Are You an Illusion?

Are you an illusion (Routledge Classics) by Mary Midgley 

Are You an Illusion? How does that question make you feel? Mary Midgley poses the question both whimsically and seriously. Given that a vast corpus of contemporary neuroscience and psychology today questions the existence of “free-will”, and asserts that consciousness is no more than a by-product of neurons firing off in the brain or other unspecified bio-chemical processes, the conclusion of such studies is that the sense of a self is an illusion. Mary Midgley not only argues that the conclusion is nonsensical but that the scientists themselves probably don’t believe it either. At least with regard to themselves.

Mary Midgley is no anti-science nut. A respected philosopher who has produced a large corpus of books on moral philosophy and the philosophy of science, she is grounded solidly in Darwinian Evolution. She deserves a serious hearing, even if her views challenge prevailing scientific views.
How did we come to accept as scientific facts concepts that in her view clearly don’t make sense: that we don’t have free will, that our self doesn’t exist, that animals have no emotions, that nature and evolution have no purpose. She concedes that many scientific findings are “counter-intuitive”. Example: the Earth moves at 30km/second through space but we are not aware of...
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