“Okay, the next feature of consciousness, after this marvelous unified conscious field, is that it functions causally in our behavior. I gave you a scientific demonstration by raising my hand, but how is that possible? How can it be that this thought in my brain can move material objects? Well, I'll tell you the answer. I mean, we don't know the detailed answer, but we know the basic part of the answer, and that is, there is a sequence of neuron firings, and they terminate where the acetylcholine is secreted at the axon end-plates of the motor neurons.”
John Searle Ted talk

“In physiology, medicine, and anatomy, muscle tone (residual muscle tension or tonus) is the continuous and passive partial contraction of the muscles, or the muscle's resistance to passive stretch during resting state. It helps to maintain posture and declines during REM sleep.”
- Wikipedia

Is the natural tendency of the human body to do biologically nothing if we weren’t always moving it with our conscious decisions? The muscles are actually always a bit active even when we’re simply resting. They often exist in a balanced system of antagonistic pairs. So the front and back leg muscles have to actively oppose each other when we are just standing still. This is called muscle tone and we aren’t always aware of it.

Maybe the body can indirectly exploit this complex and delicate system so as to conform with our conscious motor decisions. The brain might be able to passively weaken a muscle to reflexively achieve limb motion instead of actively moving the corresponding muscle in the antagonistic pair. This wouldn’t be too far off the idea of free won’t (a version of free will where we have the ability to veto decisions).

Likewise it can be easy to let the mind wander. It’s sometimes difficult to try to ignore our thoughts in a mindfulness session. So without exerting mental energy is the natural tendency of the mind to creatively or haphazardly think even without conscious decisions? Our consciousness in this case would serve to guide and analytically direct our racing thoughts. I’m not 100% sure though.

There’s no perspective in absolute time and space.

Can a universe be said to exist if there’s no consciousness inside it? Our visual perception of external objects would comply with the illusion of perspective. Although do non-sentient external objects themselves obey perspective? These tactile objects don’t have consciousness. So if these inert entities could perceive the world, what would it be like? If perspective is an illusion caused by our first-person view of the world, does that imply that external physical objects always remain the same size from a God-like bird’s eye view? But it’s difficult to even imagine a world where objects don’t get smaller in proportion with the increasing depth from a person.

https://static.boredpanda.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Worlds-Full-of-Lemons-by-Surrealist-Painter-Vitaly-Urzhumov8__880.jpg
Fantastical surreal art on google images. There’ll be no shortage of lemonade!

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d3/Vincent_Van_Gogh_-_Wheatfield_with_Crows.jpg
Even familiar rural scenes can be imbued with surreal qualities.


There’s much controversy these days about randomness, fine-tuning, quantum strangeness, etc.. What if randomness could be extended to the large-scale universe in general rather than any specific localised system? If the big bang was initiated by random means, would that process leave any residual imprint on our perception of events? So while the current motion of objects are deterministic, their original starting speed and location coordinates would be random. Someone could psychoanalyse the motion of particles to wonder how the object came to have its physical properties of speed and mass in the first place. We’ve lived in the world so long that it’d be as if we’re habituated and desensitised to the peculiar absurdness of our surroundings.

Definition of anthropic principle: “either of two principles in cosmology:
a : conditions that are observed in the universe must allow the observer to exist
— called also weak anthropic principle
b : the universe must have properties that make inevitable the existence of intelligent life
— called also strong anthropic principle”

“Basically, relativity said that the laws of physics couldn’t depend on how fast you were moving; all you could measure was the velocity of one object relative to another.
But when Einstein applied this principle to his thought experiment, it produced a contradiction: Relativity dictated that anything he could see while running beside a light beam, including the stationary fields, should also be something Earthbound physicists could create in the lab. But nothing like that had ever been observed.”
- National Geographic

If someone travelled at light speed, I guess they’d see a series of still photographic images. The light ahead of them would be stationary relative to their own speed.

There are obviously many different forces in physics such as the strong nuclear force. But from a philosophical stance, if consciousness isn’t a tactile material entity then for lack of an alternative it must be a bright photonic concoction. There’s simply no other substance that’s so far discovered with such unreal properties.

We only see light that enters our own eyes; so the light that other people see is invisible to us. Instead of viewing consciousness as a material substance trapped inside of the skull, what if your consciousness was the entirety of the actual light that you perceive in your visual system? Light itself is your consciousness.

A physical object can’t be accelerated to the speed of light. But if non-material consciousness is itself made of light, then obviously consciousness could effortlessly travel at speed c. It would be as easy as it would be for light emanating from household light bulb.

A mundane camera can essentially freeze time with a single photograph. Unconscious dreams often take the form of a series of seemingly related photographs through which we confabulate a movie-like dream narrative. Could sleep be where subjective consciousness zaps forward through time at light speed? That for sure would explain the bizarreness of dreams.

“In physics, a standing wave, also known as a stationary wave, is a wave which oscillates in time but whose peak amplitude profile does not move in space. The peak amplitude of the wave oscillations at any point in space is constant with time, and the oscillations at different points throughout the wave are in phase. The locations at which the absolute value of the amplitude is minimum are called nodes, and the locations where the absolute value of the amplitude is maximum are called antinodes.”
- Wikipedia

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hBH4c3MAACA

Pantheism is indeed a harmonious, pluralistic and tolerant belief. I think Pantheism can really square the circle; the statement of pantheism is simultaneously very humble and highly assertive.

“A luminous object is one that produces light. A non-luminous object is one that reflects light.”
- nbed website

If we assume “all is mind”, then a corollary is that luminous objects are also part of a person’s mind. Do we ever directly see an incident ray of light? Might we be only seeing the reflected colour of light? For example; when we glance at a yellow street light, is that yellow glow a result of the real light or simply the after-effects of that light? Is the amber colour merely a secondary consequence of the heated bulb and wires or it’s interaction with any surrounding fog?





“There’s no dispute over the constancy of the speed of light when measured over a round trip. But what of its speed over a one-way trip?”
https://www.google.ie/amp/s/www.technologyreview.com/2010/11/09/89763/the-one-way-speed-of-light-conundrum/amp/

If light exists in our own visual system, then logically we cannot ever sentiently get ahead of it in order to measure the elapsed time for a one-way trip.





“It’s not like superdeterminism somehow prevents an experimentalist from turning a knob. Rather, it’s that the detectors’ states aren’t independent of the system one tries to measure. There just isn’t any state the experimentalist could twiddle their knob to which would prevent a correlation.”
- backreaction website

We must rely on our own vision to read a light detector. The detector in turn probably depends on electronics and the quantum properties of light to track that very light beam. So even if we tried to circumvent the problem by using a tactile language like Braille to measure the results, it could still wind up being a bit circular.





“Most physicists of the time believed that light traveled through what they called the "luminiferous ether." In 1887, two American scientists, Albert Michelson and Edward Morley, built a device known as an interferometer, which they hoped would enable them to prove the existence of the ether.”
- amnh website

If the invisible luminiferous aether were so dense, wouldn’t there also be problems with light refraction as it entered Earth’s atmosphere? Would the light just be reflected straight back to the sun as happens in snell’s window? Or was the ether meant to also suffuse the air at ground level? I suppose reflection has the same result as a 180 degree refraction. Conceptually speaking, how does a massless particle know where the mass is located in order for it to be reflected? It’s on a par with asking how the sense of sight can be explained in terms of the sense of touch. Without one having a synesthetic sense, there doesn’t appear to be a visceral explanation.

“When light is incident upon a medium of lesser index of refraction, the ray is bent away from the normal, so the exit angle is greater than the incident angle. Such reflection is commonly called "internal reflection".”
- hyperphysics website

“The properties of light and water, and the refractive index of water leads to an interesting effect known as Snell's window. You will see a large circle of light, too large for most lenses, if you look up on a sunny day.”
- uwphotographyguide website

Synaesthesia: “a condition in which someone experiences things through their senses in an unusual way, for example by experiencing a colour as a sound, or a number as a position in space”







Just as an aside, the speaker’s last question ponders the dilemma of how space is connected to time!
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nrPPXU1MECk

The idea of gravity arising as a passive result of perpetual motion may not actually be too outlandish. The extremely fine-tuned orbits may initially seem too much of a coincidence. But the perimeter of an ellipse is actually arbitrary according to the video below.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5nW3nJhBHL0

A needle in a haystack: “something that is impossible or extremely difficult to find, especially because the area you have to search is too large.”

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4Lb-6rxZxx0&list=PLt5AfwLFPxWIUYlCb5ip9f_s4qm1zi8kc&index=19

Is that the same game though? If there were 100 doors, then to be consistent wouldn’t the game host have to close exactly 33 of them? So you’d then have your original choice with 66 other doors. A one out of 67 chance seems at first glance to be a harder challenge. Unless the number of prizes were also increased so there’d be 33 doors with the money behind them. 33 out of 67 is still 50:50 as we’re obviously forgetting about the infinite number of decimal places when 1/3 or 2/3 is converted to a decimal.

But if he closed 99 doors for there to be only one other door; it would certainly appear to be more than a coincidence. In that case you’d definitely change as there’s the notion of the complement (1-probability of it not happening). But if there’s two doors out of 3 as is the case in the original game; I’m not sure if that argument holds as strongly. Had you instead chosen a different door, that same door would also be able to exploit the law of the complement. So shouldn’t it just neutralise back to 50:50?

Keep/hold your cards close to your chest: “to keep your intended actions secret.”

Bluff: “To deceive someone by making them think either that you are going to do something when you really have no intention of doing it, or that you have knowledge that you do not really have, or that you are someone else.”

Maths is obviously a much more precise language compared to English. I’m afraid I haven’t tried at all to understand the maths arguments. So I’m not trying to take a verbal explanation out of context. It’s merely that I don’t understand why it’s relevant that the game show host knows the answer. It would appear to rely on a sort of cynicism or reverse psychology. Bluffing is an imprecise psychological technique related to tone and body language. So I don’t quite see how that could somehow translate into concrete maths.

Pseudorandom: “ (of a number, a sequence of numbers, or any digital data) satisfying one or more statistical tests for randomness but produced by a definite mathematical procedure.”

Even an individual’s first attempt in the Monthy Hall game isn’t completely random. They might have chosen a certain number owing to subliminal subconscious factors. Maybe 2 is actually their favourite number or that was just the first number they looked at on the stage.

Lucky charm: “an object that is believed to bring its owner good luck.”

“ ... supraliminal messages involve a stimulus that has both a conscious and subconscious influence. Unlike subliminal messages, supraliminal messages contain a stimulus that people can actually notice, but since people don’t know that it’s influencing their behaviour.”
- subliminal advertisements website

“However, the notion of seeing conscious choice work as a veto may be exactly what we need to focus on in order to stop engaging in nonconsciously initiated actions that are undermining our lives. We can veto our habitual actions if we make the intention to. We have free choice to invoke this "free won't!"”
- Psychology Today

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TVq2ivVpZgQ

I’ll just give my two cents on the problem! What if you approached it from a free will compatiblist viewpoint? How free is the player in the game to make a random choice in the first place?

Probability is not an exact science. It needs more than one trial to make an estimate. So intuitively it seems that the probability must be 50% for each remaining option. The fact that the host reveals another false option doesn’t seem to have any bearing on your remaining choices. Maybe for a single trial the probability really is 50%. The trouble would then occur when you try to add the probabilities of multiple trials for this unusual game.

The setup of the game is somewhat abstract. Perhaps a real life analogy would be if you were a tourist at an unfamiliar road junction. There were three different paths. A local person in the area knows the correct way. But the person is for whatever reason trying to be a bit cute and won’t give you the answer upfront. He tells you to take a guess. After you doing so he subsequently tells you that one of the other paths that you did not choose the wrong way.

Let’s imagine that you were in a state in the middle of America. You wanted to go to New York and the other roads led to Los Angeles or Miami. A city is a massive area so there’s no quantum strangeness or superposition of answers at play. In this case the goat wouldn’t be in a hybrid state of being dead or alive! The city is always at that particular location regardless of the choice you made. So your original choice and then “the road not taken” both seem to be equally likely. So for that junction both roads are at 50%.

But the road you take is windy and you encounter numerous junctions with each having 3 other alternative paths. Each one also has a stubborn local person. I think your next decision is inevitably going to be slightly biased by your previous choices. If you picked left the last time, you might then be tempted to pick the right turn on the following junction. You might mistakenly err on the side of caution and not pick the left path twice in a row. So the decision of the tourist/observer is not completely free to make a truly random choice on subsequent paths.

Maybe by always switching to the other path after talking to the local person, you as a deterministic agent might be able to counteract and overcome your own personal ignorance of the various probability fallacies. This could allow you to minimise the risk of going too far off track in terms of the junction analogy.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=b8DehsMIlkE

“I recommend that you take a look at the entry on "Relativism"...”
- magritte

Thanks. Yes I will have a read of it.



“Much of the human brain is arranged in a way that the right half of the brain controls the left half of the body and vice versa.”
https://www.essilorusa.com/newsroom/right-or-left-does-one-side-of-your-brain-control-your-vision

I remember when I was younger I had a fighter jet video game where you had to move the wheel scroller in the opposite direction to control the plane. It just reminded me of it when I mentioned the visual image being directed the other way towards the brain. Although I’m not too sure how much they’re related to each other!

https://howthingsfly.si.edu/flight-dynamics/roll-pitch-and-yaw

“But habitual use is not the only possibility. Inverting or not inverting may also involve differences in spatial perception and the interpretation of information on a screen. One theory involves how the player perceives their relationship with the character or vehicle they are controlling.”
https://www.google.ie/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/games/2020/feb/28/why-do-video-game-players-invert-the-controls

“The Arch itself obviously doesn't change in size. Depending upon how far away you are when you view it, however, it can appear to be very large or very small. Why exactly do objects appear to be smaller the farther away we are from them?

The answer lies in the concept of perspective and the difference between apparent size and actual size. These phenomena exist because of the optics of our eyes and how they process the rays of light that reflect off of objects so that we can see them.

For example, the actual size of the Arch doesn't change. It can be measured in meters or feet. Its apparent size, however — what we perceive its size to be — depends upon an angle, which can be measured in degrees.

The visual angle that determines apparent size can be thought of as the angle at the top of a triangle. The eye is the top of the triangle, and the bottom of the triangle is formed by the ends of the object you're looking at.

As an object gets closer, the visual angle increases, so the object appears larger. As the object moves farther away, the visual angle decreases, making the object appear smaller.”
https://wonderopolis.org/wonder/why-do-things-appear-smaller-the-farther-you-are-from-them

Isolating the variables is common technique in maths. So maybe to try to understand consciousness, what if you tried to keep the physical world stationary? We could then analyse the apparent motion of the observer. The only geometrical property that seems to change as you move is perspective. Is there anything more than meets the eye to this phenomenon?

“When you have an equation with one variable and you need to know the value of that variable, your task is to isolate the variable x. It’s called “isolating” because at the end of the process the variable is alone on one side of the equation (and we can see what it equals).

The basic technique to isolate a variable is to “do something to both sides” of the equation, such as add, subtract, multiply, or divide both sides of the equation by the same number. By repeating this process, we can get the variable isolated on one side of the equation. The trick is to know which operations to perform in which order.”
- gmatfree website




Could perspective be understood in terms of magnification? Instead of passively changing in size due to light intensity, the visual object would be actively magnified as it got closer to the observer. Therefore it would appear to demagnify and diminish in size as it moved away from the observer. Consequently the scale of the magnification would be irregular and it would depend on the distance to the person. The mass of the object remains the same.

“Magnification is the process of enlarging the apparent size, not physical size, of something.”
- Wikipedia

“Scale: The ratio of the length in a drawing (or model) to the length on the real thing”
- mathsisfun website

It would be hard to envision a world without perspective. Objects have to get smaller the further away you look. Otherwise your field of view would expand exponentially if external objects stayed the same size.

https://media.evolveconsciousness.org/2013/11/solipsism-all-about-me.jpg




“Consciousness is real. Of course it is. We experience it every day. But for Daniel Dennett, consciousness is no more real than the screen on your laptop or your phone.
The geeks who make electronic devices call what we see on our screens the "user illusion". It's a bit patronising, perhaps, but they've got a point.
Pressing icons on our phones makes us feel in control. We feel in charge of the hardware inside. But what we do with our fingers on our phones is a rather pathetic contribution to the sum total of phone activity. And, of course, it tells us absolutely nothing about how they work.
Human consciousness is the same, says Dennett. "It's the brain's 'user illusion' of itself," he says.”
- BBC

If consciousness were like an image on a screen, then what direction would this 2-dimensional screen be facing? Would it be an opaque screen? So the image we see is facing out towards the physical world. It would be in the opposite direction to the light we perceive.

Or if it was like a translucent screen the image would be in the same parallel direction to the incoming light. It would actually be facing inwards towards the brain.




https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=G0azrs_yPvg



“Emission theory or extramission theory (variants: extromission) or extromissionism is the proposal that visual perception is accomplished by eye beams emitted by the eyes. This theory has been replaced by intromission theory (or intromissionism), which states that visual perception comes from something representative of the object (later established to be rays of light reflected from it) entering the eyes. Modern physics has confirmed that light is physically transmitted by photons from a light source, such as the sun, to visible objects, and finishing with the detector, such as a human eye or camera...

While emission theory does not correctly explain vision, it does correctly describe the mechanism underlying echolocation and sonar. Namely, rays are emitted from the sensing organism or device, and information about the environment is inferred from the rays reflected back by objects.”
- Wikipedia

Physical photons convey the spatial qualities of an object. But colour seems to be internal; we can only observe our own sensation of colour. Could the image we see be multifaceted in having both physical and conscious features? If colour was projected outwards, would that have any testable predictions? The coloured image would then be magnified by the lens of the eye in the opposite direction to the rays of the incoming photons.

https://theswaddle.com/seeing-colors-when-eyes-closed-phosphenes/
https://blogs.transparent.com/german/the-german-colour-eigengrau/
https://d3jlfsfsyc6yvi.cloudfront.net/image/mw:1024/q:85/https%3A%2F%2Fhaygot.s3.amazonaws.com%3A443%2Fcheatsheet%2F11508.png

I’ll try to send those images again:

https://hardinthecity.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/pans-labyrinth-monster-creature-eyes-hands.jpg

https://education.abc.net.au/documents/10181/185971/Parrots-have-eyes-on-the-sides-of-their-heads.jpg/ae6c0be0-fe27-4070-9f85-65cbe948b2d9?t=1536045251796

IMG_2738.jpg

It sometimes feels as if our minds are located somewhere directly behind our eyes; that the nearby objects we see are closer to our locus of consciousness than those objects in the far periphery of our vision. Technically the sentient image we perceive begins in front of the eye at the near point of accommodation:
“In visual perception, the near point is the closest point at which an object can be placed and still form a focused image on the retina, within the eye's accommodation range. The other limit to the eye's accommodation range is the far point.”
- Wikipedia



But the entire depth of the visual 3-dimensional image is wholly and equally existent in our consciousness. The brain is obviously critically important to consciousness. But the fact it just so happens that our eyes are directly in front of the brain doesn’t itself translate to there being a spectrum of our consciousness receding out into the visual field. Objects that are located an intermediate length away from our physical body are not necessarily closer to our visual seat of consciousness than the distant objects we see. Our perception of all the entities in our vision might as well be silhouettes; we can’t escape our own mind.

Indeed other animals have eyes at the each side of their head. So where would they feel their sentience to be located?

IMG_9914.jpeg

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yNntDhr2n4g
- time 2:50 untill 5:45

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MMiKyfd6hA0

The objects illuminated by light get smaller the more further away from you they are. But would a photon itself obey perspective? If light causes perspective, does the light beam itself get smaller as it recedes into the distance? Would it have its own quantum meta-perspective? So if a photon occupied any sort of volume, that volume itself would remain the same size irrespective of the distance to the observer. But if it remained the same size, then wouldn’t it appear to increase in size relative to the diminished size of far away objects? It appears a bit circular if one tries to visualise a photon.

“ Science has taught us, against all intuition, that apparently solid things, like crystals and rocks, are really almost entirely composed of empty space. And the familiar illustration is the nucleus of an atom is a fly in the middle of a sports stadium, and the next atom is in the next sports stadium. So it would seem the hardest, solidest, densest rock is really almost entirely empty space, broken only by tiny particles so widely spaced they shouldn't count. Why, then, do rocks look and feel solid and hard and impenetrable? As an evolutionary biologist, I'd say this: our brains have evolved to help us survive within the orders of magnitude, of size and speed which our bodies operate at. We never evolved to navigate in the world of atoms. If we had, our brains probably would perceive rocks as full of empty space. Rocks feel hard and impenetrable to our hands, precisely because objects like rocks and hands cannot penetrate each other. It's therefore useful for our brains to construct notions like "solidity" and "impenetrability," because such notions help us to navigate our bodies through the middle-sized world in which we have to navigate.”
- Richard Dawkins TED talk

“In the allegory, Plato likens people untutored in the Theory of Forms to prisoners chained in a cave, unable to turn their heads. All they can see is the wall of the cave. Behind them burns a fire. Between the fire and the prisoners there is a parapet, along which puppeteers can walk. The puppeteers, who are behind the prisoners, hold up puppets that cast shadows on the wall of the cave. The prisoners are unable to see these puppets, the real objects, that pass behind them. What the prisoners see and hear are shadows and echoes cast by objects that they do not see...
Plato’s point: the general terms of our language are not “names” of the physical objects that we can see. They are actually names of things that we cannot see, things that we can only grasp with the mind.”
https://faculty.washington.edu/smcohen/320/cave.htm

If an astronaut on the moon could actually see the motion of the shadow on the moon’s surface from the small object on earth (Vsauce clip), could it be used in a similar way to a flag semaphore? The outline of the flag would be delineated by the shadow.

“Flag semaphore is the telegraphy system conveying information at a distance by means of visual signals with hand-held flags, rods, disks, paddles, or occasionally bare or gloved hands. Information is encoded by the position of the flags; it is read when the flag is in a fixed position.”
- Wikipedia

“If he were to run alongside it at just that speed, Einstein reasoned, he ought to be able to look over and see a set of oscillating electric and magnetic fields hanging right next to him, seemingly stationary in space.
Yet that was impossible. For starters, such stationary fields would violate Maxwell’s equations, the mathematical laws that codified everything physicists at the time knew about electricity, magnetism, and light... Worse, stationary fields wouldn’t jibe with the principle of relativity, a notion that physicists had embraced since the time of Galileo and Newton in the 17th century.”
- National Geographic

The physical photons seem to be travelling at a mind-boggling speed. But the actual sensation of colour appears boringly stuck to the object; be it stationary or moving.

Idiom:
“Like watching paint dry.”
- used to refer to an activity that you consider extremely boring.




“Your Color Red Really Could Be My Blue”
https://www.google.ie/amp/s/www.livescience.com/amp/21275-color-red-blue-scientists.html

The qualia of colour doesn’t seem to “jibe with” any metric of classical physics such as volume or weight. Two physically completely different objects may both have the same colour. So the different shades of wall paint seems to stubbornly defy our ordinary perception of physical reality. We can only conclude that the various colours are caused by the chemicals or dye in the paint. While the physical properties of colour can be distinguished by its wavelength, the sentient colour we perceive remains a dissatisfying mystery. The colours aren’t seemingly caused by objective dimensions such as mass or inertia.

“Brilliant White / Winter's Tale / Carraig Grey/ Goosewing / Blue Grey /Atlantic Way / Achill White / Cobblelock”
- a mocking Dulux Paint catalogue!




"If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?"
- Wikipedia

We can only see the colour of the outer surface area of the object. Visually speaking, the object might as well be hollow. Sorry to belabour this “philosophy of paint”, but would painting over a blue wall with yellow render that blue to be temporarily metaphysically nonexistent?





“Radar is a detection system that uses radio waves to determine the range, angle, or velocity of objects.”

“Two types of technology share the name "sonar": passive sonar is essentially listening for the sound made by vessels; active sonar is emitting pulses of sounds and listening for echoes.”

“Diffuse reflection is the reflection of light or other waves or particles from a surface such that a ray incident on the surface is scattered at many angles rather than at just one angle as in the case of specular reflection.”

What if one way of interpreting it would be as if the colour were the reflected echo of light? The real physical photons would then corresponded to the incident wave of light. So we wouldn’t directly perceive an object. It would be like we see the precise depth that’s between our eyes and then the border of the material substance. So our colour vision would essentially be equivalent to the shape of the empty space which encapsulates an object. So the irregular microscopic contours of the empty space that’s contiguous with the physical object would give rise to the image we see. The rough intricate boundaries of all of the chemicals on the outer surface of the object might reflect the light in different ways. This diffuse reflected light may produce something like a small interference pattern that we perceive as colour.
But I haven’t fully thought this through so I don’t know. I’m just putting it out there!

“The same is true for all of humankind. When you plop down in a chair or slink into your bed, the electrons within your body are repelling the electrons that make up the chair. You are hovering above it by an unfathomably small distance.”
https://futurism.com/why-you-can-never-actually-touch-anything

“They have no definite volume. This means that gases always spread out in all directions to fill the container into which they are placed. This spreading out of gases to fill all the available space is called diffusion.”
- exam learn website
(In this comparison colour would be like the complex nanoscopic boundary between the gas and the physical container.)

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JTvcpdfGUtQ

I’m not a mathematician but I might muse on the issue nonetheless! Can the lack of information inadvertently serve as information itself?
For instance in probability theory the likelihood of an event happening is calculated through the chance of it not happening:
Law of the complement: P(not A) = 1 - P(A).

Also consider prior knowledge, plans and arrangements. So two people could come close together and devise what actions are to be performed depending on the receiving of signals or the lack thereof. So when they are separated by a great distance, the absence of a certain signal could itself be interpreted as a cue to carry out a certain operation.

This might be a similar notion to something like cruise control:
“In control engineering a servomechanism, sometimes shortened to servo, is an automatic device that uses error-sensing negative feedback to correct the action of a mechanism.”
- Wikipedia



Dualism: “In the philosophy of mind, mind–body dualism denotes either the view that mental phenomena are non-physical, or that the mind and body are distinct and separable.”

If our perception of reality were like a closed system, would that resemble dualism? So our vision would be like a microcosm mimic of the actual physical reality. In a sense the brain is trapped inside the skull and it only interacts with the world through our different senses.

“A closed system is a physical system that does not allow transfer of matter in or out of the system, though, in different contexts, such as physics, chemistry or engineering, the transfer of energy is or is not allowed.”
- Wikipedia

I will just bounce around a few ideas so please correct me if I’m wrong. I haven’t fully researched it. Can the rotation about a point of a large irregular object result in something similar to gravity?

The Earth isn’t a perfect sphere. There are uneven parts (mountains, ocean trenches, rift valleys, etc.).
“Even though our planet is a sphere, it is not a perfect sphere. Because of the force caused when Earth rotates, the North and South Poles are slightly flat. Earth's rotation, wobbly motion and other forces are making the planet change shape very slowly, but it is still round.” -NASA website

But an irregular object has different velocities on the outer surface when rotating as centripetal acceleration is inversely proportional to the radius: ac=v2/r.

But would an object launched from such a large object be subject to Euler’s force:
“In classical mechanics, the Euler force is the fictitious tangential force that appears when a non-uniformly rotating reference frame is used for analysis of motion and there is variation in the angular velocity of the reference frame's axes.”
- Wikipedia

For example, an asteroid has an irregular shape.
“Asteroids, without artificial gravity, have relatively no gravity in comparison to earth.” - Wikipedia
If you jumped off a rotating asteroid you’d just fly straight up into space with the same circular speed of the asteroid. This is from the lack of external forces as seen in Newton’s first law. But if the asteroid had an atmosphere you’d be slowed down by the air resistance. So you’d no longer have the same centripetal speed as the asteroid and you’ll have a negative relative speed with the rough perimeter of the rotating asteroid. So instead of you going straight up into space, the sharp edged surface of the asteroid would catch up with you and then hit you. Would that scenario be similar to the effect of gravity? Instead of you falling down to the ground, the uneven ground actually goes upwards and hits you.
“Newton's first law of motion states that there must be a cause—which is a net external force—for there to be any change in velocity, either a change in magnitude or direction. An object sliding across a table or floor slows down due to the net force of friction acting on the object.” - khan academy

“Perpetual motion is the motion of bodies that continues forever. A perpetual motion machine is a hypothetical machine that can do work infinitely without an energy source.” -Wikipedia
Even though the solar system isn’t technically infinite in time, is it nearly like perpetual motion relative to us mortal beings? If one applies a planetary version of the anthropic principle instead of gravity, any large object that doesn’t conform to a steady orbit around the sun would have eventually collided with and been absorbed by other planets over a billion year time frame. Or else it would just hurtle off outside the solar system.
“The anthropic principle is the philosophical premise that any data we collect about the universe is filtered by the fact that, for it to be observable at all, the universe must have been compatible with the emergence of conscious and sapient life that observes it.” - Wikipedia

“The optics of the eye create a focused two-dimensional image of the visual world on the retina, which translates that image into electrical neural impulses to the brain to create visual perception.”
- Wikipedia

We are not conscious of photons themselves. Our vision doesn’t actually extend outward when we look at a distant object. Our brain can only sense the curved 2D surface of the retina through the optic nerve. The eyes are not telekinetic so the 2D image we detect seems to be retroactively rendered into 3 dimensions in our brain using depth perception cues.

Wikipedia: “In physics and cosmology, digital physics is a collection of theoretical perspectives based on the premise that the universe is describable by information. It is a form of digital ontology about the physical reality. According to this theory, the universe can be conceived of as either the output of a deterministic or probabilistic computer program, a vast, digital computation device, or a mathematical Isomorphism to such a device.”

“Inter process communication (IPC) is used for exchanging data between multiple threads in one or more processes or programs. The Processes may be running on single or multiple computers connected by a network.”
- guru99

If consciousness is entirely physical then it would seem like each person behaved as a parallel computer. The universe obeys deterministic laws so it’s as if our minds are concurrent computations within the supercomputer universe. But how can we be mutually aware of so many people in a large gathering at the same time?

I’m not a computer scientist but I understand there are limits as to how fast a parallel computer can communicate. So how do we communicate with each other in real-time? The communication seems external relative to me when I talk to someone. But isn’t it actually all internal communication from the standpoint of the universe itself? Our minds would be physical entities inside the physical universe.

There’s the problem of other minds as well. I can only infer that you’re conscious by your physical communication. I can’t sense you directly as if I meet someone the image I see of them itself exists within in my mind. We run into the same difficulties of conceptualising other people as we would inferring external objects:
“Another argument for the substance theory is the argument from conception. The argument claims that in order to conceive of an object's properties, like the redness of an apple, one must conceive of the object that has those properties.” - Wikipedia
“In general, knowledge of the external world is knowledge of the existence of a thing distinct from one’s mind.” - https://iep.utm.edu/locke-kn/

“Yes, I'm looking at you, looking at me, looking at you, looking at me, looking back at you.”
- Sammy Hagar

If my mind could directly observe another person’s mind there would be infinite regress as seen in the above quote. There would also be problems with identity as their mind would inherently become a subset of your own if you knew exactly how they felt.

Gnomon: “You may find that his "hidden realism" is similar to your own "mental" reality.”

Thank you for the links. Yes there perhaps exist a spectrum of views within anti-realism about the extent of the unreality.

“ “Artificial intelligence will never get jokes like humans do,” he told the Associated Press. The main problem, Hempelmann says, is that robots completely miss the context of humor. In other words, they do not understand the situation or related ideas that make a joke funny...

Puns are a kind of joke that uses a word with two meanings. For example, you could say, “Balloons do not like pop music.” The word “pop” can be a way of saying popular music; or, “pop” can be the sound a balloon makes when it explodes. But a robot might not get the joke. Tristan Miller says that is because humor is a kind of creative language that is extremely difficult for computer intelligence to understand...

Comedy, on the other hand, relies on things that stay close to a pattern, but not completely within it. To be funny, humor must also not be predictable, Bishop said. This makes it much harder for a machine to recognize and understand what is funny.”
- voanews

Does the tone of a person’s speech reveal the fact they are conscious more so than the actual content of what they are saying? There are so many subtle nuances of words in the English language that the meaning of a statement can change a lot depending on the context. There are just so many synonyms and “simply equivocal” or analogical terms. So I think being able to speak fluently inevitably means that they are sentient as they must be able to truly comprehend the dynamic meaning of the words and all of the word’s connotations. A robot wouldn’t be able to suss out the ambiguity of language. Of course we can sometimes tell the emotional state and intention of a person from their tone of voice. For instance, if they are serious or angry they might slightly raise their voice.

“However, even though the language is widely used, it’s not easy to learn. There are many confusing oddities such as homophones, homographs, homonyms, and inconsistent spellings that conspire to make English difficult to learn and easy to misunderstand... A bat can be a flying mammal or what you use to hit a baseball... There’s no shortage of examples of odd and curious inconsistencies with English.”
-owlcation

“Tactile experiments show that both pressure and temperature can influence the content of a dream. In a study conducted by Nielsen (1993), participants wore a pressure cuff on their leg while sleeping in the laboratory. During REM sleep, experimenters inflated the cuff to produce pressure on the leg and subsequently awoke participants for dream reports. The authors found several examples of leg pressure incorporated into dreams, sometimes in a subtle yet direct fashion (ie, tingling in the leg), and sometimes in a more elaborate fashion (ie, a dream sequence that involved paralysis of the leg, attempts to move the leg resulting in intense discomfort). Thus the physical sensation of pressure on the leg was incorporated in idiosyncratic ways, perhaps depending on the prior narrative of the dream or the quality of sleep.”
- Michelle Carr Psychology Today

I think the sense of touch is a very necessary but not entirely sufficient reason to conclude that the world is real. I think the sense of touch is a prerequisite as it would be very difficult to imagine reality without it having a tactile component. But one would need extra reasons to further validate the reality and consistency of the world. How can one infer that they weren’t still being deceived in a dream by tactile hallucinations?

“In addition, there has been considerable discussion of how touch and vision might differ in terms of their spatial features. Vision, it seems, provides a rich felt awareness of objects in a spatial field–an area where there are potential objects but where none currently reside (that is, we seem in vision to be able to see empty space). Touch, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to present features in this way. Instead, like audition, touch seems only to bring awareness of individual objects that each seem to occupy a specific location... When we press against a solid object, the resistance to our agential act of pressing gives our experience a more solid epistemic foundation than what we experience through the other sensory modalities. Only in touch do we seem to come into direct contact with reality, a reality that actively resists our voluntary actions.”
- Stanford website

“Now we look at both lines, noticing that since they are both pependicular to the mirror, they must be parallel to each other. Thus the distance from top to bottom on the object is the same as from top to bottom on the image. They're the same size!!

The image formed by a plane mirror is the same size as the object.

Why does the image look smaller, then, the further we go from a mirror? It's a simple matter of perspective. Something the same size, but further away, takes up a smaller angle of our vision. Therefore it seems to be smaller.”
- cbakken website

With regards 2D/3D space and perspective, I found an interesting and counterintuitive result on a Vsauce YouTube video. Plane mirrors don’t seem to have perspective despite looking equivalent to our reality. The explanation seems to revolve around similar triangles. The mirror surface itself gets smaller as we move away from it due to perspective. This appears to have a neutralising effect on the size of the image it produces.

It’s after time 4:20 on “Inside a Spherical Mirror”:
https://youtu.be/zRP82omMX0g

“The image will be inverted, reduced in size, and real. Quite conveniently, the cornea-lens system produces an image of an object on the retinal surface... Fortunately, the image is a real image - formed by the actual convergence of light rays at a point in space. Vision is dependent upon the stimulation of nerve impulses by an incoming light rays. Only real images would be capable of producing such a stimulation. Finally, the reduction in the size of the image allows the entire image to "fit" on the retina. The fact that the image is inverted poses no problem. Our brain has become quite accustomed to this and properly interprets the signal as originating from a right-side-up object.”
- physicsclassroom

While the image my mind perceives will have the identical quantitative dimensions that a camera would have, there still seems to be some qualia attached to our vision. A camera appears to pass on colour to our brain rather than being the source of the colour itself. A colour-blind person would see different colours when looking at the same camera screen or photograph. However, we’d both agree on the objective spatial and proportional features. What gives?

It seems subjectively inconceivable that the sentient contents of my visual system could themselves be projected onto a screen no matter what brain-scanning technologies one might have in the future. Might an upshot of this be that the real image our eyes receive must somehow be converted into a virtual image in the brain? That is to say an image which “cannot be projected onto a screen because the rays never really converge”. Phosphenes are incongruous entities: “an impression of light that occurs without light entering the eye and is usually caused by stimulation of the retina (as by pressure on the eyeball when the lid is closed).” The apparent irreducible and internal nature of phosphenes makes it hard to imagine them ever being by some means transplanted onto an external screen. Another person can’t see exactly that which I observe in my mind’s eye.

There's a lot of debate about chaos theory and free will; that chaos is still deterministic even if it's unpredictable. But obviously over larger time-scales it becomes even more unpredictable.

Likewise short-term behaviour (like whether I choose to lift my hand or not) might be completely deterministic. But perhaps there's scope for free will to act in a more gradual way that affects long-term memory and personality.

I agree that there can be more to the concept of God than meets our minds; there's a lot of mystery about reality. Certain ideals that we must strive for like mercy and goodness are indeed constant and unchanging. Perhaps there's even a timeless aspect to them.

But consciousness, at least in our first person point of view, is never static. So how does an unchangeable God perceive the world? I don't think reality unfolds to God vicariously like an ensemble cast movie.

Also, how does the theistic God find meaning in life Himself if everyone is just relying on Him to provide meaning for them? Is it a bit circular?

Crash 2005 trailer

I think Pantheism and Panentheism can be synergistic and complementary ideas. In a sense, Pantheism is a “subset” of Panentheism. This is because in both cases God interpenetrates the Universe and there would be an impression of connectedness. Panentheists merely believe that there is an additional element of God that is not captured in the Universe. So to a certain extent a belief in Panentheism “implies” Pantheism.

Subset: all elements of A are also elements of B.
Imply: if A is true, then B is also true.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_motion

I've been thinking a bit about dualism. If the mind is fundamentally and ontologically separate from the body, then how does relative motion occur between the mind and the physical world? If someone walks forward 10 meters in space, doesn't their sentient mind also move forward precisely 10 meters with their body? But in order for this corresponding relative motion to occur the mind would necessarily have to be part of the physical world. Only material objects can move relative to each other. Unless the locus of consciousness were somehow forever stationary; that the brain just relays signals to a static and unmoving mind. This would imply that the motion of the mind is illusory and that only the body moves. The mind would solely move through the dimension of time.

If all of our thoughts and actions were preprogrammed and merely passive responses to external causes, wouldn't one expect far more uniformity among people in general? Even if a supercomputer could mimic all of my behaviour, would it be able to copy other people's responses at the same time? We all seem to have a different 'operating system' in the sense that meeting one person is a qualitatively different experience to meeting another person. We have an ability to improvise and deal with uncertainty. There is so much diversity and contrast between people which seems beyond that possible than if our decisions were completely deterministic.

Randomness is unpredictable. — TheMadFool

I'm a compatibilist. I think free will might be a complex interplay of determinism, chaos and randomness.

The mind may well have both deterministic and random elements that counterbalance each other. For instance, lets think about cognitive dissonance. This sensation forces us to reconcile our actions with our thoughts. It's a stressful feeling. If one were to try to act on an evil thought that randomly pops into their head, they will be prevented from doing so by this stress reaction. Maybe this stress is deterministic in nature. So the randomness of our thoughts is counteracted by an instinctive feeling of stress and tension if we act against our true beliefs. This makes us responsible for our actions.

If hard determinism is true, then why can't we go on "autopilot" or "cruise control" and sleepwalk to where we need to get to? Consciousness must have a function.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/dont-delay/201106/free-wont-it-may-be-all-we-have-or-need

Perhaps your idea of self-restraint and frugality as an antidote to hedonism may provide a sort of veto power. We're not slaves to happiness and our emotions. This might provide a limited sort of freedom in and of itself.

"Determining the motion and position of every particle within the universe would allow you to predict the future of the Universe and everything inside of it"

- I don't think omniscience will ever be possible. The physical world is not self-aware so the particles themselves don't know what they're doing and are just passively responding to the various forces.

"power of a computer"

- But such a massive supercomputer would itself exist inside the universe and so in order to make predictions it would have to be simultaneously aware of every particle that constitutes this computer and every other particle in the universe. I don't think this would be possible at the same time.

Is there a degree of spontaneity in our interactions with other people? Even if my thoughts occurred deterministically, I obviously don't know what is happening in the mind's eye of other people. So even if my actions and your actions are physically deterministic, isn't there still an unpredictability in our social interactions? And the sheer number of people in the world makes it impossible to predict how the future will play out. There is just so much chance and randomness involved in our mutual communication.

Free will perhaps exists on a spectrum as we stress over some decisions more than others. So doing something trivial like choosing between different options on a dinner menu may be more of a subconsciously automated choice based on your taste buds. But then a more significant decision such as what subject to study in college requires more deliberation and stress to freely weigh up the pros and cons. Sometimes we are forced to randomly choose the least worst option. On other occasions when we are rushed we might take risks to avoid analysis paralysis. So how free a decision is may vary.

If consciousness has no causal role and is merely epiphenomenal, what is the point of the experience of pain? Why would our brains be "programmed" to feel pain if it has no causal function and everything is simply deterministic?

"When I look at the sky, the sky I see is inside my head. This means that my skull must be beyond the sky!"
- Lehar

Superdeterminism: "not only is our behaviour determined, but it is determined precisely in such a way as to prevent us from seeing that the world is deterministic".

So are you saying our own thoughts and judgements are not real; perhaps they are deterministic and not truly our own? That brings up the problem of free will. Perhaps the different issues in consciousness are related. Must an antirealist also be a determinist? It's a big topic.

The mind is still mysterious. It gets deceived while dreaming but then dreams are also mysterious. The external world can only be inferred from one's perception of it.

"Even if I happen to be a brain in a vat at this moment—all my memories are false; all my perceptions are of a world that does not exist—the fact that I am having an experience is indisputable (to me, at least). This is all that is required for me (or any other conscious being) to fully establish the reality of consciousness. Consciousness is the one thing in this universe that cannot be an illusion."
- Sam Harris