Anyone who spends enough time admiring themselves in a mirror should know the answer to that question!

If our image on a mirror is somehow always the same size then wouldn’t that have to apply vice versa where the mirror is moving instead of us moving? So if a mirror was moving back several meters as your position remained the same does your actual size on the mirror change?

What would happen if we viewed the brain as purely physical; as though it’s simply where all of the sentient memory is being stored? Then your consciousness would literally “be” the entire world that you see with it’s myriad colours and diverse qualia. It would be like perspective were a real physical force in your subjective sense of photon vision. Although it’d clearly have no effect at all on the actual matter of objects or indeed the living minds of others.

Needless to say that there can be an absurd element to the world sometimes. An infinitude of time is incomprehensible. Who knows what belief system humans will have tens of thousands of years in the future. I don’t think having faith in a particular belief system must contradict a recognition of the absurd: we can always be understanding of others who have espoused different faith beliefs based on their own unique experiences of the absurd or nihilistic features of existence. So an appreciation of the absurd can increase our tolerance of other religions. It’d be like our spiritual beliefs of what we view God to be like were a subset of the total universe where a particular God might exist within an infinite amount of absurdness!

“Camus states that because the leap of faith escapes rationality and defers to abstraction over personal experience, the leap of faith is not absurd. Camus considers the leap of faith as "philosophical suicide," rejecting both this and physical suicide.”

Dualism might appear to be more usually associated with free will. But what would happen if we instead combined dualism with determinism? Then our visual reality and our tactile sense could exist in parallel without directly interacting. So long as they both have the same initial conditions and that our volition during the day is in some way deterministic, then hypothetically light and matter doesn’t really have to interact.

We can wonder if colour is spatially real when it applies to material objects. It’s not like a more vivid shade of blue alters the density of that substance. But can this question of unrealness be extended to the temporal dimension? If colour wasn’t real in terms of time then it’d be as though the colours were eternal and timeless. What are the options? Colour might have arisen just like matter in the Big Bang. In that case the colour of a green forest would of always been there even if no one was ever there to observe it. Or else in a biological sense the qualia of colour might derive from primordial human evolution where our perception of red is based on ancient memories and associations that have trickled down by way of our genes. Alternatively we could perhaps view the sensations of colour as originating from the deepest parts of our own unconscious mind. This would be where the brain superimposes the feeling of touch and balance on top of an initial, fundamental layer of these inexplicable colours (rather than it being the other way round where colour would just be secondary or epiphenomenal). So in that scenario colour would seem to be the primary reality. To be honest I don’t exactly know.

Another motive for believing in heaven is not just eternal happiness but also the hope that we can see our deceased friends again. I interpret reincarnation to mean that we can see the souls of the people we know though of course in a different bodily form. It’s hard to think about death and the next life so it’d be doubly hard to consider ourselves dying once again in that next life followed by an endless series of deaths! So maybe in a probabilistic sense you’d be able to bump into an erstwhile friend in one of those future lives without ever realising it. We might not see them all in our next life but maybe during our 4th or 50th round at reincarnation! Maybe if there is a God He could bias the probability such that friends might see each other in reincarnated lives more frequently. This could theoretically happen through group reincarnation. I often think reincarnation will be the final stage of heaven but at death I simply wouldn't be prepared for such a radical alteration. Sometimes I'm amazed at how easily cultures like China or religions like Hindus can brace people so easily for reincarnation. Perhaps the way they live in such large population centres reminds them of their kindred spirits for reincarnation.

Panentheism: “the belief that God is a part of the universe as well as transcending it.”

I think pantheism and panentheism can be two sides of the same coin in the way that the destruction of death transcends your own consciousness. Death is incomprehensible and outside of our control. Our state of consciousness at death appears to be outside of causality and time. Yet we’re obviously all conscious now at the same time in parallel and simultaneously rather than in a delayed system of one death after another. So there’s a lot that separates everyone in a literal sense. We clearly don’t ever want to feel very connected to or responsible for people who perform evil actions. But I suppose we can try to feel connected to a spirit of goodwill.

how can one explain the astonishing degree of agreement between you and I and Aunty Millie and Fred over there, if there is no 'reality' that is somehow shared by us all?

Two possibilities occur to me, neither of them very palatable. Perhaps me and Aunty Millie and Fred over there are your creations, you being all that there is. Or perhaps you and me and Auntie Millie and Fred over there all partake in some 'overmind' that sets us up to think much the same thing. Solipsism or panpsychism. — Banno

Even if we can’t directly observe the physical actions of someone’s consciousness on their materialistic neuronal brain, we can always discern the after-effects of their mental processes through their apparent free will and ability to spontaneously adapt or improvise to you and their surroundings. So if you can infer that you yourself have free will and that other people can change based on your input, then logically they must also have this same capacity for free will and consciousness.

“In terms of length, the average brain is around 15 centimeters long.”

If the world were like a projection in our brain where our eyes are somehow in front of what we see rather than behind it, with the visual screen extending backwards into the brain, then the third dimension of depth would have to be abbreviated to a maximum length of that of the brain itself. So in that scenario the depth axis would be minimised and an apparent metre of visual light qualia would be a lot less than the real tactile metre it corresponds to.

It’s quite easy to distinguish a flat 2D screen from it’s surroundings as it’s small and lacks resolution. But our retina has a much higher resolution than a TV screen. So even if the retina conveyed a 2D version of a 3D world we’d really still perceive it as 3D. The plank scale of our physical world is a lot more miniscule than an electronic pixel:

“The proton is about 100 million trillion times larger than the Planck length...
The Planck scale was invented as a set of universal units, so it was a shock when those limits also turned out to be the limits where the known laws of physics applied. For example, a distance smaller than the Planck length just doesn’t make sense—the physics breaks down.”
-symmetry magazine


“Pixels are the individual points of light that make up a digital picture. For example, an 8K TV has 33, 177, 600 pixels. To note, the term 8K refers to the number of pixels (about 8000) displayed horizontally per line.
However, in human vision, eyes do not contain pixels. The closest comparison would be the rods and cones in your eyes that help you see. What’s more, what you resolve is the picture you are able to put together with your eyes and brain, not what necessarily exists in reality.
Since the human eye doesn’t see in pixels at all, it’s pretty hard to compare them to a digital display.
But curious minds want to know, if you could compare the two, how many pixels would the human eye likely have? It turns out, someone smart used some pretty complex math and (assuming 20/20 vision) got to 576 megapixels. 576 megapixels is roughly 576,000,000 individual pixels, so at first glance, it would seem that we could see way more than an 8K TV has to offer. But it’s not that simple. For instance, we see in 576 megapixel definition when our eyes are moving, but a single glance would only be about 5-15 megapixels.
What’s more, your eyes naturally have a lot of flaws that a camera or digital screen don’t. For example, you have a built-in blind spot where your optic nerve meets up with your retina. You might also have a refractive error like nearsightedness or farsightedness. You might have also been born with (seemingly) super-powered eyes, like tetrachromats: people with four cone cells in their eyes instead of three. This means they can see many more colour varieties and therefore, when looking at a TV, could potentially distinguish much more than the average person...
So if you’re wondering if your potentially extreme high-definition 576 megapixel eyes can see more than an 8K TV has to offer, consider this experiment: think of when you are at the beach. If you look down at the sand closest to you, you can easily count the individual grains, right? But the farther you look, the more difficult or impossible it becomes. That’s because distance plays a huge role in our resolution.”
https://www.lasikmd.com/blog/can-the-human-eye-see-in-8k

Perhaps we could eventually use a binoculars or a telescope to discern distant areas on a high-resolution TV screen!


“Steve Jobs introduced the Retina display like this: "There's a magic number right around 300 pixels per inch, that when you hold something around to 10 to 12 inches away from your eyes, is the limit of the human retina to differentiate the pixels." In other words, the individual points of light would, theoretically vanish, creating a seamless image.
But Raymond Soneira, president of DisplayMate Technologies and a frequent critic of screen-makers' marketing claims, calls that "marketing puffery." He says that your eye’s resolution isn't counted in pixels. Instead, your eye is limited by its angular resolution. "The angular resolution of the eye is 0.6 arc minutes per pixel,” he wrote in an e-mail to tech publications in 2010. "So, if you hold an iPhone at the typical 12 inches from your eyes, that works out to 477 pixels per inch." The bottom line: "The iPhone has significantly lower resolution than the [eye's] retina. It actually needs a resolution significantly higher than the retina in order to deliver an image that appears perfect to the retina."
Now, it's worth noting that his analysis wasn't universally accepted. Phil Plait, who spent years calibrating the Hubble Space Telescope's optics, wrote that Soneira's numbers hold true only for people with perfect vision. If you have average eyesight, Jobs's claims are fine.”
- scientificamerican: Why Hi-Res Isn’t Always Better

Light travels so fast that it’s unaffected by the curvature of Earth. It’s only under certain circumstances of massive stars that there’s any gravitational lensing. We’ll feel the effects of gravity on solid objects when we touch them. But our sensation of colour is unrelated to mass.

“A gravitational lens can occur when a huge amount of matter, like a cluster of galaxies, creates a gravitational field that distorts and magnifies the light from distant galaxies that are behind it but in the same line of sight. The effect is like looking through a giant magnifying glass.”
-hubblesite

“Past research in experimental psychology and human physiology showed that perceiving the vertical and the “up” direction is based on multimodal integration of vestibular, somatosensory, and visual signals. Vestibular receptors located in the inner ear are directly sensitive to linear accelerations, and the vestibular system has been shown to play a crucial role in sensing the vertical... Another reference for the perception of the vertical and “up” direction is a body-centered reference based on somatosensory information emanating from the receptors distributed in the muscles, joints, skin, and viscera...
Although most research on internal models of gravity has focused on the perception of visual stimuli in motion, it is very likely that representation of the vertical and “up” direction may modulate the perception of static visual stimuli as well...
Our data show that pictures of a human body that is tilted in the direction opposite to physical gravity (“up”) are judged as more stable than pictures of a body that is tilted in the direction of physical gravity (“down”)...
Collectively, the present data point to the highly adaptive role of the representation of the vertical and “up” direction and that humans constantly update this representation on the basis of multisensory cues, not only to maintain balance for standing upright or achieving acrobatic feats... but also for accurate visual perception.”
https://jov.arvojournals.org/article.aspx?articleid=2122063

It would look very weird if we didn’t perceive the ground as below us. It’d be like everyone was abseiling as they walked vertically up and down the footpath. It would seem as if gravity was acting horizontally on our physical body if we were at the equator. But that’s not how we perceive gravity and it’s like wherever on earth we look out towards the horizon is the top of the earth. Everyone almost perceives themselves to be at the north pole in the way that we can’t directly see the curvature of our planet on the ground in front of us. Location and space is relative that way so what I perceive as up in Ireland will be inverted in Australia. I’m not sure how exactly it is that our physical sense of balance can realign our perception of completely massless light given that light and gravity don’t seem to interact too much. Is the image rotated a bit in our brain?

Other people have a different perspective than you; both metaphorically and literally. If someone looks at a scene and then moves away so that I can look from the exact same position, will we have both experienced the same perspective and depth perception from that vantage point? Will there be any slight geometrical differences? My sense of perspective will obviously conflict with another person’s view of perspective when we’re at different locations. If an object is closer to you than it is to me then you’ll perceive it as being bigger. So if I’m at the centre of my reality that doesn’t make me the visual centre of anyone else’s reality; we each have a unique locus of perspective.

The image we see can represent a far greater area than the surface area of our eye. The scale of the background could be 1000s of times the size of our eyes. However we could still interpret the external image as being the same size as the eye. Consequently everything you see, from the floor below to the sky above, would be miniaturised and only a few centimetres long in total image height. The image would be almost entirely parallel to your eyes as you look straight ahead. Your perception of the ground would counterintuitively be at the same height level as the lower half of the eye. Perhaps a shortcut to think of this idea would be that the image we see exists inside of the eye rather than behind the eye in the brain or in front of the eye in external reality. An analogy for it would be like the visual image we see with its colour qualia is almost directly inside the vitreous humour itself. Invisible external light needs to first enter the eye to become visible while the brain subsequently reinterprets and resizes the image even though the image itself is right inside the middle of your own eye. We interpret light as being external because we cannot sense the fact that it has been refracted as it enters your eye. For example in the case of virtual images we view light as having travelled in a straight line even though it might have been redirected or reflected several times before it reached your retina.

Definition: “The vitreous humour (also known simply as the vitreous) is a clear, colourless fluid that fills the space between the lens and the retina of your eye.”

We often think of perspective as being epiphenomenal because it obviously has no effect on physical objects. Changing your sightline relative to a moving object won’t make it veer off course. Clearly the changing size of distant objects won’t result in them experiencing any strain or deformation forces. The mass and density of objects remain constant irrespective of your conscious location. That said, perspective is still a major depth cue. The change of size affects the area and volume disproportionately through the square cube law. Of course it’s not that objects are orbiting around you but visually speaking you are essentially the centre of your own subjective perception. Light travels in straight lines from the top and bottom of the object to your eye. But we’ve no way of seeing the absolute size of the object seeing as we can only see it’s subsequent apparent size due to perspective. So the way that light gets translated into colour qualia might be indirect. Motion parallax seems to exploit this mismatch between apparent and absolute size. An identical eye movement from left to right will correspond to a larger visual displacement the further out into the horizon you can see. So if your head is directed downwards the eye movement merely equates to a few meters of the ground below you. If you look out in front of you from a high vantage point then this same eye angle across will cause a change of perhaps a kilometre.


“Q: Can you explain the "square-cube" law in easy to understand terms?

A: It’s not that hard to get. The square-cubed law is about the relationship between volume and area.

Let’s take a water tank that holds 1 cubic metre of water. If you double every side of it, how much more water can it hold? And how much more material will you need to build one?...

To build the first tank, you need 6 sides of 1 square metre, so 6 2 of stainless steel. To build the second tank, you need 6 sides of 2x2 m of stainless steel, or 6 sides of 4m2=24m2 of stainless steel, four times as much.

So if you double the size in length, the surface area is double-squared, while the volume is double-cubed. Okay?

And this has all kinds of consequences in real life. Say that you are an airplane manufacturer and you have a very successful airplane. But now you need to scale up. To remain competitive, you need to offer a plane that can carry eight times as many passengers.

Oh, simple, you say. Just take the old plane and double every measurement. We can probably save tons of money because we will only need four times as much material on the hull. Right?

Wrong. You see, while carrying capacity (in terms of fuel, passengers, kilograms, whatever) is determined by volume, the lift of the wing is determined by area. So if you double every measurement, you will have 8 times as much aircraft, passengers, fuel, cargo etc, but you will only have 4 times as much lift. And that means that your scaled-up plane will not be able to get off the ground – it will only have half of the lift per kg airplane than your original one.

There are lots of other examples, from sailing ships (sail area is squared, cargo volume is cubed) to rocket engines (heat transfer in rocket engines depend on the area of the nozzles, not on the volume of fuel).”
Quora

“Objects at a distance appear smaller because the visual angle they subtend becomes more acute with distance. The visual angle may be thought of as a triangle with the apex at the eye, and the distant object as its base.

The apparent height of an object is directly proportional to its actual height and inversely proportional to its distance from the eye. Apparent Height = Actual Height / Distance. So to find the actual height of a distant object, multiply its apparent height by its distance. Conversely, you can divide the known actual height of a distant object by its measured apparent height to arrive at the distance.

There is another geometrical distance relationship called the Inverse Square Law. This applies to all qualities projected by a distant object, including light bouncing off of its surface. Application of this law explains why a distant object may appear fainter than a near object.”
- physics stackexchange

That piece explains three distinct ways in which to infer distance by the phenomenon of perspective.

“Point sources of gravitational force, electric field, light, sound or radiation obey the inverse square law.”
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Forces/isq.html

A small object placed right beside your eye will appear to decrease significantly in apparent size when its moved to an arm’s length away. It might be half of its original size. If you were to look at a distant house on your street and took a step back from it then the house will only look marginally smaller with respect to its apparent size. Perhaps its still 95% of its previous size. However both the arm length and stride length back are almost the same length in the examples above even though the proportional change in size due to perspective is very different. Therefore the rate at which objects get smaller due to perspective is decelerating in its overall effect as the distance from you increases. This is related to the inverse square law. So the size of the various objects in your peripheral vision around your main object of focus can also provide clues as to how far away it is.

Free won’t is the inverse of free will whereby we’re selecting a certain action indirectly. We’d be failing to act on all other possible actions which gives us no choice but to perform the last remaining option. For instance, I could think about going for a walk into town or perhaps into the countryside. But I could opt not to do a long walk simply by consciously failing to withstand the fatigue, exertion and pain required to keep putting one leg in front of the other. Thus I’ve used my free won’t to prevent myself acting on my previous intentions and lazily compelled myself to stay sitting down. This works until another thought or ambition pops into my head. It can at least slowly come to reflect your actual intentions after a large number of choices and multiple negative commands over a long period of time. This is even though it’s a circuitous method to make decisions. So free won’t is a passive phenomenon in the same way that dreaming occurs in a listless and unthinking manner. There might therefore be a link between free won’t and sleep.

We don’t have full control over our subconscious mind even though it’s an inherent part of our awareness. Dreams seem to be internally created by the subconscious rearrangement of our memories. But dreams are still external information relative to your ordinary consciousness. So maybe we aren’t directly creating the dream content ourselves. This means that there’s information in dreams that didn’t actually come from your own first-person consciousness. A dream could present new complex information despite it being obscured and forgotten by the fatigue of sleep. Perhaps there’s more of a separation between the conscious and subconscious mind.

In a dream we’re able to move about and appear to change location even though we’re physically stationary. If this concept were extended to waking life it’d appear as if our visual scene as a whole is moving backwards and against us to give the net impression of us having moved forward. A 2D world would imply that light doesn’t currently exist behind your eyes but that the entire scene counter-rotates as you try to look behind you. If we were to view the eyes as the ‘origin’ of your own conscious perception then it would somehow appear in such a way whereby you’re always looking perfectly straight “ahead of your head” even when you’re glancing in different directions. Whatever object we look at is sharp because of our central vision. Another way of thinking about it is that our subconscious increases the resolution of what we want to focus on. In this analogy our eyes would be passively moving in response to the change in image focus rather than being the sole cause of it. We’d be in a sense compelled to direct our gaze towards whichever part of our visual scene is most clear.

Counterrotate: “rotate in opposite directions, especially about the same axis.”
Origin: “a fixed point from which coordinates are measured.”

“Réné Descartes proved this in the 17th century by setting a screen in place of the retina in a bull’s excised eyeball. The image that appeared on the screen was a smaller, inverted copy of the scene in front of the bull’s eye... The image that hits each of your retinas is a flat, 2D projection... This power of the mind to piece together incomplete data using assumptions based on previous experience has been labeled "unconscious inference" by scientists. As it draws on our past experiences, it’s not a skill we are born with; we have to learn it.”
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/91177/how-our-eyes-see-everything-upside-down

How would we know if the image we see isn’t resized relative to the actual size of the physical objects? Could our visual “screen size” be enlarged or minimised in terms of square area to help us concentrate? So if the overall horizontal and vertical dimensions were expanded, what effect would it have on our forward depth and volume perception? The innumerable photoreceptors convey such acuity that the resolution of the image wouldn’t appear to be less sharp were it to be scaled up.

Could the conscious screen size be much bigger than the eyes? So maybe in terms of perspective the individual objects in the background are the same visual size as close objects, except that far away items seem smaller because of the increasing number of objects in the visual field with the further out you look. Objects moving outwards would appear smaller due to the apparent increase in relative size of the entire background.



“On 2D displays, such as computer monitors and TVs, the display size (or viewable image size or VIS) is the physical size of the area where pictures and videos are displayed.” - Wikipedia

(Even without altering the aspect ratio, the width and height could be equally lengthened relative to the tactile objects themselves. For instance, both subjective height and width could be together doubled or halved.)

“A force can be considered a push or a pull upon an object. It can cause an object to speed up, slow down, change the direction of movement, remain in place or change shape.”
- letstalkscience ca

Consciousness affects our thoughts and motion, but the most viscerally immediate way it operates is through our very eye movements. Are we actively pushing the eyes towards an object or is our subjective visual field actually rotating in the opposite direction? If vision were like a TV screen, it would really be fixed at one location while the darting image passively pulls our eye’s attention towards a different perspective.


“Stand up in a clear space and spin round. It is not too difficult to turn at one revolution each two seconds. Suppose the Moon is on the horizon. How fast is it spinning round your head? It is about 385,000 km away, so the answer is 1.21 million km/s, which is more than four times the speed of light! It might sound ridiculous to say that the Moon is going round your head when really it is you who is turning, but according to general relativity all co-ordinate systems are equally valid, including rotating ones. So isn't the Moon going faster than the speed of light? This is quite difficult to account for...

Nevertheless, the modern interpretation is that the speed of light is constant in general relativity and this statement is a tautology given that standard units of distance and time are tied together using the speed of light. The Moon is given to be moving slower than light because it remains within the "future light cone" propagating from its position at any instant.”
https://www.desy.de/user/projects/Physics/Relativity/SpeedOfLight/FTL.html

“Panpsychism is the view that mentality is fundamental and ubiquitous in the natural world.”
- Stanford

I feel a question which naturally arises from panpsychist theory is how it is that our minds don’t all “collide” if each of our consciousness were visually located outside of our eyes in the same physical reality. Could it be that we’re all seeing the same physical reality but through different versions of light?

“Eye beams” of emission theory doesn’t add up as we can’t light up a dark room with our eyes; we must use an actual light source. Yet somehow colour qualia seems internal. Maybe it’s as though we’re tuned into slightly different frequencies of the same visual spectrum. So light remains external but it’s marginally unique to the individual observer. So the light that another person’s brain receives exists inside the invisible spectrum of light relative to the light that you perceive; and vice versa.

The potential benefit of this line of thought is that qualia could be said to exist outside of the brain without in any way impinging on the location of other minds. The visual spectrum itself covers an immense span of wavelength compared to the sub-atomic size of the photons. The light that others see would in some way be hidden between the wavelength gaps of your own line of sight.

“A typical human eye will respond to wavelengths from about 380 to 750 nanometers. In terms of frequency, this corresponds to a band in the vicinity of 400–790 THz.” - Wikipedia

“What Is Non-Visible Light?
The human eye can only see visible light, but light comes in many other "colors"—radio, infrared, ultraviolet, X-ray, and gamma-ray—that are invisible to the naked eye.

On one end of the spectrum there is infrared light, which, while too red for humans to see, is all around us and even emitted from our bodies...

On the other end of the spectrum there is X-ray light, which is too blue for humans to see...

Non-visible light can also be found in your home in a device you most likely use every day: remote controls! Your remote control uses infrared light to transmit signals to the television and other electronics. While the signal is invisible to you, your television can process the light and respond.”
https://www.essilorusa.com/newsroom/visible-and-invisible-light

Consequently visual reality would be comparable to a deterministic simulation that passively progresses along until it gets updated every so often with new input that we have to freely adapt to.

Tracerdefinition: a device which transmits a signal and so can be located when attached to a moving vehicle or other object.

“Somehow, even for a straightforward, deterministic set of equations, a minute change in initial conditions yielded radically different behaviour.
As he would later note, in what was dubbed the ‘butterfly effect,’ the extreme sensitivity to initial conditions meant that the flapping of a butterfly’s wings over the Amazon could influence the weather in China. This phenomenon, pioneered by Lorenz and others, has found widespread application as deterministic chaos.” - Forbes

We often ask if we’re able to predict where the light will be. But on the flip side could light in turn predict where the object will be? Since the innumerable photons of light travels so fast, could a single instance of reflecting off an object give light the ability to know all of the item’s sensitive initial conditions? If this were so, light could anticipate the short-term future trajectory of the entity. Therefore it could show an observer where the object is without the continuous feedback between the short intervals of time. It would be as if the next minute of time is superdetermined so that light could continuously relay on objects position with only intermittent signals of photons. Although in this case light wouldn’t know the medium or long-term future as it travels at a finite speed c. Colours are attached to the piece and would resemble the traced path of an object into the future. Light would be a time tracer.


“Particles can also tunnel through solid objects, which should normally be impenetrable barriers, like a ghost passing through a wall. And now scientists have proven that, what is happening to a particle now, isn't governed by what has happened to it in the past, but by what state it is in the future – effectively meaning that, at a subatomic level, time can go backwards.”
http://m.digitaljournal.com/science/experiment-shows-future-events-decide-what-happens-in-the-past/article/434829

Superdeterminism: “That not only is inanimate nature deterministic, but we, the experimenters who imagine we can choose to do one experiment rather than another, are also determined.”
https://www.informationphilosopher.com/freedom/superdeterminism.html

Mysteries like consciousness and wave-particle duality have been a prolonged problem. Even though everything we see is light, we can’t find a neat analogy of what light is from any of the objects and systems that light itself illuminates. So there’s no harm in considering the implications of an alternative metaphysical framework like antirealism to see if we can help break at all the circular logic of these conundrums.




“Light is not only a wave but also a particle.”
https://photonterrace.net/en/photon/duality/

what exactly is that point of any of this? You are avoiding the questions. — Darkneos

We seem to mostly rely on our sense of vision to interpret our surroundings; our sense of touch only provides information on objects beside us that we can feel. Light is deemed more fundamental than matter because it travels faster. If anything we’d expect light to be more familiar and ordinary as it’s our primary sense; it’d actually be the nature of tactile matter that’s mysterious. What if we thought of it the other way round; like matter was the hidden external reality that we share while sight was merely our own internal representation of the world? This would mean that our sense of touch is operating “outside” our sense of vision. What would that imply? It might be that nothing in our vision could actually be said to contain mass. Tactile mass would only physically appear and affect us when we happen to touch the specific object. For example, the objects shown in 2D photographs don’t have any mass whatsoever even though its colours outline where the mass was located. Through this comparison it would seem that our sightseeing perception is made at bottom of light. The objective matter we can touch is the concealed shared external world that represents the tantalising unreachable limit of our subjective perception.

“What we perceive as solid objects like desks, chairs, cars, even ourselves, is actually just a big conglomeration of tiny particles separated by what is practically infinite nothingness. This absurd truth has everything to do with atoms...
Every human on planet Earth is made up of millions and millions of atoms which all are 99% empty space. If you were to remove all of the empty space contained in every atom in every person on planet earth and compress us all together, then the overall volume of our particles would be smaller than a sugar cube.”
- interestingengineering page

I miswrote that sentence:
“Light... far-away object without us (the body) directly touching it.”

Antirealism is not a competing religion. — magritte

Still I ask what is the point of all this? — Darkneos

Consciousness has been a scientific mystery for a long time. I suspect it’s not just the structure of the brain that’s causing the confusion; maybe our “non-local” visual perception also contains hidden mysteries. Light allows us to perceive a far-away object without directly touching it. Yet our sense of touch doesn’t contain as many distinct qualia as all of the unique colours. That is to say that our perception of ordinary medium sized objects might be more complex than we currently understand. So while materialism indeed reigns supreme at the moment, perhaps in the future when consciousness is finally scientifically understood there’ll be more appreciation for some “unreal” aspects of reality.

Nonlocal meaning: “not of, affecting, or confined to a limited area or part.”

You can see the same objects I see and vice versa — Darkneos

either perception is real or the outside world is real — magritte

Even the manner in which we look at an unmoving object is surprisingly very intricate. Our eyes are always moving in saccades (1) but it’s performed unconsciously. So the image we see may not be as unified as it appears to be. Perhaps our visual field is cobbled together afterwards with all of the depth perception cues.

If the entirety of the mind isn’t itself the brain, then it’s as if that small subset of consciousness that’s independent of the brain would be controlling and acting (2) on the the neurons from an imperceptibly slight distance away.

1: “Saccades are rapid, ballistic movements of the eyes that abruptly change the point of fixation. They range in amplitude from the small movements made while reading, for example, to the much larger movements made while gazing around a room. Saccades can be elicited voluntarily, but occur reflexively whenever the eyes are open, even when fixated on a target (see Box A). The rapid eye movements that occur during an important phase of sleep (see Chapter 28) are also saccades.”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK10991/
Subjective colours are like a continuation from cartoonish dreams.

2: “Action at a distance is typically characterized in terms of some cause producing a spatially separated effect in the absence of any medium by which the causal interaction is transmitted.”
https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/action-at-a-distance/v-1

mind is still not abstract — Darkneos

Perhaps one way of expressing the same problem would be wondering if consciousness could ever be replicated on computer microchips. If neurons are themselves conscious then microchips would struggle to mimic any sort of consciousness as neurons are biologically and genetically complex. If however neurons aren’t identical with sentience and only stored their memory and retroactively conveyed the traces of someone’s consciousness, then maybe the qualia of colour perception really could leave imprints on microchips. It would be like tuning into the right frequency signal.

I think if you could interact with a true conscious entity that’s physically made of only inert microchips, you’d have to conclude that their mind is somehow more abstract than their representative computer chips.

https://petcentral.chewy.com/wp-content/uploads/iStock-532190589-1.jpg
Could non-rational minds be transmitted by mere microchips?

anti realism is a philosophy that shoots itself in the foot just like solipsism. — Darkneos

“In metaphysics, abstract and concrete are classifications that denote whether the object that a term describes has physical referents.” - Wikipedia

The way I look at it is that the objects I see have a concrete existence in my consciousness alone and the things that you see have a concrete existence for just you. But I can’t see the same objects you see so your whole existence is abstract relative to my own perspective. This applies vice versa where my experience is abstract from your point of view. So I can’t concretely see your mind but I could interpret it to be just like an abstract object. I can’t feel your emotions but I can still relate to it by comparing your description with its abstract language and then trying to apply it to my own experiences.

“Mathematics is an abstract object for most of us. Okay, but what does “abstract object” mean in philosophy? An abstract object is an object that does not occupy any place in the universe. Ideas are prime abstract objects and numbers are also an idea. Numbers also don’t enter in causal relations with other objects that we can see, touch, or eat.”
https://medium.com/however-mathematics/is-mathematics-really-an-abstract-object-31658c1e4310

Assume that the critique is valid and see where you went wrong. — magritte

OK, I’ll quote a few sections from Banno’s Stanford antirealism link:


“This diagnosis is arguably facilitated by van Fraassen’s... intimation that neither realism nor antirealism (in his case, empiricism) is ruled out by plausible canons of rationality; each is sustained by a different conception of how much epistemic risk one should take in forming beliefs on the basis of one’s evidence. An intriguing question then emerges as to whether disputes surrounding realism and antirealism are resolvable in principle, or whether, ultimately, internally consistent and coherent formulations of these positions should be regarded as irreconcilable but nonetheless permissible interpretations of scientific knowledge ”

I alluded to how we can “infer” that other people are conscious by their communication and physical movements. I didn’t say we could directly observe other people’s minds as we only experience our own consciousness. This means that there’s inevitably some degree of “epistemic risk” when we try to infer what someone else is thinking or guessing what are the contents of their mind. There’s clearly less epistemic risk when we try to analyse a physical system like an ordinary computer as that is solid while consciousness is more mysterious.





“Kuhn held that if two theories are incommensurable, they are not comparable in a way that would permit the judgment that one is epistemically superior to the other, because different periods of normal science are characterized by different “paradigms”... As a consequence, scientists in different periods of normal science generally employ different methods and standards, experience the world differently via “theory laden” perceptions, and most importantly for Kuhn (1983), differ with respect to the very meanings of their terms.”

I don’t what the future of science will bring so I can’t comment much on the next paradigms. I’m sure there’ll always be surprising and counterintuitive discoveries. Science still can’t fully explain consciousness so I imagine that consciousness and artificial intelligence must eventually be included in those future paradigms. Artificial intelligence doesn’t even have to be restricted to rational human minds or supercomputers. There’s so much complex animal and lower insect life that there’s really no end to what artificially intelligent machines could mimic. It took millions of years for human consciousness to evolve so I’m not sure if we’ll ever be able to skip that process and create artificially intelligent humans before having designed artificially intelligent monkeys!





“One outcome of the historical turn in the philosophy of science and its emphasis on scientific practice was a focus on the complex social interactions that inevitably surround and infuse the generation of scientific knowledge...
By making social factors an inextricable, substantive determinant of what counts as true or false in the realm of the sciences (and elsewhere), social constructivism stands opposed to the realist contention that theories can be understood as furnishing knowledge of a mind-independent world.”

I agree that there can be social factors that affect our metaphysical beliefs. If I’d instead been born hundreds of years ago in Aztec Tenochtitlan, would I’ve been able to reject their beliefs in human sacrifice to the gods? Or would I be so impressionable to culture that I would’ve went along with it? I suppose I can never know for sure! But science and society are very open-minded and analytical these days so I think we can be assured that we’ve made some objective progress in understanding knowledge and “mind-independent” truths.




“Standpoint theory investigates the idea that scientific knowledge is inextricably linked to perspectives arising from differences in such points of view. Feminist postmodernism rejects traditional conceptions of universal or absolute objectivity and truth.”

I suppose a lot of our knowledge are based on analogies. For example, I know what a bird is by comparing it to a creature that flies. But analogies aren’t created equal and so in the future we’ll be able to get better and better analogies and combinations of analogies to describe aspects of reality. So perhaps the analogies we use in the distant future will become increasingly accurate as we approach the limit of “absolute objectivity and truth” without us ever actually reaching a point of witnessing and touching the external reality:

“Sometimes we can't work something out directly ... but we can see what it should be as we get closer and closer!... But instead of saying a limit equals some value because it looked like it was going to, we can have a more formal definition.”
https://www.mathsisfun.com/calculus/limits-formal.html





In terms of how my vision could be separate to another person’s vision despite us seeing the same quantitative dimensions, an analogy could be with lenticular printing. So we’re both looking at the same object in the photo but from different angles. For whatever reason I’ll never be able to see the object from the precise angle that someone else is looking at it from. We can’t see each other’s sense of colours.

https://s3.amazonaws.com/cdn.freshdesk.com/data/helpdesk/attachments/production/5123714815/original/QdFdivDj0HrG53Xb6yfLROTvgh-dN7Fn_g.gif?1591655446

“Lenticular printing is used to produce images with an illusion of depth and movement. This is achieved through an array of lenses designed in such a way that when viewed from different angles, different images are seen. This process can be used to develop various frames of animation to create fluid movement, or it can simply show a set of images flipping from one to another.”
- clearchannel

So with all that dismantled I still have to ask on anti-realism, what's the point? — Darkneos

Dualism: “a theory or system of thought that regards a domain of reality in terms of two independent principles, especially mind and matter.”

I reckon that a dualist would have to also be an antirealist in order to be consistent. If your mind is in any way separate from your brain, that would have to equally apply to others. If my mind isn’t fully contained in my brain, then other people’s minds aren’t entirely inside their skull either. There can’t be an exception where you’re a dualist but everyone else can still be observed by you to be inside their brain. So I think a dualist would I think have to concede that the minds of others aren’t immediately existent within their own reality.

I’m not necessarily saying that it has to be the other way round where an antirealist must be a complete dualist. The physical brain I’m sure has the memory stores and remains involved in everything else. But maybe there’s some limited foundation to consciousness that isn’t reducible to materials. Antirealism is a real-time belief whereas dualism is often referenced in debates about what happens after death.

This can be extended further to who are you saying all of this too if you are arguing against reality. — Darkneos

OK, below I might indulge in some of my own philosophical musings!

The way I see it is that my living reality is real only to me. Someone else’s conscious reality is real only to them. Both of our realities exactly correspond quantitatively but not qualitatively; we have different sensations. So if we put two and two together someone else’s consciousness simply doesn’t exist in my reality.

I can’t directly see what it’s like to be someone else but we can obviously still infer each other’s sentient existence through the other person’s corporeal body and brain. Maybe the physical brain is more of residue of the effects of consciousness rather than consciousness itself. Perhaps the brain is like our complete memory storage device that somehow leaves the imprints of a real conscious being without it actually equating to that consciousness.

One way of thinking about it is that we’ve a shared physical, spatial reality but we occupy different timelines. So my perception of time wouldn’t be physically, spatially real to someone else. Although my brain would nevertheless leave real vestiges of there having being a conscious decision-maker. In a sense, time is spatially invisible and I only know that another person experiences time because I myself can experience time.

Maybe time and space are subjectively completely separate dimensions. “Spacetime” (the simultaneous experience of both space and time) would then be unique to each observer. I can more easily imagine time existing without space than I can think of space existing without time. So I think time is intrinsically more associated with pure consciousness while the coordinates and dimensions of space are more physical in nature. I don’t dispute that physical objects pass through time like the “relativistic physicists” say; but maybe without slowing time down enough to really experience time. The physical brain is an exception and manages to feel the traces of time.

Timeline definition:
a graphical representation of a period of time, on which important events are marked.
a chronological arrangement of events in the order of their occurrence.

Space-time:
“the concepts of time and three-dimensional space regarded as fused in a four-dimensional continuum.”

A (dead) human body exhibition:
https://lh4.ggpht.com/_5V7vNjVKdVI/SYL87f_wL1I/AAAAAAABIM4/bbn9vvMpCMI/s400/bodies.jpg
This brain still occupies space but of course it no longer has a sense of time.

Seriously though, I've never seen a more futile argument than anti realism. — Darkneos

Irrespective of any spiritual undertones, antirealism would still be a great way of understanding the science of perception. So whether or not you think antirealism is metaphysically valid, it could nonetheless serve as a novel way of understanding how consciousness might relate to the physical brain. If the mental can in any way affect the physical world, then antirealism would be a useful platform and shortcut for trying to grasp how that occurs.

But the bigger question would be why would one argue for anti realism. You should see the futility of it just like arguing for solipsism. — Darkneos

In the future people might be able to come up with more testable predictions for antirealism. There’s still a lot of mystery at present though about the nature of consciousness.

To give an example, could visual perspective have an effect on your own indirect perception of the motion of light? Objective photons are physically travelling straight while also merging together as they approach your eye (diagram 1). So alternatively from a subjective standpoint light from the top and bottom of large distant object would appear to be travelling in not just straight lines but straight parallel lines (2). Visually speaking, you’d be the same height as a much taller object if you viewed it from a large distance. From your biased first-person point of view, objects seem to visibly contract as they moved away from you. Perhaps the light would somehow get more dense and compact for the far away objects.

1:
https://s31531.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/figure-1_principle-of-vision_linear-perspective_patrick-connors-1024x791.jpg
Light merges towards the eye. The light is straight but it’s not parallel.

2:
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/68uU_MSmtkc/maxresdefault.jpg
Maybe light (phosphenes) would give the impression of travelling in parallel lines from an object that’s apparently decreasing in size itself as it moves away from you. So the light would remain parallel because the size of the object is actually changing and getting reduced. A 2D TV screen has pixels that only send out horizontal polarised light even though it displays a 3D image with perspective.


Pixel definition: “a minute area of illumination on a display screen, one of many from which an image is composed.”

Polarise definition: “restrict the vibrations of (a transverse wave, especially light) wholly or partially to one direction.”

- While physical light travels in many directions, might our phosphenes in our conscious colour representation of the world travel in the one direction? After all, I can never directly perceive any light that is angled in a different direction and fails to enter my eye. Even though external light falls on the eye, the resulting qualia of internal phosphenes which we we use to see all of the projected colours might operate more like lasers.

“In contrast, the output of a laser, as shown in Figure 3, has a very small divergence and can maintain high beam intensities over long ranges.”
https://ehs.princeton.edu/book/export/html/348

https://www.chem.purdue.edu/gchelp/cchem/RGBColors/body_rgbcolors.html

The sensation of volition when you decide to intentionally make any movement comes after the action has started. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The external entity doesn’t have to be where we perceive it to be, in objective time or absolute space, just because our senses are in alignment. Our senses seem to have evolved to allow us to find our way through the environment rather than for pure metaphysical accuracy. There just has to be a synchronised proportion in scale of where we visually map objects so that we don’t collide into it.

“As we look deeper into timing, we face the question of volition. Your decision to act – and then the action itself – seem simultaneous with the sight and sound of the snap. But weren’t these volitional and motor signals generated some time ago, so the impulses could travel down your spinal cord and peripheral nerves to move your fingers?”
“Why do the sight and sound of a slamming car door suddenly appear unsynchronized if you view it from more than 30 meters away? This seems to occur because the system perceptually synchronizes signals that arrive less than 80 msec apart (past 30 meters, the difference between the speeds of light and sound exceed this window). But little is known regarding timing conflicts across other modalities, e.g., vision and somatosensation.”
https://www.eagleman.com/research/110-time-and-the-brain-or-what-s-happening-in-the-eagleman-lab


“Put this book down and go look in a mirror. Now move your eyes back and forth, so that you're looking at your left eye, then at your right eye, then at your left eye again. When your eyes shift from one position to the other, they take time to move and land on the other location. But here's the kicker: you never see your eyes move. What is happening to the time gaps during which your eyes are moving? Why do you feel as though there is no break in time while you're changing your eye position?”
“It may be that a unified polysensory perception of the world has to wait for the slowest overall information. Given conduction times along limbs, this leads to the bizarre but testable suggestion that tall people may live further in the past than short people. The consequence of waiting for temporally spread signals is that perception becomes something like the airing of a live television show. Such shows are not truly live but are delayed by a small window of time, in case editing becomes necessary.”
“When it comes to awareness, your brain goes through a good deal of trouble to perceptually synchronize incoming signals that were synchronized in the outside world. So a firing gun will seem to you to have banged and flashed at the same time.”
https://www.eagleman.com/blog/brain-time

Seems to me that much of this discussion is based on a misapprehension of what antirealism means. — Banno

What I’m trying to say is that our perception doesn’t literally have to be “real” even though it’s based on a real outside world. Light travels in straight lines as it approaches us but the lens inside our eyes then distorts and redirects the light as it enters the vitreous humor and on towards the retina. So the image we see doesn’t even have to be a precise true to life scale of where the hard external objects are located. There only has to be a proportional correspondence between our visual qualia and the actual physical entity in order for us to navigate around. Colours could be simply a representation of the object rather than the material object itself.

https://www.lei.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/eye-diagram-2.png

“Seems to me, the main premise of “anti-realism” is, as it’s been expressed in the O.P., self-contradictory.
For if by “objective,” it’s meant (as it would quite plainly) “not-subjective,” that is, not determined by any subject, then the very premise itself is self-defeating.”
-aRealidealist

“Australian bull ants, like humans, have three types of photoreceptors that are sensitive to different colors (ultraviolet, blue and green) and therefore the potential for trichromatic color vision.”
https://www.asianscientist.com/2015/05/in-the-lab/ants-human-like-color-vision/

Consciousness doesn’t always have to be personal. There might be impersonal aspects of certain qualia. By way of illustration, deterministic ants might identify sensations of colour that are similar to our own. Although they don’t have self-awareness, rationality or insight into their immediate experience. Therefore they might indeed see vibrant colours yet lack the primary qualities that we’d ordinarily interpret as consciousness. A small robot could inertly differentiate colours by their physical, mathematical wavelength without any accompanying qualia of colour. Although perhaps an ant could actually really have the specific colour qualia but it somehow remains devoid of any internal psyche.

Moving on from ants, it doesn’t mean we personally invented or created colours from scratch even if the colours themselves only exist within our mind. The mind itself can have quantitative dimensions backstage despite it having subjective experiences. Anti-realism merely acknowledges that we are perceiving the world indirectly. Although this indirect perception we experience might be two-way and be valid in and of itself. Our perception of time can be self-sustaining.


“(Christopher Isham)
What do you mean by antirealism? Because in days gone by, the antithesis was between realism and idealism; which is to do with the mind.

(Robert Kuhn)
Idealism being that everything is a manifestation of mind; that there’s no physical real world at all... In today’s world it’s just a lack of hubris; more of a humility to recognise that everything comes to our sense organs, we’re interpreting things, we’re seeing the photons as they hit our eyes, we’re not approaching things in themselves, it’s more of a cautious way of doing things. That seems legitimate.”
- extract from Closer to Truth series

Impersonal definition:
“Lacking personality; not being a person: an impersonal force.
2.
a. Showing no emotion or personality: an aloof, impersonal manner.
b. Having no personal reference or connection: an impersonal remark.
c. Not responsive to or expressive of human personalities.”

Panpsychism: “the doctrine or belief that everything material, however small, has an element of individual consciousness.”

With regard to antirealism, the terms impersonal and materialistic don’t have to be equivalent. There could be more primitive versions of sentience.

https://help.autodesk.com/cloudhelp/2016/ENU/AutoCAD-Core/images/GUID-90C14932-5903-4AA6-93F8-1DBF8E3ECB57.png
Both images are 2D. It’s very easy to notice depth in the right image. Perspective has a warping effect of sorts. The floor appears to ascend vertically in the photo to the right. This illusory “floor height” is another depth cue as we can approximate the different angles and eye level to triangulate the distance to the object. The specular parallel projection image is idealised and resembles something like “square-eyes” or tunnel-vision. Our curved retinas and eye lenses allows us to see diffuse light from multiple directions at once.


“In trigonometry and geometry, triangulation is the process of determining the location of a point by forming triangles to it from known points.”

https://www.google.ie/amp/s/www.geeksforgeeks.org/difference-between-parallel-and-perspective-projection-in-computer-graphics/amp/

https://www.computerhope.com/jargon/d/diffuse-reflection.jpg

The eyelids are like the screen that dreams are projected on.

Projection definition:
“The presentation of an image on a surface, especially a cinema screen.”

“Emission theory... is the proposal that visual perception is accomplished by eye beams emitted by the eyes.”

When you think about it, any visual stimuli or memories in a dream are actually “emitted” by your own brain. Although it’s the other way round when we’re awake.

“Rapid eye movement (REM) sleep is one of the four stages that the brain goes through during the sleep cycle. This period of the sleep cycle usually takes place about 90 minutes after a person first falls asleep...
Dreams happen during the rapid eye movement (REM) stage of sleep.”
- verywellmind com

https://cdn-mos-cms-futurecdn-net.cdn.ampproject.org/i/s/cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/CrvvEKHrkayTnkdg6kvs8K-1200-80.jpg
The apparent decrease in width of the road can be used to infer that the absolute length of the road stretches to very far away.

https://www.google.ie/amp/s/www.creativebloq.com/amp/features/one-point-perspective




https://d1alt1wkdk73qo.cloudfront.net/images/guide/66ecf462f287438ba166b46d0f9c62d9/640x960.jpg
The decreasing apparent height of the wall is used to deduce the actual length of the hallway.





https://i.ytimg.com/vi/FMeK75m4hAI/maxresdefault.jpg
We often see objects that are slanted at an angle to us instead of it being faced straight towards us head on. We can see two diagonal sides of the object (similar to the “a” variables in the below diagram) which we can subconsciously use to work out its internal depth (the hypotenuse or d variable in the below link)
https://vt-vtwa-assets.varsitytutors.com/vt-vtwa/uploads/problem_question_image/image/1471/square_diagonal.jpg





https://www.art-class.net/10-pictures/drawing-perspective/three-point-perspective%20(16).png
The relative size of the background that an object blocks out can be used to assess the object’s real size. The background could include the sky above, the ground below and/or any vertical wall behind it.

“In space, an occultation happens when one object passes in front of another from an observer's perspective. A simple example is a solar eclipse.”
- space com

“Occultation (also referred to as interposition) happens when near surfaces overlap far surfaces. If one object partially blocks the view of another object, humans perceive it as closer. However, this information only allows the observer to create a "ranking" of relative nearness.”
- Wikipedia





https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perspective_(graphical)