The Ego Trick (baggini, Julian) / quote 171 of 254
Dennett: the self as user illusion
The philosopher Daniel Dennett takes a similar line, calling the perception of a unitary controlling mind a ‘veridical illusion’. ‘It’s an illusion in the same way the desktop on your computer is an illusion,’ he told me. ‘There aren’t any little yellow files on your hard disc and in fact files are distributed, scattered all over your hard disk. All of the icons stand in for real and quite messy and elaborate processes – you really don’t want to know anything about them. It’s called the user illusion and that’s a good term for it. I won’t go so far as to say we’re the only species with any kind of user illusion, but that’s pretty close to the truth, I think.’