Science Misses Illusion

By Leo Gura - June 3, 2025

The whole challenge of understanding reality is that your mind is not an honest actor, because its life is at stake. The prime methodological error in all of science, philosophy, and academia is the assumption that mind is an honest actor. If you assume that, you will never be able to unravel the ingenious illusion that is reality. Human beings do not properly estimate nor appreciate just how dishonest of an actor the mind is. Your mind is so dishonest that everything you understand is an elaborate self-serving illusion. You’ve been blowing smoke up your own ass your entire life, and so has everyone around you. By overlooking this one factor academia is forever doomed because it never deals with the elephant in the room: illusion.

Scientific method is incapable of dealing with the situation where reality happens to be an ingenious illusion. Science is naïve like an innocent child. A child does not understand the notion of a dishonest actor. Science has no comprehension of the tricks reality is capable of. Science is like a child and the mind is like a pedophile luring it into its white van with candy. This is why science naively asks for evidence, reasons, logic, equations, proofs, models, sources, consensus. Oh, you sweet summer child! It asks for these things without ever considering that the whole scheme could be an elaborate illusion. What if scientific method was an illusion? What if rationality was an illusion? What if human-kind was an illusion? What if life and death was an illusion? What if objects were an illusion? What if space/time was an illusion? What if all limits were an illusion? What if other minds were an illusion? What if society was an illusion? What if knowledge was an illusion? What does science say to all this? Science never takes any of this seriously. Science just says, “Oh well, those are some wacky ideas for armchair philosophy debates. I just want to get to the business of doing science. I want to be practical.” But no! You can’t escape the issue of illusion like that. Illusion is not optional. You can’t opt-out by being pragmatic. This is to sweep the elephant under the rug.

The bottom line is that neither scientific method nor rationality are methods for dealing with intelligent illusion nor dishonest actors (the mind). This is why scientific method must fail at grasping the deep mystery of reality. Reality is an ingenious trickster. Reality bites back. Science assumes otherwise. Science assumes that reality is a dumb passive machine that a scientist can poke with a stick. That attitude is the fatal flaw. Science fails because it grossly underestimates the inherent intelligence of the beast it has undertaken to study. Science projects its own lack of intelligence and creativity onto a Infinite Mind. What arrogance! I am not arrogant, I am humble. I take illusion seriously. Science does not. This is why I am able to understand things no scientist can. Not because I am a high-IQ genius, just because I take illusion seriously.

The issue of illusion is so profound, so serious, that it transcends scientific method. But good luck getting a scientist or academic to understand that.

What’s necessary to solve the riddle of reality is a science of trickery, illusion, and deceit. This is a branch of science that barely exists. Actualized.org is a contribution to this branch by cataloguing and explaining how the mind constructs illusions and self-deceptions. Two of the most important illusions to understand is the illusion of science and the illusion rationalism.

Click Here to see ALL of Leo's juicy insights.