The illusion of realism is that it mistakes our experience of reality for reality itself. Realists like Dennett think of themselves as tough- minded empiricists, but they are not empirical enough to realize that all that is available to them are experiences and nothing beyond them. It is Kant, the transcendental idealist, who starts with experience and then proceeds from it by steps that reason can justify. By contrast, the empiricist begins with a presumption that is impossible to validate, and his whole philosophy is constructed on that dubious premise. The empiricist assumes without any evidence or proof that his experiences somehow give him a magical access to reality. So completely does he identify experience and reality that he cannot liberate himself from thinking of the two as one and the same. In equating experience and reality he is making a huge and unwarranted leap, but this breakdown of reason is not easy for him or us to recognize because our human minds have a built-in disposition toward illusion: the illusion that reality must be exactly the way we experience it. The irony is that many of the people who proceed in this irrational way think of themselves as following strictly along the pathways of reason. Their outlook can survive scrutiny only as long as they do not examine its foundations.
To their credit, there are a few “brights” who take Kant seriously and attempt to answer his arguments. Kant cannot be right in saying that we have no access to reality, they say, because you and I and everyone else experience the same reality. When we are in a room, we see the same lamps and tables and books on the shelf. Obviously those must exist and we must have direct access to them; otherwise we would not all have the same perception of them. But Kant’s answer is that because we are all human beings, we have the same sensory equipment, and it operates in each of us in the same way. Therefore we all have the same experience, but the experience is all we have. Just because we have similar or even identical experiences does not mean that any of us has access to a reality that is beyond that experience.
