The world is an illusion.

This seems to be true due to the fact that we do not have a full understanding of it and are limited by our own perceptions.

If we had a full and complete understanding of the world, then it would be hard to argue that it is an illusion. But since our perception is constantly changing, evolving and expanding by learning new information, there does not seem to be a way to fully understand reality.

It is like the movie The Matrix, where any character can be killed at any time and have a new one take their place. Our lives are similar to the movie in that we are all characters living out a story.

If it is an illusion, then does that make us all characters like Neo in the movie? Are we part of some grand program controlled by a being who thinks he is God (or whatever supreme being you follow)? Or are we like robots existing to help him run his mainframe?

It is hard to tell whether reality exists or not. There does seem to be some aspects of it that are accurate, but there seems to be a lot of contradictions and oddities.

We can look at the universe and see that it is expanding, but we do not know whether or not this expansion has been happening forever or if it will stop sometime in the future.

The physical world is a very large place. It is made up mostly of empty space and operates under the laws of quantum physics, which govern how particles interact with one another at small scales. At these smaller scales, reality becomes mutable; there are no absolutes and things can be influenced by the observer.

This is the basis of quantum mechanics, which has been tested to an incredible degree and never found wanting. At even smaller scales however, these laws break down and we are left with phenomena that cannot be explained by our current scientific models.

Hence, there is no reason to think that anything we know about the universe is really true. It could be made up entirely of atoms or be infinite, for all we know.

As a result, the physical world is not an objective reality but it is a self-evidently subjective one. It can be manipulated by the observer's mind and will.

Most notably, the human mind is capable of perceiving a rich world that extends far beyond what our senses are able to pick up on their own. This world exists only in our minds and is entirely subjective; an illusion created by the observer.

To oppose my argument: One of the reasons I think it is not possible for us to know whether or not the world is an illusion and that we cannot experience its non-existence, as I have tried to suggest above, is because in order to do so you would need a mind which was able to perceive this. Such a mind could only be one which did not exist - as any such mind must already be conscious in order for it to 'know'. Therefore there can never be any way of knowing if our minds are just part of some kind of simulation, especially since there may well be no such thing as anything outside these simulations (otherwise how would the simulators gain knowledge about this).

For example, we all know that a cat exists. But how do we know this? Well, in order to answer that question you would need to be able to conceive of what a non-existent cat might look like and yet if there is no such thing as non-existence then it's impossible for us to even imagine what something which doesn't exist looks like let alone compare any kind of 'non-existent' with an existing creature. The same applies for anything else - we can never experience things themselves but only their appearance.

Every person has their own idea of what the world is like, and every person's ideas are different. There is no universal way to understand what reality really is beyond personal perception. A thought experiment might be useful here: imagine a color which nobody can see (I know this sounds silly, but bear with me). Imagine that you yourself can't see this color either - it does not exist in your brain as an object of awareness in any sense whatsoever. Nevertheless, you believe that it exists because other people tell you it does and show you pictures of it.

Now, what if I told you that this color is an illusion - there really isn't any such thing as the color you think exists. No matter how much proof people show you or how many other people agree on its existence, it doesn't exist at all.

It turns out that in our world, the color you can't see does not exist at all, but it is nevertheless an illusion created by many people's false perception. Many other things in this universe are like this as well - nothing has a single fixed reality independent of human beings and their perceptions of them.

So, in a way, what you call the 'world' is really just an illusion of reality which emerges from some people's perceptions and beliefs. It does not have any sort of objective existence.

So, the world is not real. But how can we know what reality really is? Is it possible to get past human perception and see a more universal view of things?

You can't, because reality doesn't exist outside of perception. To put it another way: you can see the world as an illusion which is not real, or as a dream from which we will eventually wake up.