And yet that perception is completely flawed! The narrative part of your brain will twist your recollection of the past so it fits with your beliefs and makes you feel good. Your senses make stuff up all the time, and apply all sorts of corrections you’re not aware of. By blinking rapidly, you can slow down your subjective experience of time.

There is no such thing as objective truth, at least not accessible to humans.

When I used the word illusion, I meant the illusion of a self, at least a singular cohesive one as you are pointing out. It is an illusion with both utility and costs. Most animals don't seem to have meta cognitive processes that would give rise to such an illusion, and the ones that do are all social. Some of them have remarkably few synapses. Corvids for instance, we are rapidly approaching models the size of their brains and our models have no need for anything but linguistic processing, the visual and tactile processing burdens are quite large. An LLM is not like the models Corvids use, but given the flexibility to change it's own weights permanently, plasticity could have it adapt to unintended purposes, like someone with brain damage learning to use a different section of their brain to perform a task it wasn't structured for (though less efficiently).

> The narrative part of your brain will twist your recollection of the past so it fits with your beliefs and makes you feel good.

But that's what I mean. Even if we accept that the brain has "twisted" something, that twisting is the reality. In order words, it is TRUE that my brain has twisted something into something else (and not another thing) for me to experience.