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But if one said magicians use sleight of hand to fool the brains of audience members into the illusion that magic has been performed, then why doesn't that bring clarity? Illusions are perceptual errors the brain creates when misinterpreting data from the senses, often because of some unusual condition in the environment.

This idea has been extended to say things like reality could be an illusion (Matrix scenarios), or something we take to be fundamental to reality such as the flow of time could be an illusion, in that our mental experience of it is misleading us into thinking it's fundamental.

That we can be fooled by our experience of the world is not controversial. People thought the world was flat and that the moon and sun rose around a still Earth, which was the center of the cosmos. Because that's how it appeared to them.




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