In the philosophy of mind, the user illusion is a metaphor for a proposed description of consciousness that argues that conscious experience does not directly expose objective reality, but instead provides a simplified version of reality that allows humans to make decisions and act in their environment, akin to a computer desktop.
Kay noted that the visual metaphor of a desktop is merely a tool to create the simplified representation of the underlying complexity of the computer.
[4] For example, computer designers create windows and folders, objects that only exist in the interface but allow the user to interact with the underlying complex programming.
[5] Norretranders approaches the problem of consciousness through the perspective of information processing, where he treats the human brain as a computer.
[6] Thus, Norretranders postulates that when athletes report that they had too much time to think about their skills and mess up, it could be due to the fact that the thought process became slow enough that the conscious mind interfered and started to take over the control.
Much like the computer desktop, our perception of reality is merely a tuned simplification that guides adaptive behavior, a user illusion.
[11] Critics of user illusion argue that humans are able to access the content of their brain’s representations by introspection and analysis of inner speech.
This argument disputes the claim that consciousness is merely a simplified representation of the world in which we cannot access the full information of reality since what you introspect is what there is.
[12] The user illusion proposes that consciousness is an evolutionary tool utilized to enhance social behavior and cooperation.
Critics argue that the existence of social insects with extremely small brains falsifies the notion that social behavior requires consciousness, citing that insects have too small brains to be conscious and yet there are observed behaviors among them that for all functional intents and purposes match those of complex social cooperation and manipulation (including hierarchies where each individual has its place among paper wasps and Jack Jumper ants and honey bees sneaking when they lay eggs).
If consciousness is just the data in the human mind creating a user illusion, then this supports the theory that free will may not exist.