CHAPTER

Most of the films we love watching are peppered with continuity errors great and

small, but how many of us ever noticed a white van driving into a Braveheart bat-

tle scene, or bullet holes in a wall before shots were fired in Pulp Fiction? Should

we doubt our perceptual grasp on the world?

The closer you are to something, the easier it is to feel that you understand it. Noth-

ing, it seems, could be closer to me than my personal experience; after all, it is a large

part of what makes me me. But in the first two chapters we have already begun

to find that our intuitions about the nature of experience and its relation to our

physical world and body may not always be completely reliable. And sometimes,

perhaps if we have spent too long imagining Mary coming out of her black-and-

white room over and over again, we lose hold of what those intuitions even are.

This can be a frightening moment: if I cannot base my exploration of conscious-

ness on what I  know about my own consciousness, what can I  base it on? But

it can also be liberating: OK, now it makes sense for me to go right back to the

beginning and work my way back to the question I was struggling with, one care-

ful step at a time. One crucial part of doing this is being willing to accept the

possibility that you are mistaken about some aspect of your experience. In this

sense, we must be prepared to ask whether some of the ways thing seem to us

might be illusions.

The word ‘illusion’ is sometimes taken to mean something that doesn’t exist: ‘His

arrogance was just an illusion.’ But more precisely, an illusion is something that it

is not what it appears to be: what looked like arrogance was profound shyness.

The grand illusion

tHRee