Just as I suspected. Viewed in a different light, North America vanishes. In the upper left is the North American Nebula as seen in the visible light spectrum. Obviously, it looks just like North America:
But when viewed in different parts of the spectra, it goes away. Read the story and see the pretty pictures at NASA.
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not an illusion, but a consensual fiction.
Paulino, you're conflating "North America" with "the United States of America." Not that I blame you--I do it myself, speaking colloquially--but North America preceded the USA by millennia (a lot of them) and will almost certainly outlive the USA too.
Unless you were being much more metaphysical, and asserting that the world is a consensus reality. I've wrestled with the idea myself ("I reject your reality and substitute my own"), but it seems one of those untestable things on runs across now and then. An intriguing thought-experiment (and fodder for science fiction authors), but not particularly useful.
"one runs across," of course. BlackBerry is much harder to use than a proper keyboard...