https://courses.lumenlearning.com/wmopen-psychology/chapter/reading-touch-and-pain/

Intricate touch receptors wouldn’t be easy to imitate through electrical wires to the brain in a vat.

https://eschooltoday.com/learn/the-sense-of-touch-2/

“Common to many science fiction stories, the brain in the vat outlines a scenario in which a mad scientist, machine, or other entity might remove a person's brain from the body, suspend it in a vat of life-sustaining liquid, and connect its neurons by wires to a supercomputer which would provide it with electrical impulses identical to those the brain normally receives.”

If perception is part of our consciousness under panpsychist models then it follows that removing all perception will stop consciousness. Therefore the brain couldn’t be computationally alive on its own without the body and a sensory medium like touch or hearing. Patients in locked-in syndrome still have some neuronal senses and meta-senses working such as vision and hearing the sound of their inner voice. The brain in the vat conundrum is not only important for understanding whether our reality is real but also the connection between mind and body should the body be fictitiously detached from the brain and spinal cord without somehow causing death.

I consider myself a realist, i.e. a person who accepts a situation as it is and is prepared to deal with it accordingly. — Alkis Piskas

I believe an anti-realist can also be pragmatic. Our power is limited in this world whether it’s real or not. The subconscious mind has involuntary parts that I can’t change. I’m unable to volitionally swap the colour brown and green in my vision because it’s not under my control. Colour might be internal but that doesn’t mean I can alter it. The laws of physics are impartial arbiters so we can’t interfere with someone else’s consciousness in either a real or non-real world without affecting their physical brain. Our communication is mediated by physical matter and not mental signals.

"anti-realism" literally indicates the opposite of "realist", i.e. one who is idealist, romantic and such stuff — Alkis Piskas

Anti-realist isn’t the same as anti-realistic! It doesn’t dispute the existence of a shared space. What anti-realism implies is that our perception uses some mechanisms that might not be materialistic in nature. However there are other procedures the mind uses that are materially reductionistic. For instance the shapes of objects are reductionistic.

Using labels such as "anti-realist" only limits subjects, situations, ideas and so on. — Alkis Piskas

I feel when the hard problem of consciousness still defies scientific explanation after hundreds of years then all options should be scrutinised. Let’s remember the goal is not necessarily to find only a materialistic explanation but at least an intuitive understanding of how consciousness affects the physical world. An example of this is where a hypothetical proof of consciousness being fundamentally untraceable would also ironically count as a solution to the hard problem.

By saying that "the world is real" I assume you mean that "the physical universe exists", right? But it does not exist because other people can percieve it. — Alkis Piskas

Were the world completely physical and yourself the only conscious being then that wouldn’t be a real world as such. If someone else could somehow witness my dreams then the dream would actually be real in the sense that there’d be shared agreement on its content. Therefore other conscious agents besides ourselves are necessary to validate our world.

And this is exactly what reality is all about: How one perceives the physical universe. — Alkis Piskas

Yes sense perception is needed to find our way around the world we live in. Although self-awareness is usually part of our definition of reality. Thus the mental universe also holds some importance.

I am among the ones who believe that there is no objective reality. — Alkis Piskas

If a tree falls in a forest and there’s no one to see it then it’s location is unknown to all of us. If one person is there to witness it, it remains a mystery to the rest of us until they choose to tell us. Thus one conscious observer doesn’t instantaneously remove the randomness from your own perception. From a soldier’s point of view a bullet aimed at them is randomly located until they get hit or hear it whizzing by. If your consciousness is in a separate location to mine then maybe an external object hidden in your vision truly is in a random superposition. We could perhaps combine entanglement with the problem of other minds. If each of our minds occupy unique, non-interacting streams of consciousness experience then maybe we can’t agree on an absolute nanosecond timeline of events.


https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/the-quest-to-test-quantum-entanglement
I’m a mere lay person but the situation goes from pure randomness to absolute determinism with only one observation. Maybe the person receiving the second predetermined particle is conscious at a different time to the sender.

One more criterion for comparing anti-realism to materialism is the phenomena it might predict. We all know the amazing mathematical predictions from deterministic, classical physics. Perhaps a benefit from an anti-realist attitude is to predict the behaviour of fellow people. If other people’s perception have non-real components then someone could use their own spiritual perception to relate to them better.

I’m short sighted so when I take off my glasses the distant objects look blurry. I don’t notice a big metaphysical change though. I tend to wear my glasses all the time. Maybe if I walked around without my glasses more often I’d appreciate the wave side of wave-particle duality!

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20150925-blindsight-the-strangest-form-of-consciousness
“Some people who have lost their vision find a “second sight” taking over their eyes – an uncanny, subconscious sense that sheds light into the hidden depths of the human mind... What causes the conscious and unconscious to decouple so spectacularly?”

Could it be that they are in fact consciously seeing the object but are then instantly forgetting it like a dream? That way they’d have a subconscious intuition of where it’s located.

One could say that the curved retina demagnifies the object to create perspective. This would be instead of the expanding sphere of decreasing light intensity coming from an object having a magnifying effect on those closest.

We use perspective to infer distance. That distance is the extent of empty space between you and the object. Therefore we can use perspective to infer empty space in general.

we start to have a situation where we just can’t relate to that person — Richard B

One metric that language fails to immaculately communicate is intensity. Let’s take a negative emotion like fear. We can say that an event was mildly disconcerting or extremely petrifying. But there’s a range of fear situated between all of those descriptions. We could try to quantify the fear by saying we were 80% afraid though we’d then lose the tone and fluency of our intended statement.

So to say that something internal to yourself that is not readily describable leaves one wondering what you are talking about at all. — Richard B

What I was getting at is that there might be a non-real or spiritual aspect to emotions. It’s like our language allows us to express 90% of those emotions. Maybe foreign languages might capture certain states of mind better than English. For example French has a more fluent sound which might increase closeness and familiarity between speakers. Anyway my emotions are fine-tuned differently to someone else’s. There are lots of different varieties of the same emotion. Just think of how many synonyms there are of happiness: bliss, contentment, relief... Unless we’re Shakespeare we can’t fully articulate the subtle differences in an emotion. If someone asks me how I am then I usually respond in a brief sentence as a formality but also as a cognitive inability to reply in long poetic verses! Think of words like quixotic and machiavellian that can be used as adjectives even though they carry multiple connotations because they refer to whole works of historical literature.

I think what you mean is “through language we express our thoughts”, which is quite different. — Richard B

Indeed. Sometimes an emotion can create thoughts. For instance being bored can make your mind wander. Other times thoughts create emotions like where realising a mistake was made induces stress and confusion.

The first part of the sentence sounds like I have thoughts and once I have a language then by some inner observation can describe them. — Richard B

Most of our thoughts do occur semantically and logically. Although it’s possible to have visual thoughts apropos of nothing. I could close my eyes and think of a forest. I’ll momentarily see vague outlines of tress in my mind’s eye. But the flickering image is automatic and I don’t have to semantically state how many trees there’ll be for the imaginary scene to arise. I suppose my subconscious just loosely amalgamates previous memories and pictures of forests. Remembering is a form of thinking even though it can refer to nonverbal experiences.

Is our sensation of anger or happiness the same as other people’s? There’s certainly some overlap because we can distinguish between positive and negative feelings. However our rationality came through the growth of childhood while our emotions are deeper. The sensation of frustration has been with us since the evolution of the first humans. How are thoughts and emotions related? Are they interdependent where they both guide each other? Emotions are more complex than our thoughts and they’ve a genetic basis. For example, reports of feral children raised without much communication will be unable to learn language but they’ll still experience emotions as they’re an innate and evolved response. We can describe our thoughts through language but some of the experience of emotions are not readily describable. Therefore how our nuanced rationality interprets the ups and downs of emotional qualia will be slightly unique for each of us.

“If an object is placed inside the focal length of a concave mirror, and enlarged virtual and erect image will be formed behind the mirror. The cartesian sign convention is used here.”
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/geoopt/mirray.html

We often view the retina as a sensor but what if the brain interprets the curved retina like a concave mirror? There’d be a virtual image in the brain.

“Real” and “Perception” is drop out because they are superfluous. — Richard B

Yes your entitled to your point of view. But many stars appear not just younger than they truly are but also in a different location to wherever they’re currently situated. So the light is not just older but also misdirected from the real star in present time. That is to say there’s no mass directly behind our visual perception of many stars in different galaxies. That mass is now in another location somewhere. Scientists have to work out the real coordinates of stars indirectly through red shifting, laws of gravitation, stellar parallax and brightness.


“if that star is hurtling away from us, all those absorption lines undergo a Doppler shift and move toward the red part of the rainbow. This is what we call a redshift. For stars heading toward us, the opposite happens, and the lines are shifted toward the blue end of the spectrum; they are blueshifted (generally, astronomers only use the term redshift to simplify things, and just put a negative sign in front of it if it’s a blueshift). By measuring how far away the lines are located from where they’re supposed to be in the spectrum, astronomers can calculate the speed of a star or a galaxy relative to Earth, and even how a galaxy rotates: by measuring a different redshift for one side of the galaxy compared to the other, you can see which side is moving away from you and which side is moving toward you.”
https://earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/what-is-a-redshift/

“when you look at a star, you are actually seeing what it looked like years ago. It is entirely possible that some of the stars you see tonight do not actually exist anymore.”
https://www.wtamu.edu/~cbaird/sq/mobile/2017/04/02/since-a-stars-light-takes-so-long-to-reach-us-how-do-we-know-that-the-star-is-still-there/

The speed of light number accidentally came up as link in my last post. Wouldn’t it be cool if someone had the speed of light as their own phone number!

“This constancy of the speed of light means that, counter to intuition, speeds of material objects and light are not additive. It is not possible to make the speed of light appear greater by moving towards or away from the light source.”

That might also be the case if visual perception were internal. Thus our sense of vision would be distinct from the external material objects that our visual perception is based on. If vision were 2D, then perhaps our perception of light would appear static in the third dimension. What would happen if photons moved at 0m/s? Then a potential photon is stuck to every tiny piece of space. Is a photon sent out of a torch the same photon one second and 299 792 458 m later? If a photon was like a pixel then any individual pixel is motionless and its apparent motion is in fact separate pixels. Is a photon being “pushed” out of the torch or is it the opposite direction where the torch “pulls” photons from any object in its path? Maybe light could travel through empty space because the oblivion of black is itself a colour and so light “is” an excitation of empty space.

A distant star illuminates the vast empty space directly between you and the star. Or else starlight is itself the white empty space between you and your own perception of the star.

https://www.google.ie/amp/s/theconversation.com/amp/when-you-look-up-how-far-back-in-time-do-you-see-101176

The starlight we see are light years away. This means we’re not seeing the real stars as such but a perception of them as they were years ago. Likewise we perceive close objects nanoseconds in the past. Yet we’re physically travelling through time at the same rate as those nearby objects. The image of our own body and hands are a nanosecond in the past. In other words our view of objects is not always based on the actual matter behind the photons but just the photons themselves. If we’re receiving a 2D image in our eyes, then perspective is akin to length contraction and demagnification. We could interpret our retinas as being transparent whereby light passes through our light-sensing cells without fully blocking the photons. Then the image we perceive is in fact still travelling at light speed! Then there wouldn’t be a time lag between your present moment and the room your in. Visually speaking you are at one with the photons you see! Sorry if I’m nitpicking but yourself and the room might both equally be a nanosecond in the past!

If something isn’t material then it can logically only be either empty space or else temporal and spiritual. So free will could be view as a temporal phenomenon occurring in each of our unique histories where my timeline is located separately to your conscious experience. Maybe your consciousness is all the empty space you perceive!

The choice between “realism” and “anti-realism” should be decided based on ethical and/or practical consideration rather than some decision of the veracity of a metaphysical picture. — Richard B

People say that physical determinism is the most objective stance. Determinism might lend to a stoic attitude of accepting our faith. We can’t control our fortune or misfortune. There will always be a few events that are beyond our control. Some accidents cannot be avoided. We can’t go back in time and change our mistakes. However I tend to believe free will is superior when it comes to being proactive. We can take the initiative and pursue our goals uninhibitedly. When we view ourselves as free agents we can take responsibility for both our virtues and vices. Free will is intimately entwined with antirealism because realism implies materialism which in turn connotes determinism. Free won’t also entails elements of antirealism though not to the same extent as it’s also compatible with aspects of materialism. Free won’t can be viewed as a middle ground in the debate!

Some people are much more discriminating when it comes to certain sounds that they've spent a lot of time understanding. — Marchesk

Same idea with things like wine tasting. — Marchesk

Indeed. Although doesn’t this disparity in our thresholds of perception hint at elements individuality in our senses more so than materialism?

“Habituation occurs when we learn not to respond to a stimulus that is presented repeatedly without change, punishment, or reward.
Sensitization occurs when a reaction to a stimulus causes an increased reaction to a second stimulus. It is essentially an exaggerated startle response and is often seen in trauma survivors.”
https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-psychology/chapter/biological-basis-of-learning/

Ever been in a room where people couldn't agree on whether the temperature was too cold or too hot? — Marchesk

Temperature is multifaceted. Infrared radiation is heat even though its technically invisible light. Pressure and convectional currents are the more tactile versions of heat. Latent heat is where an object changes state; from solid to gas (sublimation) or melting ice into liquid and boiling water into vapour. This consumes energy even though we don’t detect it. Therefore heat perception is more ambiguous than the other senses.



“Heat moves naturally by any of three means. The processes are known as conduction, convection and radiation.”
https://www.google.ie/amp/s/www.sciencenewsforstudents.org/article/explainer-how-heat-moves/amp

Cos we're all in the same big boat — Richard B

One way of looking at it is that people could speak long before the invention of writing. Therefore many of the mental constructs we use are based on sound. Likewise braille are tactile messages. Writing on the other hand is a more visual means of communication. How loud a voice is will be a shared perception. Audio is a longitudinal pressure wave through the air. The sense of touch also concerns the movement of pressure. My sense of hearing won’t be too dissimilar to someone else’s. Hence the sound of a singer will the same for both of us.

Nonetheless sound and touch still have traces of ethereal features such as proprioception. Sound is non-spatial yet we can detect where a noise is coming from. That locus of proprioception is unique and different for me relative to someone else’s proprioceptive direction. Our body has an irregular shape with a centre of gravity that fluctuates as we walk. Thus my sense of balance will be different to another person’s. However light travels much faster than sound and it’s spectrum is far more diverse. So maybe there’s more deviation in our visual perception compared to other senses like sound and touch along with their derivative forms of communication.

when we do we have this little invention
By pretending they're a different world from me
I show my responsibility — Richard B

There isn’t the same qualia problem for our sense of touch as there is for colour vision. My red might look different than yours. Athough a red apple probably has a similar texture and haptic feel for both of us. Touch is a more simple sensation than vision. An entity is either hard or soft, fluid or viscous. The pressure of an object against our hands is more describable through science than colour qualia. Our material world is the same and our visual world is definitely similar though maybe not identical.

One world is a enough for all of us — Richard B

If we were each living in a world of our own, then there’d be 7•9 billion unique perspectives within our planet’s population!

If colour is internally emitted then the multicoloured phosphenes would neutralise at a black colour as black absorbs all light.

https://www.colormatters.com/color-and-design/are-black-and-white-colors
The darkness of our eyelids contains all colours while we’re asleep!

Maybe we don’t actually lose consciousness as such during sleep; we forgo a sense of continuity.

During sleep we are detached from reality and disconnected to our body. We lose awareness of bodily sensations like touch and balance as we drift asleep. In a state of oblivion all we have left to connect with is our memories. Free from external stimuli our subconscious can hyper-focus on arbitrary recollections.

When I was at the beach lying down as a young child I noticed I could see these pulsating specks in the bright sky if I stared for a prolonged period. I was confused at the sight of this rapid flow of a faint purple colour. I rarely think of the sensation unless I'm relaxing somewhere and happen to be staring upwards where it catches me unexpectedly. As it turns out the phenomenon has a name; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_field_entoptic_phenomenon .So even the distant sky can be skewed by our internal perception!

If you are identical with your perception then the syntax and semantics guiding your very next thoughts relative to your previous thoughts can indeed be 100% deterministic. The catch is it'd be determined by a shared reality in a subset created by yourself. That sounds somewhat circular which means in that context you could have some degree of free won't. An analogy is that everything you do from the time of waking up until falling asleep is wholly mentally determined and the unconscious then alters the variables for the next day before we wake again.

How would an altered rate of perspective affect our sense of motion if we had some contraption of lenses or somehow changed the flow of time? Were objects to get smaller at a faster rate than normal where height was our depth cue, then our view of the third dimension would be contracted while objects moving away from us would appear to be travelling at a slower horizontal speed. Conversely an image where entities get shorter at slower rate than our normal vision results in an expanded third dimension. If we had the same inclusive field of view at a constant size then objects would appear to move faster relative to their actual speed. (Time=Distance/Speed so the longer the apparent distance the greater the perceived speed if time elapses at the same rate)

One way to investigate the effect of depth perception on anti-realism is through cinematography. Can different camera lenses alter not just how the movie looks but also how the movie viscerally feels? If so could perspective subconsciously affect how we emotionally view our own reality? By way of illustration, could long-distance 3D angles make the scene appear more materialistic while perhaps those focal lengths that emphasise shorter distances come closer to 2D phantasmagoria? Notice how the field of view with the camera in the linked scene appears deep and crystal clear. It helps create an unsettlingly vivid, impersonal and physical image that adds to the movie’s theme of objectification and psychopathy:

The newsman's sly nature has made him my favourite movie charcter!
Nightcrawer - home invasion scene

“Elswit shot the night scenes digitally, since the technology allows one to get clear images with minimal lighting setups. Compared with the daytime scenes, which Elswit shot on 35-millimeter film, the nocturnal sequences look slicker and dreamier. ("I found it beautiful,"Gilroy recently told journalist James Rocchi, "in the sense that you can see far and the neon lights sort of popped out and the yellow sodium vapor lights really gave it an interesting sort of glow.") On one level Nightcrawler is a knockout photo essay about the dark corners of LA—Gilroy and Elswit avoided famous locations, focusing instead on "the functional side of the city, the strip malls and the [suburban] sprawl." Often shooting in deep focus, Elswit creates images that allow us to look far into the distance—some of the settings seem to go on forever, suggesting a post-industrial desert.”
-chicagoreader


“Bokeh, an effect "that shows off light as round shapes, almost always in a blurred background" is used extensively in the film in order to separate Lou from the rest of the world, to put him apart from society, as well as to emphasize his deep connection to media. Achieved through the use of a wide-angle lens with a shallow depth-of-field, the bokeh in Nightcrawler emphasizes that Lou's existence is a mediated one (pun sort of intended). In this clip, the world around him fuzzes out at the edges, and indeed, while we are frequently viewing the same scene through the eye of the film camera and the eye of Lou's camera, it's only through Lou's viewfinder that the image appears crisp and real. Lou's interest in reality is contingent on whether or not it's being filmed, and how much he's getting paid (which, of course, hints at deeper issues.)”
-nofilmschool

Some senses are more indirect than others. Therefore our relative awareness of them might affect how solidly or spiritually we view reality. The sense of touch is the most immediate and materialistic of them all. Our vision is more circuitous in the way we consciously perceive an object that appears to be situated at a distance from our seat of consciousness. Sound seems to have a less diverse spectrum than light. Even so it can create a larger emotional impact in terms of hearing other people and listening to music. Smell is usually the weakest sense. The fact that we can smell something that is distant or otherwise hidden from our other senses means that a heightened smell might appear less real. It can be used to generally give an atmospheric vibe of a location.

Our mindset changes as we age so whatever is causing free will would have to be continuously updated rather than it being endowed once at birth. Dreams allow us to escape “collectivised” physical reality. They interrupt a continuous chain of causality in our lives. It disconnects us from the previous day. Absolute nothingness is pure time! If we’re struggling to derive free will from determinism than a shortcut is to start from the polar opposite of determinism; anarchy. The silliness of some dreams can merely be the unconscious telling us what not to do. The visual content of the dream such as dream characters, objects and surroundings all behave like decoys. Hedonistic impulses in a dream can be there to distract you by lulling you back unconscious. A dream could try to analyse our understanding of others and not just ourselves.
Dreams can convey the absurdness of our immediate goals. If we don’t like the message of a dream we can ignore it. If some of our thoughts are deterministic, then could those same thought patterns be computationally accelerated during sleep? If a dream isn’t physically real then it follows that thinking about a dream after you wake up no matter how little you remember will still contribute to your free will. It’s not just the dream itself but also your response to it during the day that also counts. Dreams are like our own version of a Boltzmann brain that you created out of the chaos of your unconscious.

Panentheism: God is in the tree, the rock, and the river.
Pantheism: the tree, the rock, and the river are in God.

However, a lot people with these beliefs don’t think carefully about this difference, so, practically speaking, pantheism and panentheism tend to overlap or blend, as they do with polytheism.

There’s many layers to this world and we can go however deep we want. There’s an interpersonal level to pantheism of merely trying to feel connected and compassionate towards others in general. There can be many ways to express that simple belief. We could just view the physical universe as being random in its creation. It’s easiest to understand other people compared to nonhuman spirits. As you say there’s also the imbuing of nature with spirituality. From this vantage point it’d be like the natural world was intentionally created by a spirit rather than randomness. We usually view nature as impersonal and incomprehensibly vast or even infinite. Nature worship can of course be compatible with pantheism. But our theory of mind and empathy is more geared towards fellow humans. In my mind the admiration of nature is within a very deep layer of reality and so it personally reminds me more of panentheism or mysticism. I’m not disagreeing with you about nature and pantheism. Technically you’re right that we’re all part of nature. But by its sheer size I feel nature worship sometimes places emphasis on the transcendent qualities of the world rather than interpersonal communication with others in our social environment. Therefore nature worship by itself is consistent with multiple worldviews and faiths to different degrees.

Imagining a personal spirit inside the sky:

Robert Miles - Children - Screenshot

Existence is proof that we are not the measure of all things. — James Riley

If time is infinitesimally continuous then everyone would be gliding through time at infinitesimally different rates of time.

Existence is proof that you don't take us with you when you die. — James Riley

I disagree! The universe will be so upset when I die that the whole place will implode.

One way to think of colour is that the sensation is infinitely complex. If that were the case, then no two areas have exactly the same colour. So even a red wall will have microscopic variations in shade. In that way every object has a different colour. Then colour could be perceived as the object itself.

When we’re close to a mirror where our head is in the middle we can move our eyes to look diagonally through it and see much further behind us in that particular direction. When we step right back from a mirror we can’t look diagonally at it with the same angle as the mirror gets smaller from perspective. But the mirror reflects more objects that are in front of us when we look straight at it from afar. So it’s not a simple case of the mirror reflecting more field of view when we change position. The area of a mirror surface is always the same and so the 2D visual volume it reflects will be the same.

Or for all we know the image on the mirror is actually the real size of the object and it’s our own perception that’s arbitrarily enlarging objects to twice the size!

The mirror we see exists inside our own mind so to speak.

As the mirror moves back it gets smaller itself due to perspective from your point of view and so your image remains the same size even though the field of view within the mirror is increasing.