Here is a 19th Century stereogram image of the Lion Gate entrance to the citadel of Mycenae on the Peloponnese of Greece. If you cross your eyes and get the two images to overlap suddenly they merge into a 3D image before your eyes. It is like entering a window into the past over a century ago.
Now we call this an illusion.
You can do the same with moving images to get profound phenomena:
Following the same method of crossing eyes to get the two images to overlap suddenly an impossible object occurs in the space before your eyes. A 3D object that appears in the world and yet is not.
How is this possible? Well people argue that we have two eyes, and yet only see one world. What the brain does is take the two images from the eyes, which are seen from very slightly different perspectives--because the eyes are a few centimeters apart--and combines them to extrapolate the 3D dimension. Thus the brain is able to imagine a 3D object.
But wait a second. This is not just how the brain creates the 3D stereogram or the 3D mandala above this is how it makes the world itself! When we see a "real" 3D object we are still using the information from our 2 eyes to extrapolate that 3D entity. The only difference is that unlike the images above which are caused by crossing the eyes, with a "real" 3D image we don't cross our eyes, we just look at the object and that causes the two separate images to enter our eyes.
So there are 2 ways to create this "illusion." One is to cross our eyes to combine two separate images on a screen, and the other is to look at an object and get the two separate images reflected off it. Yet the process of "illusion" is the same!
The only difference then is the method by which we get the two images. In both cases the actual 3D vision we get is an illusion, or better neither are an illusion because this is how we create the visual world!
So this suggests a Matrix type reality where we are living in a make believe mental space that is separate from the outside world. Wrong.
There is only one space. That is the space created by the brain through the process of combining twin images.
What we tend to ask next though is well if the brain is making this space, then the space must be "inside" the brain and the brain on the outside of the 3D space? It is though we really could disconnect the illusion and wake up in reality like Neo does in the Matrix.
But problem. If we ever did follow Neo and wake up in "reality" isn't this just a new 3D space created by the brain?
We are going much further here. We are looking at the very process by which 3D is created at all. Any experience of 3D involved the combining of 2D images and the brain extrapolating the 3rd dimension. There is no "escaping" this into "reality."
So what does reality look like "outside" the 3D world of experience?
That is like saying of a rabbit hutch, what does the outside rabbit look like when it is the inside rabbit. Well if we put it outside then it is not inside, and it can't be in two places at the same time. So if the rabbit is inside the room then there is no rabbit outside and so it doesn't look like anything. It is a contradiction. Seeing something in 3D means seeing something in 3D, there is no way to see something in 3D outside of 3D.
So our brain is still puzzled. If I am creating the illusion of 3D then where am I?
Well by SRH you can't create 3D and be inside 3D. If you were to go to a hospital you could get a scan of your brain sitting their inside your 3D skull. And if you really needed persuading you could get a surgeon to remove part of the skull so you could look (via a mirror) at your brain in 3D. From SRH we know the brain cannot simultaneously be creating the world of 3D and be in the world of 3D. What we are looking at when we see our brain is not the creator of the world!
And so we enter a no man's land. And this is where people even modern science has got confused. There is this belief that "I" must be somewhere. If I search the world hard enough I will find this "I." Currently we think the Brain actually IS the "I." No brain no I. So Brain IS "I." Have "I have a brain therefore I am" to give a modern materialist capitalist reified version of Descartes (not only do you need to own something to be a self, but that something must be a material object - this is how far the world has fallen!). Obvious question: if you are the brain then who "possesses" that brain? It can't posses itself, any more than Descartes can think himself.
We find that the creator of the world, the thing which generates the 3D world (the computer behind our Matrix so to speak), the thing that thinks, the thing which is "me" that "thing" is not a thing, and that thing is not me, and that thing is not in the 3D world.
What we discover is that there is nothing "outside" the 3D world because inside/outside are part of that 3D world of space. Kant says that Space is one of the a prior conditions for the possibility of experience; without a stage already existing then we couldn't perform our play. So we can't ask normal questions of Space like where does it come from.
The major confusion is that in we have another world apart from experience to play around in: the world of Thoughts. Once we start talking about Space we can switch to Thought World which does not have space and start to construct elaborate theories about how Space is created. But we shouldn't get too involved because even that world has its limits: how are thoughts created? Not so powerful now thoughts!
Ultimately we are just left with the phenomena as they happen. What could cause Space anyway? Whatever we decide is the cause of space, will just become a new question. Somewhere we have to stop and just accept things as they are.
So no these images at the start are not illusion. That is what 3D looks like, whether it is generated by crossing eyes on two slightly different images, or looking at a physical object to get two perspectives in our eyes. The result either way is actually 3D! That is what the phenomenon is like. There is no illusion of 3D!
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