Is there a list of cognitive illusions?
After I posted my great idea that “Determinism Is Just A Special Case Of Randomness” because “if not I don’t see how there could be free will in a deterministic universe” I was positively guided by the LW community to read the Free Will Sequence so I am learning more about our biases and how we build illusions like free will and randomness in our minds.
But I don’t see a list on LW or Wikipedia of a list of cognitive illusions and I think it would be great to have one of those just as it is useful for many people to visit the List Of Cognitive Biases page as a study reference or even to use in day to day life.
I think these are some cognitive illusions that are normally discussed as such:
- Free will
- Randomness/probability
- Time
- Money
There must be many more, but I don’t find a list with summaries and that would great (to help me avoid writing posts like my “great idea” above!).
EDIT: The majority of comments below are about questioning if they are illusions or not and if they should be called cognitive illusions.
I guess there is no list of cognitive illusions because there is no academic agreement about these issues like in cognitive biases which are generally accepted as such!
Thx for the comments!
Are the following also illusions?
A brick. Pain. Monarchy. Atoms. A recipe for fish pie. A 747. The neighbours’ cats. Romania.
Once you deem things to be illusions because, when you stare at them hard enough, they seem to not really, truly, fundamentally exist, there’s no end to that process, as Buddhist philosophers have found. Some of them bite that bullet, even to the point of declaring the emptiness of emptiness. Then, I presume, they carry on getting up in the morning and going about their days, teaching their illusory students in illusory lecture halls about the illusion of illusion.
The meta-ontological principle there is that only ontologically irreducible things “exist”, and that everything else is “illusion”. If this is to be anything more than a redefinition of the words “exist” and “illusion” that leaves the ordinary uses of these words unchallenged, some truth must be being asserted by such claims of non-existence. But what?
If things have fuzzy edges, if they come into existence and pass away, if some of them turn out to be not what we thought they were: we still have to deal with them.
What you say above is true, we can deconstruct endlessly with no useful objective, but that doesn’t mean that the process of deconstruction is wrong.
My example of the car is to illustrate that we build concepts out of “lower level” parts.
The car and the bricks are real, but sometimes we do the same thing and build a construct that doesn’t correspond to reality. I use the word illusion when this happens I guess.
I think time is an illusion because our mind puts together some observations and properties and we feel time, but I don’t think it is an object like the car.
Why not just call them “mental concepts”?
There’s a case for calling free will an illusion.
You can directly stimulate a neuron to get someone to move his arm up. If you then ask him why he moved his arm he will usually make up an explanation that explains his behavior. He will explain you why he made the free choice to move his arm. Behavior caused by posthypnotic suggestions produces the same effect. T
People makes up a plausible sounding justification for their behavior that’s different from the true cause of their behavior if they aren’t aware of the true cause. There’s the illusion that the person could have made a choice to act differently.
As a result it makes some sense to call free will a cognitive illusion. I doesn’t feel to me like “Money” is in the same class. Money is simply a concept. I don’t feel on a very primal level that a dollar bill is money the way I feel like I’m having control over my own actions. I identify a dollar bill as money because I learned from someone else that it’s money.
Given the history of money I don’t think there strong enough evolutionary pressure to have a direct experience of money the way we have a direct experience of free will.
Agreed!
Why not just call them “mental concepts”?
These aren’t illusions, even free will; let alone time, money and probability.
Free will concept (as used by anyone but philosophers) makes sense; there are things that are controlled by your conscious processes. For example, now I’m deliberately controlling my arms to type this comment, isn’t it a free will? Of course, I’m entity within physics, my thoughts and actions are fully determined by physics laws (whether random or not), etc, etc. Yet, I can deliberately move my arm.
Probability isn’t an illusion; probability is a measure of uncertainty, and probability theory is a large and very useful field mathematics which supplies us with knowledge about how to use such a nice tool. It’s not an illusion; it’s a mathematical concept.
Time isn’t an illusion; no matter how timeless your physics theory, it must contain explanation for phenomena that you now call time. If you develop a shiny new gravitation theory, apples won’t fall differently. You can a new shiny timeless physics, butwhatever you now call time isn’t going to disappear. It would be explained as a dimension, or as a function of position of all particles in the universe.
As for money, I don’t quite understand why they are considered an illusion at all. I have checked banknotes in my wallet; they are real, as far as I can tell. Did you mean some economical misconceptions?
It all adds up to normality.
You cannot deliberately move your arm. The program of our universe just brought the elementary particles that make up your body into a configuration in which you moved your arm demonstratively. You cannot reasonably understand yourself as a closed systems because all of your elementary particles are heavily entangled with your surroundings. I like Joscha Bach’s definition of free will best: It’s a social term, in that an action was carried out under free will iff. it could have been influenced by social discourse.
The concept is that by aggregating things we observe that form parts of processes, or physical things, sometimes we end up calling them one name, or feeling them as one thing as a category or a concept.
For example, if we see a sequence of events where the first gave way to the second, which gave way to the third, fourth, etc. all the way to the 10th, because each one was not possible unless the previous one had happened we tend to “feel” as if something is passing, so we feel time, and we call it time, and create methods for measurement, and it all works in favor of our collective organizational strategy, but time by itself does not exist. The use of the word “cognitive illusion” I got it from some authors who describe it this way.
In my case I had arrived to the conclusion that time didn’t exist, that it was only “movement”, independently when I was in 10th grade, when a history teacher asked aloud “what would happen if everything in the universe stopped?” and I screamed “time would stop!” and she sent me to detention for acting as a smarty pants. I learned about relativity much later in my life.
Regarding free will, I had the same belief as you, but they convinced me otherwise here, when I posted about my idea of free will, randomness,and determinism.
Money, because I am in finance, I have a more closer perspective and have considered it similar to time. The addition of the properties of store of value, unit of account, medium of exchange, divisibility, portability, etc. add up to a feeling of substance or tangibility. Just like you say “I have checked banknotes in my wallet; they are real...” that is what I call above an illusion. That paper you have is just nearly worthless, but because we use it as a standard it has a subjective value and that feels like “money”.
One should distinguish between common-sense concepts, and their formalization. But since they have the same name, many people fail to see the difference.
For example, people perceive time. Time flow is a thing that everybody feels and knows about; I have a hard time imaging living in a world without it (it’s easy to imagine such a world—just as some static object—but what it means to live in a static world? consciousness thing seems to be very connected to the time concept). Then, people invent some physical theories; in those theories, time is somehow formalized—for example, in relativity theory time is considered an additional dimension. Note that there are two concepts—common-sense-time, and physics-time.
Now a new cool physical theory appears, which declares that the time dimension (or whatever) is redundant, that only spatial positions of particles are required, thus rendering physics-time concept an illusion.
So physics-time is an illusion; but common-sense-time isn’t—it’s still here, in our lives, it hasn’t gone anywhere. Now it just has a different formalization in physics.
Pretty much the same thing is true for other cases: there is a real-world solid fact, and then there are formalizations, theories and concepts built on the top of it; some of them can be wrong.
Money have a subjective value—one can go and exchange it for goods and services; the (obvious) fact that money is paper is irrelevant here. We can consider various economical theories about what money is and how it all works, and conclude they are false (or not), but money itself is certainly a thing and it works somehow. The cake isn’t a lie if you can eat it.
What you are searching for isn’t a list cognitive illusions of things; rather, it is a list of wrong, yet widespread theories of them. Common-sense time exists, but time as an additional dimension, maybe, doesn’t. Common-sense-free-will exists, but philosophical-free-will, maybe, doesn’t. And so on.
Regarding free will, I guess I was probably one of those people who tried to convince you otherwise :)
Thx for your thoughts and taking the time!
I agree that there is a common-sense vs formal dimension to the concepts we use. Time is so real in a common-sense way that we measure it precisely and we manage a big part of our lives with it.
Free will and it’s correct conceptualization is critical for our freedom and political systems.
The same goes for money and its use.
I think that a list of “illusions” is more difficult (and controversial!) than a list of cognitive biases.
Every cognitive bias can be seen as an illusion that the biased thought process is accurate, but you contrast illusions with biases. So it’s not clear to me what separate class you have in mind by “cognitive illusion”, and I don’t see how any of the examples you gave fit.
Is this an example of what you mean:
From here.
Yes, I might be naively confusing terms. I see that there are cognitive biases, fallacies, heuristics, and other mental constructs we build and use to make our thinking more efficient, although some are not very accurate, but there are some more elaborate constructs with bigger structures that I see are considered “feelings” or “illusions” that are not listed like the others (maybe because there is more controversy around them or they are not psychologically relevant).
If “stereotyping” is a cognitive bias, the more elaborate “free will” is a cognitive illusion, but that is how I read it in some blogs.
Very close I got from here: How An Algorithm Feels From Inside.
I think the term cognitive illusion should be used as defined by psychologists for a class of perceptive illusions.
I think the term illusion when used for specific biases is used historically in the metaphoric way. Example: The illusion of control.
I agree that maybe we should use a better term.
Your example above is what I would like to see, a wiki page where all the “illusions” are listed like in the case of cognitive biases (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases).
I couldn’t build it because I am not a scientist or psychology professional.
The free will / determinism question(?) is entirely pointless because even if you know the answer, it won’t have any effect on you. (I haven’t read the relevant sequence and I don’t have a strong feeling that it would change my mind, but you’re free to give it a shot, or two, or spray the whole clip)
In the abstract it doesn’t have an effect. In you look at particular choices and investigate whether those choices are determined by specific outside factors or by free will it matters.
People like to think that marketing has no effect on them, but if you actually go out and measure marketing has a deterministic effect on the choices people make.
People often rationalize decisions they make with explanations about why they choose that have nothing to do with the factors that determined the decision. They think they were capable to make the decision based on the reasons they come up with as if they had the freedom to make a decision that isn’t determined by an outside factors.
If you look an issue such as being overweight thinking about free will is interesting. You might naively think that the overweight person could just make a decision to eat less via free will. On the other hand the strong correlation between genetics and being overweight suggests that it doesn’t really work that way. The genetics determine the result.
Can you clarify what you mean by “cognitive illusion”? I don’t see why your other three examples should be grouped in that category with free will.
I don’t see why free will should be there either. That it is an illusion is one particular view of free will, but it is not “normally discussed as such”.
In the physical world we may call a set of wheels on a chassis, with a steering wheel, and a motor, a car. The meaning car is very tangible and useful, but cars are constructs in our minds. In reality it is organized metal, rubber, and fuel.
In the environment of the mind we build concepts like cars, but we put together properties like “store of value”, “unit of account”, “exchange mechanism”, “divisibility”, etc. and we call it money, but money doesn’t exist per-se, although it is very useful to quantify it, manage it, and turn it into a commerce tool.
The same way we feel that time, free will, and randomness exist.
So, if we call some constructs “cognitive biases”, others are calling these more elaborate structures “cognitive illusions”.
Sure, a car is composed of other things, but that does not make the car illusory.
Similarly I see no reason to deny the reality of free will, randomness/probability, time and money.
Some structures are the sum of parts, and our designation of a meaning to the complete structure is the layer at which I think we may create things and sometimes we feel them very tangible. For example randomness is our lack of information of how thing operate so we feel them as random (or certain on the opposite side) and created probability to manage that.
Also, I think that we tend to group and categorize these parts into “information packets” (as constructs in our minds) so our brain doesn’t have to compute the whole history of things each time we think about them. To think about time is much more efficient than to think about every earth spin and at which point in earth’s orbit we are.
I think we are so used to time that our brain feels it exists as nearly a tangible thing.
The car is made of material that we can touch and it works, and takes us to where we want to go,but I still think the idea of the car is a construct.
Who calls things like time and probability cognitive illusions?
Cognitive illusions are formally a category of Optical Illusions.
Free will as a cognitive illusion is mentioned here.
I haven’t found time and probability directly mentioned as cognitive illusions.
Determinism is called an illusion here.
Certainty is called an illusion here.
I think to call the above illusions is equivalent to cognitive illusions because they describe similar mental processes and patterns.
I don’t think this is carving reality at the joints.
The free will illusion, at least as presented by Yudkowsky, is that we don’t know our own planning algorithm, and understanding how it (probably) works dissolves the illusion, so that “do I have free will” stops even seeming like a question to ask. The illusion is that there was a question at all. The relevant category to watch for is when lots of people want an answer even though nobody can nail down exactly what the question is, or how to tell when you have an answer.
This is a much more specific phenomenon than “elaborate structures”, which includes pretty much everything except fundamental particles or the like.
I agree my arguments must be grotesque. I hope to get better by participating more here and reading the sequences so I may be more useful for the community.
Your explanation above helps me fill in the blanks of things I missed of Yudkowsky’s free will articles.
It is a little disconcerting not to have opinions like “free will does not exist because...” or “Free will is an illusion because...” instead of “dissolving” issues which requires much more abstract thinking and preparation for newbies like me!
I’d consider personal identity to be an illusion in the same way as free will. I would not consider the other three to be illusions. Time goes hand-in-hand with free will and personal identity, but it’s still a thing. If you start with differential equations and boundary conditions, you will get time, where complex things emanate from the simple boundary conditions.
I agree that identity is similar to free will.
Can you point me to some articles or content about differential eq and boundary conditions? (I am lazy w/ math!).
I don’t think you need to know much math to understand it. The way we understand the universe is that there are the laws of physics and the big bang. The laws of physics are a set of differential equations. The big bang is the initial condition. You specify how the universe is at t = 0, and how it changes, and from that you can deduce everything that will happen. You could also go on to deduce everything that did happen, and you’ll end up with the arrow of time going the other way. Or you could follow the timeless physics route, and have some huge number of dimensions, and the arrow of time just generally points away from wherever you stuck the big bang.
You don’t even need differential equations. A reversible cellular automaton will also work.