouldn’t feel like part of a story. The illusion would shatter into isolated frames.

There are people who suffer from anterograde amnesia, where they can no longer form new short-term memories. They often feel like they’ve just “woken up,” even if it’s the tenth time today.

They may not remember eating, speaking, or being in a room. But their emotions often linger. They might not remember a conversation, but still “feel” trust or fear toward a person based on prior encounters they can’t recall.

Perception without memory is not reality as we know it. It’s a sequence of nows. The “script girl” is gone, and the illusion turns into a slideshow with no story.

Their brain has created a reality as real to them as yours is to you, but it is a reality that lacks continuity.

We each live in a different world, one created uniquely for each of us by our unique brains. My world is as real to me as yours is to you, but they are different worlds.

My beliefs and decisions reflect my perspectives just as yours reflect yours. My illusion is that somehow, my world is the “real” one, but it is upon those unique beliefs that all my decisions are based.

I do not rule my brain. There is no “I” that is apart from my brain. My brain rules me via its interpretations.

Thus, I do not have free will.

Nor do you.

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell

Monetary Sovereignty

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