The titled question of what we feel and see as an illusion is tricky. It’s a complex and intriguing puzzle that invites us to delve deeper into the nature of our perceptions.
After all, it seems evident that if we feel and see something, that something must exist. For example, the discovery of the planet Neptune was made based on mathematical calculations of its predicted position due to observed perturbations in the orbit of the planet Uranus. It happened in 1845. Astronomers Urbain Jean-Joseph Le Verrier in Paris and John Couch Adams in Cambridge made these extraordinary computations. Still, for one year, these were only calculations and hypotheses. In 1846, astronomer Johann Gottfried Galle used a telescope. He made the first observations of the new planet, which was only 1 degree from its calculated position. What he saw, planet Neptune, was not an illusion.
Nevertheless, aren’t we all live in a collective illusion?
After all, in its essentials, the geocentric theory of the Universe, which placed stable Earth in the center of the Universe, was based on our common sense, that is, of how we feel and see the surrounding world. We feel and see (but not in the open sea) that the world is flat, and by watching the Sun and Moon, we “feel” these astronomical objects revolve around us. Still, it is only an illusion. By writing about all these things, I started to wonder if we should always trust our ordinary senses. The answer is obvious: we cannot implicitly trust our senses.
So maybe our lives are illusions, experiments prepared by external, unknown forces.
Is our Universe a bubble with infinite numbers of other bubbles, that is, dimensions? While writing about all these things, only questions and doubts arise. How happy I am that I do not have to know the answers to all questions and do not need them to lead a calm and peaceful life. This uncertainty, this lack of definitive answers, is the essence of the philosophical journey we, mankind, are on, and it is what keeps us questioning and exploring the nature of reality and perception.
