Another Free-will poll, please bear with me!

[Angrboda]

It seems to me you are describing us as beings who are fully immersed in the Matrix.  But I always get a kind of philosophical Spidey-sense in situations like this: for if the brain isn't real in the whole-cloth sense that we look at it, then where and what is mind, really?

I'm not sure I understand your question. The mind is created whole cloth, but some things in that mental construct have a correlation with things in the real world (this desk, my body) and some things are purely mental constructs in that they don't correspond to anything real. In fact, a lot more of the mind is illusory in this sense than we normally grant. Our eyes present the brain with two 2D pictures of the world, but we don't perceive the world as two dimensional. Even if we close one eye, features of the 2D picture are used to make the best guess as to a 3D view in the mind, utilizing cues like color, shadow, size and parallax. So in a sense, the mind lives in a Matrix of constructed objects and constructed illusions, like will, feelings, concepts, and morals.

The whole of the mind, whether there is correspondence with things in the external world or not, is a whole cloth construct. It's all illusory in the sense that things in the external world are only incorporated into the mental model after being abstracted from our sense data and interpreted (small/big, near/far, part/whole,line/boundary). (The pain isn't in my foot, it's in the model of my foot in my mind. That sinking feeling in my chest isn't a feeling in my chest, it's a part of my mental model of the world. My imagination of a pony doesn't occur somewhere deep in the center of my head, that's just where in my mental model my 'consciousness' seems to be situated. Our model could place the image of a pony anywhere, from my foot to 6 feet above my head, but it doesn't. Consciousness is 'situated' in space and time (in my head, in the now), despite the fact that if consciousness occurs as a function of the brain, it is spread out among many neurons, and is not 'occurring' at any specific "now." This appearance of my mind being situated in space and time is yet another illusion. It doesn't correlate with real objects in the external world.)