Abstract

Plato's error is the illusion to know and to control what is not in reality under our control. By consequence, we simulate possible world undoing events judged as controllable reducing the subjective uncertainty of the future. People tend to focus on events which would have been sufficient to disable the outcome from occurring. We have different types of Plato's errors depending from the type of uncertainty that we hope to eliminate. This illusion is a special case of the focusing illusion, i.e. the tendency to reason from mental models, involving attention to what is present in the immediate field of consciousness, neglecting what is outside but accessible with some mental search.