Dear Joel,
I enjoyed you essay. Since you do not rely on the reader mathematical
Ability to carry your points, but his/her common sense, your argumentation is clear.
I have done on Ph.D. on image analysis and visual perception and I read and reflect a lot on this question. I will limit my comments to your first section "THE ILLUSIONISTIC NATURE OF PERCEPTION" which is a description of your "notion of the illusionistic nature of perception".
P1: "we don't actually see what's out there on the world-side of our eyeballs."
P2 "What we think we see out there is really what the complicated process of cognition constructs in here (tap your skull, please)."
P3: "There is something out there but it's different from what we perceive".
P4: "Voila! You 'see' the mountain for a short time with exactly the same detail as before the curtain had descended and yet the view of the mountain is totally blocked by the opaque curtain of lead. Such is the illusionistic nature of perception."
P5:" We inhabit a world of experiences that have some connection with
what's out there, but caution is in order when one says, seeing is believing."
P1 is false if we use the common sense meaning of the expression "actually see". What you seem to actually mean by P1 is P3. P4 is used as an example of a case proving P3. I do not agree. Even though the photon stream is blocked, we effectively see the mountain for a little while and this is not an illusion. What is an illusion is the expectation that the stream will not stop but this has noting to do with viewing the mountain now. Suppose that alpha century is now exploding as a supernova. Astromers knows that their current observations are about 4.3 year old. For a child looking in the telescope and interpreting this image as now happening, it is illusionary in its interpretation but not in the sense of what is really experience right now on earth about alpha century. Small light delay here on earth have no practical consequencex and in a pragmatic sense it is not an illusion to neglect these delay effects. P2 and P5 are uncontroversial true.
Maybe the purpose of this section is to refresh our memory about this but overall I do not see anything in this section that says something new that is true.
- Louis