Real Illusions

This title features a selection of family lies and biographical fictions in which the ancestral dead also play their part.

This edited collection presents the latest cutting-edge research in the philosophy and cognitive science of temporal illusions. Illusion and error have long been important points of entry for both philosophical and psychological approaches to understanding the mind. Temporal illusions, specifically, concern a fundamental feature of lived experience, temporality, and its relation to a fundamental feature of the world, time, thus providing invaluable insight into investigations of the mind and its relationship with the world. The existence of temporal illusions crucially challenges the naïve assumption that we can simply infer the temporal nature of the world from experience. This anthology gathers eighteen original papers from current leading researchers in this subject, covering four broad and interdisciplinary topics: illusions of temporal passage, illusions and duration, illusions of temporal order and simultaneity, and the relationship between temporal illusions and the cognitive representation of time.

Alexander Unzicker is a theoretical physicist and writes about elementary questions of natural philosophy. His critique of contemporary physics Bankrupting Physics (Macmillan) received the 'Science Book of the Year' award (German edition 2010). With The Mathematical Reality, Unzicker presents his most fundamental work to date, which is the result of years of study of natural laws and their historical development.The discovery of fundamental laws of nature has influenced the fate of Homo sapiens more than anything else. Has modern physics already understood these laws? Many puzzles formulated by Albert Einstein or Paul Dirac are still unsolved today, in particular the meaning of fundamental constants. In this book, Unzicker contends that a rational description of nature must do without any constants.A methodological and historical analysis shows, however, that the underlying problem of physics is deep, unexpected and fatal: the concepts of space and time themselves, the basis of science since Newton, could be fundamentally inappropriate for the description of reality, although-or precisely because-they are so easily accessible to human perception.A new understanding of reality can only arise from mathematics. By exploring the three-dimensional unitary sphere, which could replace the concepts of space and time, the author presents a mathematical vision that points the way to a new understanding of reality.

Since the late 1920s, the theory formulated by Niels Bohr and his colleagues at Copenhagen has been the dominant interpretation of quantum mechanics. Yet an alternative interpretation, rooted in the work of Luis de Broglie and reformulated and extended by David Bohm and his colleagues in the 1950s, explains the experimental data equally well. Through a detailed historical and sociological study of debates within and between opposing camps, and the reception given each theory, Cushing showed that despite the pre-eminence of the Copenhagen view, the Bohms interpretation cannot be ignored. Copenhagen interpretation became widely accepted not because it is a better explanation ("how") of atomic phenomena than Bohms but because it happened to appear first. In this monograph the author shows that Bohm's point of view is more productive. The properties of solitary objects, which he discusses contradict the Copenhagen's Illusions, but the results are or proved or provable experimentally.

Who Am I? Why Am I Here? What Is Reality Really All About? Throughout mankind's history, our perceptive reality has led us to question who, what, and why we are here. What is this universe we perceive around us? These questions have been the driving force of our survival and have contributed to the evolution and proliferation of man's existence. While there have been many disciplines of thought which have attempted to answer these questions, the truth seems to elude us, thereby indicating a lack of satisfactory answers from all our religions, philosophies, mythologies, and sciences. Ironically, we do in fact have enough knowledge, experience, and information to discover, define, and comprehend the true nature of our existence, as well as our individual roles in it. To realize this requires the willingness to see things at their most basic level, and recognize that what we find there provides us the evidence to understand the foundation of all that exists. For thousands of years, theologians, philosophers, and scientists have monopolized the question of "what is reality?" Now it's a topic for the rest of us. Anyone sufficiently motivated to ask themselves questions such as "Who am I? Why am I here? What is this existence really all about?" already has the inherent ability and the direct evidence to find the answers. It is often said that truth can be stranger then fiction. No where is this more true then in the pages of this eBook.

Visual illusions are compelling phenomena that draw attention to the brain's capacity to construct our perceptual world. The Compendium is a collection of over 100 chapters on visual illusions, written by the illusion creators or by vision scientists who have investigated mechanisms underlying the phenomena. --

Wiggling a pencil so that it looks like it is made of rubber, "stealing" your niece's nose, and listening for the sounds of the ocean in a conch shell– these are examples of folk illusions, youthful play forms that trade on perceptual oddities. In this groundbreaking study, K. Brandon Barker and Claiborne Rice argue that these easily overlooked instances of children's folklore offer an important avenue for studying perception and cognition in the contexts of social and embodied development. Folk illusions are traditionalized verbal and/or physical actions that are performed with the intention of creating a phantasm for one or more participants. Using a cross-disciplinary approach that combines the ethnographic methods of folklore with the empirical data of neuroscience, cognitive science, and psychology, Barker and Rice catalogue over eighty discrete folk illusions while exploring the complexities of embodied perception. Taken together as a genre of folklore, folk illusions show that people, starting from a young age, possess an awareness of the illusory tendencies of perceptual processes as well as an awareness that the distinctions between illusion and reality are always communally formed.

This book presents a unique perspective into the investigation and analysis of public discourses, such as those of the environment, politics, and social media, springing from issues of key relevance to contemporary society, including the War on Terror, the ‘Arab Spring’, and the climate-change debate. Employing a qualitative approach, and drawing on data which comprises both written and spoken discourses, including policy documents, political speeches, press conferences, blog entries, informational leaflets, and corporate reports, the book puts forward a unique theoretical framework, that of the Discourse of Illusion. The research draws on discourse analysis, in order to develop and implement a multi-perspective framework that allows a closer look at the intentions of the producer/actor of various discourses, power struggles within social domains, in addition to the socio-political and historical contexts which influence the individual repositories of experience that create multiple, often contesting, arguments on controversial issues, consequently giving rise to discursive illusions. Discursive Illusions in Public Discourse: Theory and practice intensively explores the discourse of illusion within multifarious dimensions of contemporary public discourses, such as: • Political Voices in Terrorism • Activist Voices in New Media • Corporate Voices in Climate Change This book will particularly appeal to researchers working within the field of discourse analysis, and more generally for students of postgraduate research and specialists in the field of language, linguistics, and media. The book can also be used as a guide for non-specialists in better understanding the complexities of public discourses, and how they shape society’s perceptions of some key social and political issues.