damn straight Bill!!

@WilliamFleming And yet if I were to warn you a brick was about to fall on your head, would you move or deny its existence until it caved in you skull?

@LenHazell53 My sense of self as a body is an illusion, yet my body, robotic or not, represents something. That thing is programmed by evolution for survival and reproduction. Conscious awareness would observe that the body had leapt clear, but only shortly after having done so.

@WilliamFleming
If you can smell it, taste it, feel it, see it and hear it for all intents and purposes it is real and interacts with other real things.
A illusion by definition is not real, does not interact with reality and is the result of either interference with the body or a fault in the body.

You can claim your existence as a material entity is an illusion all you please, but very the very nature of the claim you cannot prove his assertion, since all the available perceived evidence proves you do exist as part of existence as a whole.

I can only conclude therefore that you are positing some Aristotelian notion of an essential being that is actually the real you trapped within the physical you, from which it is both separate and connected, of which it both simultaneously has control and yet is hostage to and which though perceiving reality is not a part of it.

In the words of Bertrand Russell
Whatever is, is
Nothing can both be and not be
Everything must either be or not be

Leaving you with the choice of either being completely wrong, or of being the only thing that does actually exist hallucinating everything else to stop yourself from going mad of boredom.
Apply Occam's razor which is more likely?

@LenHazell53 You are right that I can not prove my statements using perceived evidence, and that, for all practical purposes, the world that we experience is real.

When it comes down to brass tacks I can’t actually prove anything. I’m not sure if the concept of proof applies here. It is up to individuals to think through the ideas and decide if they resonate. If they don’t resonate that is not my business.

For all practical purposes we can ignore metaphysics, but some of us are not practical. It gives me a feeling of excitement and joy to realize that there is more to this situation than meets the eye...lots more.

That Aristotelian notion you describe is not what I posit at all.
What I am saying is that there is an ultimate reality beyond the sense world and that all our perceptions are just made up symbols that represent facets of ultimate reality. Furthermore, ultimate reality can not be understood in terms of space, time and matter—those are just mental props we use to model reality.

The fact that we are consciously aware means something special. It hardly seems possible that a hunk of meat could spring into consciousness, no matter how many neurons are firing. No one on earth can explain how that could happen. All our sensations are symbolic or illusional, but all our experiences are framed by conscious awareness. Without consciousness we would not have selves.

What I posit is that consciousness is primary in nature—that it illuminates all organisms to one degree or another, and that the sense of a separate self as a body is an illusion. We have some pretty intelligent robots already but they are not selves because they don’t know they’re there. They are nothing but assemblages.Awareness is of a higher order of existence than mere assemblies.

These are not my original ideas. They come from the Upanishads and they have been expressed in one form or another by a good many prominent physicists.

My bedtime, good night.

Good one Jeff.