"Electrons belong to the first generation of the lepton particle family, and are generally thought to be elementary particles because they have no known components or substructure. The electron has a mass that is approximately 1/1836 that of the proton."

If an electron is capable of emitting and absorbing photons then how do we know an electron itself isn't simply an accumulation of photons moving together?

"An atom can absorb or emit one photon when an electron makes a transition from one stationary state, or energy level, to another. Conservation of energy determines the energy of the photon and thus the frequency of the emitted or absorbed light. Though Bohr’s model was superseded by quantum mechanics, it still offers a useful, though simplistic, picture of atomic transitions."
- Britannica

"According to electromagnetic theory, the rest mass of photon in free space is zero and also photon has non-zero rest mass, as well as wavelength-dependent."
- science direct

When the senses encounter a real thing, the mind creates an impression of it in such a way that the impression does not in any way resemble the real thing. Thus, the impression is said to be “real to us” but not “real in itself.” — Neri

Likewise the shapes of atoms are probabilistic and multidimensional which would be far more complex and unrecognisable than the colourful shapes our mind sees. Maybe the mind-body problem could be interpreted the same way that photons interact with matter. Photons can "heat up" electrons to a higher orbital. Perhaps the mind "heats up" the neurons to a higher circuit! I'm not sure if my air-quotes will count as a scientific explanation!

"At an energy of 7 TeV, the protons are moving at 0.999999991 of the speed of light."
-LHC Machine Outreach

If the mind is equivalent to photons of light while the body is the same as atoms and protons then the mind is ahead of the body by a tiny fraction of the speed of light. Therefore the mind would see an event happening in the future by an infinitesimal amount of time compared to the present location of physical atoms.

Antirealism may be understood in both the ontological and the epistemic sense.
The belief that nothing material exists outside the mind is the ontological antirealism usually associated with Berkeley.
The belief that physical things do exist outside the mind but are completely unknowable as they really are, constitutes the epistemic antirealism of Immanuel Kant.
The Kantian view includes the following ideas:
(1) When the senses encounter a real thing, the mind creates an impression of it in such a way that the impression does not in any way resemble the real thing. Thus, the impression is said to be “real to us” but not “real in itself.” — Neri

Thank you for your good explanation. I was approximating "mind" to mean colours, phosphenes and photons and then I was trying to make "physical things" loosely synonymous with the tactile sense and atoms. This metaphor might not be philosophically perfect but it might serve as a rough translation when we go from science (particularly the science of perception and visual photography) to philosophy. A limitation of my analogy is that the sense of touch is still a subjective qualia of pressure and heat but nevertheless there's far more uniformity in our sense of touch compared to our sense of vision with its diverse colours and perspectives. A further limitation is that blind people cannot see but nonetheless some people who become blind later than birth can report seeing phosphenes in their mind's eye even if it doesn't represent where the physical objects are. Therefore the congenitally blind will still have a liberating imagination even if they can't communicate it to us through our customary language of colour.

"A dictionary definition of a phosphene is: “A sensation of seeing light caused by pressure or electrical stimulation of the eye”... Even people who have been blind from birth can see them."
https://informativefacts.com/phosphenes-facts/

How is perspective related to parallax? The further out an object is the smaller it gets and the less background it occults/blocks out. So a far-away object moving sideways will block out less background area as it moves compared to it travelling sideways at the same speed closer to the observer. A distant object moving 45 degrees diagonally further back will block out less background than had it being moving sideways at the same perspective size. A car moving mostly sideways but slightly forward towards you will block off an increasing amount of the background. Therefore if you know it's travelling at a constant speed you can then infer whether it's veering forwards or backwards depending on the rate at which the background is blocked off.

My updated blog intro:

Here I wonder about the scientific implications of anti-realist philosophy. What would unreality entail for our sense perception? There must be knock-on effects. In order to follow suit from this mysterious initial premise, all other scientific variables would need to be adjusted accordingly. Through illusory parallax we can detect depth when the world in the background almost appears to conter-rotate when we stare at a close moving object. The organised chaos of language can help verify the existence of other minds. A lot of our communication might be based on arbitrary symbols or random starting points in conversation but it can deterministically progress into complex patterns of behaviour. A computer would struggle to write metaphorical poetry. (Anyone who got a D- for their Shakespeare essay is a robot.)

We usually take the physical world for granted. Even religious folk often concede that our lives in this world are boringly materialistic in order to make their belief of a certain afterlife in a spiritual realm more compelling. But what if the physical world itself is more open-ended and exciting than first expected? There are many interpretations of quantum mechanics so maybe in the future when we know more about it there could be multiple competing versions of how we should perceive reality. Maybe there’ll be several perfectly valid solutions to the mind body problem even though they’d be somewhat incompatible with one another. We could each focus on different layers of reality.

Metaphysical beliefs can be shown to deterministically affect our physical behaviour. Christians tend to live a different lifestyle than Hindus for example based solely on their spiritual beliefs. We can each be either more or less attuned to different parts of our sensory input and end up seeing the world differently. So perhaps a deterministic agent who believes themselves to be free really will gain some degree of freedom by way of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Therefore free will isn’t wholly irreconcilable with determinism. We can take it as literally or symbolically as we want.

In terms of our vision, every single object we see is ultimately only made of light. We can’t synaesthetically see mass or atoms. We can feel tangible objects with our sense of touch. But matter is a different sense to sight even though photons happen to illuminate and correspond to where the physical substance is. Physical entities are invisible in and of themselves. The way light somehow locates tactual solid elements might be indirect. (I learned the following in a failed science interview about attempting to minimise the solar system where density is constant) If every object was equally minimised it would have no effect on the speed of light (the speed of gravity = speed of light). Another way to put it is that photons are real while colour exists within our virtual image of the world.

Light moves so fast that we don’t actually see it move directly. We can only see colours after the light has already moved and not their original frequency. Although colours can still move much like they were pixels turning on and off in a screen. It would be like the colour of a moving object simply replaces the previous colour of the background using the same pixels. All we can detect is the retina. We’re not aware of the individual muscles that move our head so it feels like we’re leveraging our entire field of view in order to rotate our neck. If our perception is just an approximation of reality then it doesn’t have to be the same size to create a ranking of the relative depth of all objects. A 3D TV screen can do so through emphasising a few mere centimetres in difference to convey an apparent distance of several meters.

I suppose a mental shortcut for imagining a holographic reality would be if your eyes were like a mirror where everything you see is behind you inside the brain. The optic nerve is directed backwards towards the brain. If our vision is 2D then that would imply that our perception of empty space isn’t real and is simply a rendered version of external reality. I’m not too sure what that would translate to; maybe the overall shape of the object appears far away even though their constituent colours are all right beside you. The minute atomic perimeter of the boundary between two large coloured objects are so complex that they’re like a fractal pattern.

Objects get smaller from perspective because our subjective impression of an object is based in some way on an external entity and a world bigger than ourselves. One could reinterpret that by saying perspective doesn’t exist in external nature and is self-imposed and self-created through magnification in our visual subconscious. Objects can remain the same size regardless of distance if we had the capacity to zoom with our eyes like a camera lens. Perspective minimises the flat area of an object evenly so length and breadth at eye level are proportionately changed. But the internal volume is excessively reduced relative to the frontal area and appears foreshortened. Objects above or below eye level will have an uneven aspect ratio in terms of area. The further away an object the blurrier it becomes as our eyes don’t have infinite resolution. The way we perceive and move through depth is different in a dream.

No one can ever withstand an infinite amount of pain even if the pain sensation and our own response to it are both deterministic. So we can’t be deterministically programmed to be somehow fearless in a literal sense. Therefore there’s an element of both determinism and free will in the idea of “free won’t”.

The mind body problem has been a puzzle forever. I’m not sure about you but at least my mind can affect my body because I must be a pure genius! It’s just that the unique talent comes to me so naturally and effortlessly that I’m actually unable to describe it to others! I suppose the most immaterial entity we know is light. I know it’s simplistic to combine mysteries but my guess is that consciousness has something to do with light given how ethereal both substances are. It’d be like each of our own consciousness were the medium of light that we perceive. When we’re awake we’re each travelling at light speed into the future one second at a time! Our mind would be like a tachyon that never goes below speed c. And just to reassure you I never took speed; just a few mild doses of anti-psychotics!

Does consciousness perfectly coincide in time with the physical world? If consciousness lagged behind by 1 second that would actually make a big difference in terms of the mind-body problem. It’d mean consciousness could read our senses as a memory in the brain instead of a location in real-time. An analogy is a horse rider that sits behind the horse to steer it with the reins even though the horse is moving by itself. A timeless universe means we don’t actually have to be conscious all at the same time!

The brain is physical so dualism would imply that your consciousness doesn’t actually have a brain and that only other people could perceive our brain. Speaking to the brains of others would be like you were making a telephone call to another mind who’s own reality isn’t real or palpable from your point of view; as if their brain were a tachyonic antitelephone! It’d be like a phone call that’s separated not by distance but a chasm of time. Are other people conscious at the exact same time we’re conscious? How do we know other people’s minds aren’t in a different timeline altogether where all we can observe are their insentient physical selves?

Not only can we not detect other minds but we don’t even observe their brains in absolute space. If we don’t see physical reality directly then even though it’s counterintuitive it’d logically mean we don’t perceive other people directly either. They too are part of our visual perception with the rest of the physical world. If my consciousness weren’t inside my brain then to be consistent that would mean other people’s minds aren’t inside their physical brain that we perceive inside our own vision. Everyone else’s brain is coloured red but of course we are told that any red we see is merely a qualia within ourselves. Something has to give! Might it be like our bodies were inert robots that follow around after our conscious mind! Anyone who disagrees can feel free to excuse themselves from my vision!

If one thinks of the Turing test then any information the deceptive computer gives is ultimately programmed by another conscious agent initially even if the computer itself isn’t currently conscious. That is to say inert computers don’t make themselves. They don’t exist in nature. People make complex computers and so any comeback the computer gives can still be used to infer the existence of other minds in general even if that computer itself isn’t conscious. It’s like a secondary version of consciousness. It shows the after-effects of other conscious beings. If someone spent long enough inquiring about my personality and feelings then I’m sure it will be theoretically possible to encode all of my responses on a lifelike machine. Even though my clone wouldn’t be conscious it’d prove to an unknowing spectator that the clone was based on the true existence of a conscious being even if they didn’t know the real me. Therefore they can disprove the robot being conscious by outsmarting it but they can still derive the consciousness of an entity somewhere external to their own mind.

I remember a panicked feeling I had a few years back where it seemed my visual perception was somehow inside me which motivated me to investigate anti-realism. Perhaps it was possible to describe our perception of the physical world differently. I tried to work backwards from that dizzy sensation. Even though anxiety can play tricks on the mind and the effect disappeared after 30 minutes, I was amazed afterwards that my perception of the world as unreal seemed visually self-consistent. I’d to rely solely on my understanding of other people as being external to me for the anxiety to eventually go away. This was instead of saying everything was physical and back to normal. Other people have information that’s too complex for our own subconscious minds to have made it up. When we empathise and visualise with what someone has told us then you’ve to use your own mental concepts but in a different way than you’d normally think yourself. It’s both understandable and novel relative to ourselves whereas a foreign language is novel but not readily understandable. Chaos and complexity in and of itself is never subjectively understandable and so the physical world by itself doesn’t prove it’s fully real in the sense that there’s other minds.

As conspiratorial as this may sound, the thousand year mystery of free will might attest to radical flaws in not just our academic understanding but also our very own sensory perception of the ordinary medium-sized objects around us (rather than solely quantum-level mysteries or larger-scale gravitation). The weirder the idea the more realistic a chance it has of been correct! So we can keep coming up with as many random solutions as possible to try to home in on the eventual answer. Colours are hollow and fail to describe anything other than the surface area of a solid object. So colour by itself doesn’t show any volume. Their emptiness could be perceived as fake and unreal. At the end of the day our brains are medium sized objects. Anti-realism acknowledges the existence of a shared and objective material world but reminds us that we could be perceiving it indirectly through immaterial colour qualia.

Only the first-person character in a video game has free will arising from the input of the hands on the controller where the other characters will move deterministically or randomly according to the console disk's instructions.

If a dream is like a video game then reality is like a multiplayer video game!

"If Earth suddenly lost all of its gravity, we wouldn't just start floating. The lack of any forceful gravitational pull would turn humans – and anything else with mass, like cars and buildings – into very fast-moving tumbleweeds. That's because the planet would continue spinning, without exerting gravity to keep objects tied to it.
A loss of gravity would also mean that the planet would stop pulling down air, water and Earth's atmosphere. That's where the apocalyptic devastation somewhere along the lines of a Michael Bay movie come in. A sudden and significant loss of air pressure would immediately shatter everyone's inner ear. Think about the pressure that builds when you're flying or scuba diving; this would be much more intense and immediate. Concrete structures would crumble as oxygen – an important binding agent – left the planet."
https://science.howstuffworks.com/science-vs-myth/what-if/what-if-earth-lost-gravity-for-five-seconds.htm

So we'd spin back against the Earth's direction of rotation if gravity disappeared. But then the air in the atmosphere would also move backwards and downwards against the rotating segment of the earth. Therefore even without traditional gravity there'd still be a downward force exerted on you from atmospheric pressure and Eulur's force.

The original brains in vats!
Kang and Kodos - Simpsons Aliens

Imagine speaking to a visible brain without a skull in real time!

Eiffel 65 -- I'm Blue (Mister Perfect Remix)

I remember years back I went through a stage of listening to every remix of this trance song. I was even inspired to buy a grey jumper afterwards! Even though the verse's lyrics of "I'm blue da ba dee da ba di" is semantically nonsensical it's still catchy somehow. It adds to its theme of confused wonderment. This emphasises how much the emotional tone is appreciated of whatever is being sung no matter what the actual written content is even if it's ridiculous.

Hedonistic and rebellious pop songs can sound even more energetic and intense when it's remixed in another language:

Sexy B*tch - Versión en español

Is colour made of photons or are photons made of colour?

Maybe a panpsychist point of view would be that light has colour qualia even before it hits your eyes while a materialist however would say the photons are colourless and it's only added on afterwards where the photons are detected in the eye.

If consciousness is located outside the body then it'd be movable instead of being in a constant location within the brain. Therefore the mind could affect the brain in separate areas depending on what part of your perception is being activated and most focused on. Perhaps our own mind is spatially scattered and denser in those sensory regions we're being attentive to.

If our own visual screen of all the objects in front of us is larger than the size of our head and yet still remaining equivalent to our consciousness, then it'd seem like the visual phosphenes that make up our sentience is an out-of-body experience so to speak. Then our visual perception could be both 3D and internal.

If consciousness were equivalent to empty space then it'd feel like your visual consciousness literally moves forward when you look at something in the distance and it then retreats back when you focus on something closer where the background is now blurry. If you are one with your perception then the most vivid segment of your perception is where most of your flowing consciousness is located.

If dreams can be perceived as visually real to our consciousness while lucid dreaming then why don't we have the focus to become lucid in every dream? Maybe it's because there's too many unexpected events in dreams where we're continuously distracted by the changing storyline:


The Monkey Business Illusion

"This finding was a particularly dramatic example of "inattentional blindness," the failure to see something obvious when focusing attention on something else."
https://news.illinois.edu/view/6367/205580

"(An) anti-realist can come in a number of flavors. As always the out and out anti-realist might just (be) a skeptic. Or an eliminativist is the term that's often used. I mean somebody just thinks we ought to eliminate this branch of discourse. So for example take say theological talk: some people might believe that there's a God they think God is an element in reality. They're realists about god. Other people might go to the other extreme and say you know all this theological talk is just junk. (That) We should not be thinking in these terms (is) eliminativism. In between there are people who say well i'm not quite so hostile to the discourse, i don't mind people talking and thinking in god terms but you mustn't think in terms of realism. You mustn't think in terms of a three decade universe with heaven up there the earth here and perhaps hell down below. You ought to see god talk in different terms for example poetical, symbolical, metaphorical and religious... Now the claims of anti-realism go beyond gods or theology to where if i were a full-blown anti-realist I might think that the whole world is a construction of my own mind... That's the position known as idealism... That would be a general position usually associated with bishop Barkley in the early 18th century."


It's also possible to a be an anti-realist about God along with being an anti-realist about the physical world. One way to describe visual anti-realism would be that the quantitative outline of empty space which we see is the same for each of us but our impression of the colours within the objects are individualistic. The colourful empty space I perceive is in a different conscious location to the void that you perceive. Consciousness in this context would be equivalent to the vacuum of empty space.

For example there are lots of different regional accents and colloquialisms within the English language that convey slightly different emotions and busy intensities. Some accents might have an impression of humility or industriousness while others are more neutral and geographic.

Some of our subconscious metaphysical beliefs are non-verbal. I interpret some of my free will and decision making in an analytical way but there's still an ineffable feel about my baseline consciousness. It's like the way a background beat can affect the tone of the lyrics without actually changing the content of the lyrics. If I could switch my consciousness momentarily with someone else's then perhaps by contrast we could spot immediate differences of sensation in our free will that we previously left unstated and unexamined. Different countries have unique spiritual and religious beliefs about death although for all we know some foreign cultures could have different metaphysical beliefs and implicit tendencies about free will or determinism. It'd merely be that we currently lack an understanding of the nuances of what that would entail and we don't as yet have a full description of the subconscious and unconscious. International societies were historically far more isolated before the advent of modern communication. It took thousands of years for languages to develop which is enough time for metaphysical beliefs to leave an imprint on. If I were perfectly bilingual then maybe I might notice a subtly different shade of personal agency between the two languages. I only know a small bit of French so my experiences are limited. The happier fluent rhythm of French contrasts with the impartial monotone of the English language.

A dream is like a remix of a song where events in our past are mixed together randomly and then played out to see what would've happened under different circumstances.

Come to think of it I could probably take off my glasses and I'd feel like I was watching some 1970's video. I'm short-sighted and I'd be like one of those dark comedy movies with the unspoken irony. Then I could focus on the colours, time durations, motion blurs, relative velocities, spatial volumes and emotional vibes instead of the spatial resolution. The bokeh of street lights are less dangerous to stare at when the luminous glare is unfocused. The uncertainty principle means the more we know about location the less we know about velocity when it comes to both quantum photons and unfocused images. This is because we can focus on the entire blur of a moving car instead of a detailed part of it like the bonnet in one look. Colours will be brighter during the day and darker during the night. Colour contrast will vary as they diffuse into each other at the perimeter of objects. Depth will shorten in scale into the distance where blurred entities at the horizon will look equidistant and holographic. I might miss all of my tennis shots but at least I'll get to know my opponent better! You only live once!


Bee Gees - You Should Be Dancing - Saturday Night Fever

Understanding why a dream was irrelevant still requires use of your critical reasoning skills. That is to say in order to understand why it's irrelevant you first need to know what would've been more relevant. So having an absurd dream isn't as pointless and time-wasting as it may seem. I'd a non-lucid dream about trying to find these fiery pellets on the ground while trying to avoid being seeing by a snake. That morning I remember myself saying that I couldn't have had a more irrelevant dream. What has that got to do with my current situation? That soon got me thinking, "What actually is my current situation?". So a totally irrelevant dream can actually make you focus on thinking about what would have been a more helpful and relevant dream. Our conscious response to a dream is unpredictable to our subconscious.

Evolution is cited as a materialistic and deterministic explanation for the creation of species. But then is psychological romance also a mentally deterministic process? If so, could personality traits that we find attractive be indirectly and subconsciously cemented into our own emotions through romance? Or is it only physical traits that can be important when it comes to evolution while emotional romance is mere recreation? Other species are far less monogamous than humans because without self-awareness romance to them can only be physical.

When we vividly remember an event from weeks ago it might feel like our consciousness hasn't moved spatial position between now and back then.

"Diffusion is the net movement of anything from a region of higher concentration to a region of lower concentration. Diffusion is driven by a gradient in concentration."

Perhaps consciousness diffuses as far into empty space as your senses allow.

What if the brain itself isn't conscious but that it's perceiving your own consciousness through the senses?

What if our mind moves our body in a similar way to a dancer trying to rhyme their motion to the the beat of music; except for us our body moves relative to our thoughts and emotions.

What if intense beats could force you to dance by possessing you and twitching your muscles?!
Bob Sinclar - Rock This Party (Everybody Dance Now)

Kelly Rowland - Commander ft. David Guetta

There are caveats to this drumbeat possession logic in case we were to all lose the run of ourselves:
Neo & Trinity Sex Scene - The Matrix Reloaded 2003

If you know one depth value then you can work out the rest of your perception to the same scale using familiar size. For example you know the objective length of your body so you know what an arm length ahead of you corresponds to in distance.

"Familiar size: Since the visual angle of an object projected onto the retina decreases with distance, this information can be combined with previous knowledge of the object's size to determine the absolute depth of the object. For example, people are generally familiar with the size of an average automobile. This prior knowledge can be combined with information about the angle it subtends on the retina to determine the absolute depth of an automobile in a scene."

If we're looking in a slanted direction towards an entity then the distance we're see is the hypotenuse and we can infer the depth by approximating the hypotenuse and the width back to a position right in front of you.

Each of our eyes has a different degree of perspective since different parts of an object right in front of us will be closer in diagonal depth to one eye over the other other.

Pulp Fiction 1994 - Wolf

Notice how the lower camera resolution in older movies doesn't always detract from the atmosphere and the way the colours appear highlighted can actually increase the tone, flow and ambience of the film. It gives it a subtle and almost indescribably different vibe in how the scenes temporally transition from one to the next. Walking around with sunglasses all day long doesn't have a major effect on your self-awareness but it can alter your visual concentration.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_symbolism
https://www.lomography.com/magazine/339223-the-monochrome-effect

Maybe it's possible to combine both options where our perception is in front of our face while our rational thoughts are behind us.

Is someone's consciousness invisible and in front of their face in an undetectable manner? Or is it hidden from view behind the face inside the brain?

If our visual perception were entirely in our brain, then the further out we look the deeper we are seeing into our brain,

We're all living different lives. So how do we know how closely our conscious timelines are located to each other? For all we know another conscious mind might be a full lifetime away relative to our own. It'd be like the physical body and mental sphere were in different temporal realms. Another way to think of it would be that consciousness were like a spirit in the literal sense of the word; that is to say everyone's mind being separated by the oblivion of death.

"So if I'm doing the flipping, then the mirror is not. Take an arrow and point it to the right. The reflection in the mirror goes to the right. Point it up, it goes up. Left, it goes left. Down, it goes down. Forward, it goes-- wait a minute. If I point the arrow forward, the reflection goes backward. So the mirror is flipping the image, but it's flipping it in the z direction."


What if the page she flipped was see-through where we could still see the letters? Then we'd observe the word spelled right to left on the page and it'd be no surprise the mirror reflects the letters in that direction. A mirror would be like having an eye on the back of your head! Sadly I'm a bit angry so I might resort to name-calling anyone who dares to disagree with me a "doof-us"!

https://www.flickr.com/photos/koons/48205397436/in/photostream/
Glass buildings can serve as huge mirrors to observe direction reversal of reflections on the street.

The image in a mirror is unusual because an object looks to be in the same location but it's horizontally facing the other direction. If our consciousness is looking backwards inside the brain to see an image then it would be like our perception is rotated halfway round a circle in a straight angle of 180 degrees such that it's pointing the other way round at the opposite end of the diameter.

If the scene we see in our brain is really a virtual image then when we look in a mirror the objects should actually be the proper left-to-right orientation and it's our own usual perception that's always switched. For example our brain's motor system is contralateral.

contralateral: relating to or denoting the side of the body opposite to that on which a particular structure or condition occurs.