Dear Alan Kadin,
if what you have analysed is a profound truth, then the illusions you spoke of not only hide profound truths, but they also can reveal them. Therefore illusion seems to me the wrong term for a mind that is able to look behind the curtain. Indeed, there is no contradiction between a physical brain, hiding some irrelevant things according to Darwinian evolution and a brain revealing that this may be the case.
The question is whether what we call mind is an illusion, due to the reasons you gave in your essay and in the comments above. If the mind is an illusion, how can you be sure that your analysis meets reality. Because your analysis has no direct impact on your survival, and therefore must not necessarily meet reality. Surely, the illusion of consciousness may have been invented in the first place due to surival aspects of evolution and at present can be used to ponder about other things and imagine some possibilities. But if it was indeed invented in the first place without a causal role, how can it be now used to look behind the curtain? Wouldn't this 'look' not also be suspicious to be only an illusion? In your analysis, the real data processing is not done by the tip of the iceberg, how can you be sure that the results of your data processing meet reality? And if the real data processing isn't done by the tip of the iceberg, why has nature invented this tip of the iceberg, if it does not do anything other than believing in illusions?
If mind and brain are gradually different (mind associated with activity/energy, brain associated with matter/activity), it is no wonder that the brain can influence the mind and vice versa. But besides this, you write that intentionality is an illusion. I do not understand what the illusory part should be here. I assume you use the false term here and what you really mean is that, although a subject may feel intentions, they are products of a deterministically working brain and therefore illusions and no free choices. If the mind and with it intentionality are really illusions, why should nature have invented them? How does the illusion of intentionality makes a data processing task in a highly complex environment more rapid? Also i cannot see how the illusion of intentionality enhances adaptation to the environment. Why can't the whole machinery not work in the same manner and efficiency without consciousness? I mean, if consciousness is really the tip of the iceberg (surely in some sense it really is, because there also exists the unconcious realms), generated by the brain and the latter described as pure data processing, why does evolution then need an illusion that only accompanies a data processing device, without having some causal powers?
Are you sure you do not overact with taking consciousness, human intelligence, intentions, wishes and aims just as data processing streams, generated by an exclusively only mechanistically operating machinery? I think your answer is no, and i wonder how artificial intelligence would answer the contest's questions. Mabe it would not attribute only the need for importance to the chairman, but also his need of having the illusion of control. Control illusions are indeed very widespread, but i think they have less to do with agency, but with fear. And it could well be that in an open world where there are many uncertainties and ambiguities, even scientists have an unconscious need for a unique worldview and choose the one which they consider most reliable. And what could be more reliable than a solid machinery with wheels, pumps, bars and levers about which we know how they work and what they can do and can't.