Can there be two Boltzmann brains?! If I’m a Boltzmann brain then so are you! We’d be in a universe of interacting brains!
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NhjAKTZhUS4&t=185s

The dawn of artificially intelligent people:
Thomas the Tank Engine

If we were somehow conscious during a saccade then we’d be momentarily cross-eyed.

Saccades are involved in moving our small central vision to look at objects. If the image we see is 2D then the micro-parallax of saccades could help explain why we can automatically and subconsciously see in 3D.

Parallax can be inferred from horizontal eye positions and also slanted or vertical eye positions when you rotate your head. There’s a plethora of parallax cues for depth when you rest your head on your shoulder and close one eye after the other. It’s easier for those like myself who’ve spent years learning to wink with both eyes!

Our eyes must be completely numb so as not to wake us up during REM sleep.

The brain moves relative to others but not relative to ourselves!

The body moves but the brain is always in the same location in the body. Moreover the skull protects it from accelerating.

If the mind is separate from the body under dualism then it wouldn’t have to move.

There’s little relative motion between our brain and our eyes, head or body. Your eyes are always a certain distance away from the visual cortex. So if we’re not directly conscious of our body then its motion doesn’t have to be palpable. What if we could walk numbly without a sense of touch in our legs? Then our brains could be perceived as motionless relative to our consciousness.

Instead of asking where’s our consciousness perhaps we need to first check where is our brain!

We tend to think the brain is behind where we feel our eyes to be. Although we also view colours as being internal which seems to contradict the previous sentence. If the visual cortex is situated at the rear of the brain then perhaps most of our brain is located in front of our field of view. The invisible brain could be interpreted to be behind the image we see. In this comparison the non-conscious eyes passively collects external light and the brain reorganises it to create the qualia in front of us. It may appear counterintuitive to non-neuroscientists that the visual cortex is at the back of the brain. If I never saw a brain diagram before I’d be tempted to think the visual cortex would be right behind the eyes or scattered throughout the brain. Instead the optic nerve goes to the opposite end of the skull.

Electromagnetism is stronger than gravity over short distances. So forces like friction between our feet and the ground means we don’t fully experience gravity by itself. Maybe if there was no such thing as friction we’d feel the Earth’s internal rotation from night to day.

The sense of touch is inside the brain so when you feel the back of your head that’s actually a lot closer to your visual screen than it appears. The tactile sensation of your head exists inside the brain itself!

If the mental sphere took up space then it would create a double occupancy problem with physical space unless it were always a millisecond ahead or behind physical time.

If the visual world were 2D then it’d be like our mind teleports forward whenever we walk around. In this example the mind would be stationary in the brain and so wherever you travel your consciousness would still be in the same location throughout the day. You wouldn’t actually be traversing any 3D space so to speak. It’d feel like you were gliding through centimetres of depth.

when subjected to an electric current, for example, someone says with his eyes shut “I am moving my arm up and down” though his arm is not moving — Richard B

In a dream we often have a semblance of a body even though we often don’t take any notice it. So if you were swimming in a dream then maybe you’re right and it’s just an electric current tingling our senses to simulate motion while our actual bodies are stationary. Could these motor currents be used to change dreams? For instance would mimicking uphill walking change my dream narrative from whatever it was to a different memory where I was climbing or trekking?

When people talk about the possibility of foreknowledge of the future they always forget the fact of the prediction of one’s own voluntary movements. — Richard B

Perhaps while we’re asleep we first think of a cool sequence of events and then forget the order so that we can visually re-enact it. Then our subconscious would have “foreknowledge” of what will happen to us in a dream.

Remember our volitional muscles are always partially active through muscle tone. Maybe when we are choosing which arm to move, one of them will automatically tense up to permit motion. So the action of subconsciously increasing tone makes it easier to move the selected arm over the relaxed muscles on the opposite arm. Perhaps this biases our decision to pick one arm over the other without actually having compelled us.

if we can’t prove without “perfect” accuracy the outcome of some predicted event, this is evidence the world is not real. This is an odd conclusion. — Richard B

I watched a YouTube philosophy video that mentions a “frustrator”. It’s about trying to predict whether someone will press one of two buttons when they are alerted to your prediction in advance. It alleged that the person could change tack even when you know every law of physics about the situation. A real life version is when Libet could predict your decision from your brain waves a half-second before you consciously decided to move. There’s debate about a veto power in that instance. Let it be known that if anyone comes to me and makes a secret prediction from my neurons about where I’ll be in an hour and afterwards meeting up to see that they were right, then this would persuade me that I’m a wholly physical being. The catch is predicting that I’ll be in the sweet shop doesn’t count!

take the hypothesis that this "world is not real", what experience(s) could falsify such an idea? — Richard B

Perfect circles don’t exist in nature and pi has an infinite number of digits. So when you rotate around and move forward in a certain direction, we don’t ever know with perfect accuracy what that direction is. We see with the 3-body problem that movement can be chaotic between multiple connected objects. Fractal and chaos theory tells us the object’s constituent particles might be impossibly complex to understand reductively. A material object is physical but sometimes it’s not just chaotic but multitudes of chaos built on top of yet more chaos. Maybe it’s not technically random but neither is it predictable or deterministic. Thus it’s more open-ended and subjective: should we interpret it closer to being material or random?

How random would we view our place in the world if we could see planets with the naked eye?

How would a scientist go about determining if this world is "real" or "not real"? — Richard B

The mind is more arbitrary and whimsical in nature than the physical structures we observe. What would a random universe look like? For starters we can’t change the past and so the passage of time means every random decision is conditional on previous random outcomes; thereby reducing latent randomness. In that way our “power is limited”. Evolution says the human body is random yet we are never surprised by looking at fellow humans because we’ve grown accustomed to our physiology. We think donkeys are funny while a donkey probably thinks we look weirdly amusing with our flat faces and short noses! A person from a different planet would think our gravity is utterly bizarre though we’re so familiar with the way objects fall down that everything seems ordinary. For all we know the big bang was entirely random in the laws of physics it developed and the subsequent early universe may have become progressively less probabilistic.

“The probability that any given person has a cough on any given day may be only 5%. But if we know or assume that the person is sick, then they are much more likely to be coughing. For example, the conditional probability that someone unwell is coughing might be 75%, in which case we would have that P(Cough) = 5% and P(Cough|Sick) = 75%.
Conditional probability is one of the most important and fundamental concepts in probability theory.”

Besides even if we could artificially simulate our senses you’d still have to instantaneously rewire the brain with electrodes to prevent a deadly gap in awareness.

“It’s the most overused of horror clichés: A villain is stabbed or shot repeatedly, blown up, burnt, melted, nuked, thrown off a building — you name it — and somehow still manages to come back for one final shock, usually just as a movie is about to end. But when done properly, the “Not Dead Yet!” scare can be a glorious thing.”
https://www.google.ie/amp/s/www.vulture.com/amp/2018/11/the-25-greatest-not-dead-yet-scares-in-movie-history.html

Why have a brain in a vat when you can have a brainless body? Ever had a dream where a character gets impaled in a sword fight and they continue on nonchalantly?

Could are sensory receptors themselves have elements of our consciousness?

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.