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

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

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

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

My updated blog intro:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Michael McMahon,

Antirealism may be understood in both the ontological and the epistemic sense.

The belief that nothing material exists outside the mind is the ontological antirealism usually associated with Berkeley.

The belief that physical things do exist outside the mind but are completely unknowable as they really are, constitutes the epistemic antirealism of Immanuel Kant.

The Kantian view includes the following ideas:

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

(2) Time and space are pure creations of the mind and are not real in themselves.

(3) It is impossible to compare a thing real in itself with any impression gained through the senses. All we can do is compare one such impression with another. Therefore, we are incapable of knowing a truth corresponding to reality. We can only know what is real to us (that is, what humanity experiences as real.)

(4) However, the mind can derive new concepts from a priori concepts rooted in definitions of things. Such new concepts are both “a priorl “and “synthetic” (derivative). Thus, the definition of a circle is a priori but not synthetic. However, pi is both. All of science and metaphysics come within the realm of synthetic a priori judgments. But the latter exist solely in the mind and are not real in themselves.

(5) Thus, sensory experience is “objective” only in the sense that it is taken as real by all mankind and not because it gives us a window to a world independent of our thoughts.

The above little summary hardly does justice to the richness of Kant’s philosophy. One can only hope that it provides at least a basic understanding of his thinking.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Because of the Doppler shift, as a moving source approaches a stationary observer, the observed frequency is higher than the source frequency. The faster the source is moving, the higher the observed frequency."
https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-osuniversityphysics/chapter/17-8-shock-waves/

What if an atom were like a tachyonic shock wave? Does a mushroom cloud from a nuclear weapon resemble a massive shock wave like the way a small fighter jet creates a cloud breaking the sound barrier? The nucleus would be like the top of the shock wave with the electrons being similar to a compression wave.


Nuclear Explosion


Sonic Boom

Michael McMahon,

Kant, if he were still alive, might ask the following questions:

Do atoms, electrons, photons and electromagnetism exist independently of the mind or are they pure creations of the mind?

If the former, how do you know?

If we were a species without senses would we be capable of science?

Can things dependent on the senses in the first place (such as science) be properly used to establish the veracity of the senses?

Is it possible to establish what you have called the “present time” other than by agreement?

Can the present time exist independently of the mind? If so, how?

Do atoms, electrons, photons and electromagnetism exist independently of the mind or are they pure creations of the mind? — Neri

My brain is far more complicated than the thoughts popping into my mind. Likewise the unconscious mind could be more complex than our immediate consciousness. Photons and electrons are highly intricate but then again so is biological evolution. What if my mind doesn't create my coloured impression of photons but rather it could be the other way round where photons through my unconscious constructs my conscious mind.

"Dr. Lanza says the problem is we have everything upside down. He takes the common assumption that the universe led to the creation of life and argues that it's the other way around: that life is not a byproduct of the universe, but its very source. Or put another way, consciousness is what gives rise to our sense of there being an "out there" when, in fact, the world we experience around us is actually created in our consciousness."
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/biocentrism-rethinking-time-space-consciousness-and-the-illusion-of-death-1.3789414

If the former, how do you know? — Neri

If we see a nuclear explosion we've a very limited ability to change our visual perception. A colour-blind person would see the blast in colours other than my own. But if I'm close to the epicentre of the bomb then no matter what my perception of it is or whether I even see it at all, I'll still be killed by the blast. Altering my perception won't alter the objectivity of the event. This implies there's some shared reality that's beyond our control. It doesn't necessarily prove that my consciousness is equivalent to my disintegrated, radiated body since that's a question of life-after-death.

It's possible to interpret the sense of touch as being entirely proprioceptive and internal. When you touch a hand railing on the street then the tactile sensation would solely be the pressure and movement of your own skin rather than the external resistance of the metal. In this way your vision doesn't have to directly correspond to a physical entity.


Vsauce - You Can't Touch Anything

Spinning around and getting dizzy is a way to imagine gravity as a Euler force where the height of moving objects becomes unfocused and intermingled.

"To cut right to the chase: the viewing experience that you have with a curved television isn't much different from what you're used to. Rtings states that you only notice the outer curve when you're watching TV from an angle. The image quality deteriorates faster on the side of the screen that you're closest to. 4K claims that the ideal viewing angle is between -35 and +35 degrees. A curved TV stretches reflections. You're more likely to experience this with a glossy screen and dimmed or bright lights." (coolblue)


Our vision isn't completely 2D in that we have peripheral vision beyond 180 degrees. It might be more accurate to say we were looking at a visual screen that's mostly flat but with a slightly curved and blurry edge. We alone are the only ones who can see our own vision and therefore the curved screen won't impinge on the view of a conscious mind that isn't directly behind the eyes.


"A normal visual field for a person covers 170 degrees around, while peripheral vision covers 100 degrees of this field... The peripheral visual field for humans extends 100° horizontally, 60° medially, 60° upward, and 75° downward... (Far-Peripheral Vision: Beyond 60° till 100° to 110° of the visual field.
Mid-Peripheral Vision: Beyond 30° but limited to 60° of the visual field. Near-Peripheral Vision: Beyond 18° till 30° of the visual field.)" - iris vision

"Humans have a slightly over 210-degree forward-facing horizontal arc of their visual field (i.e. without eye movements), (with eye movements included it is slightly larger, as you can try for yourself by wiggling a finger on the side), while some birds have a complete or nearly complete 360-degree visual field. The vertical range of the visual field in humans is around 150 degrees." wiki

If our visual perception was oriented more in one half of the brain than the other, it'd still have to be projected to our conscious mind in a way that's perpendicular so that the curved viewing experience isn't deteriorating on one side faster than the other.

Further objects are seen as higher than closer objects even if they're on level ground due to the apparent rise of the ground when it's viewed from head height. The ground would appear to rise in all directions around you when it's interpreted like a 2D screen. When you look down a hill, the bottom of it will still be higher than the ground in front of you relative to the lower part of the eye.


Nadal vs Djokovic - Roland Garros (French Open 2012) - Long Rally

(Nadal in red will be seen as being higher than Djokovic on the TV screen due to the raised camera angle where the court would appear to be slanting downwards.)

If our view of the ground is obstructed we can still use the slope of the floor in front of us to project in our imagination how far it'd take for the slope to reach the height of the object in the distance if we know both are on the same horizontal ground level.

"Science currently knows of no causal mechanism or connection whatsoever that explains how firing neurons cause conscious experiences, or vice versa. For example, how does a network of firing neurons cause our experience of the color red, or the taste of chocolate? No one knows."
https://www.thymindoman.com/the-mysticism-of-the-hard-problem-of-consciousness/

Why do we find sweets sweet? One reason might be because a strawberry jelly isn't actually as sweet as a strawberry itself. A strawberry is very sweet and sugary but we don't find it as consistently tasty because the strawberry is sweet to a fault such that it's actually a bit sharp. So by reducing the extreme sweetness of a strawberry fruit, the jelly will make it less intense and therefore less sharp and easier to focus on. I remember eating pineapple and thinking that the fruit is really sweeter than any sweet but it was actually so sweet that it had a difficult and overwhelming aftertaste. I had to take my time eating it where I took a little break after each bite. Other examples would be how slightly reddish blackberries can sometimes taste sweeter than ripe ones and how older milk can taste creamier than a fresh carton. We enjoy granulated sugar added to desserts but eating a spoon of sugar by itself is too repetitive and dry; it's as if the sugar counteracts the extreme taste of certain foods to make them more familiar. I once got vegetable-flavoured jellies and found them to be a milder and more tolerable taste than the vegetables themselves even though I didn't find them sweet in a traditional sense. Another time I over-indulged at a vending machine by buying a big packet of highly-sugared sour strings and it would've been inedible had the sugar not opposed the sour interior which almost made me squeal. It's strange that I can eat melted cheese or really plain cheese and yet I dislike any intense-flavoured cheese; the constituent nutrients are similar but the taste isn't where a little ingredient can make all the difference. If taste itself is conscious and unreal then we could say the more we can focus on the taste the more pleasurable it will be since the sensation is unquantifiable. When we feel full we become distracted by our stomach and abdominal heaviness where we can no longer fully concentrate on the taste. This is why mindfulness retreats can emphasise eating basic foods like porridge very slowly so that we can appreciate the sweetness of a mundane and healthy cereal. Chocolate is actually a very repetitive taste where all the different brands don't taste as different from each other compared to the world of difference in taste between an apple and an orange. We could say that the boring taste of chocolate is surprisingly tasty in that it's easier to digest than the monotonous taste of healthier food like potatoes. So it's possible that chocolate could inoculate us to more filling foods even though it'd be healthiest not to need the chocolate in the first place.

The photons we see with our eyes are quantum entities and the tactile sense is ultimately based on innumerable collections of atoms. Therefore our perception of the world has quantum components to it which then gets translated into nerve impulses. Even if the nerve impulses deep in the brain don't display quantum superpositions it's still the case that the very first impulse from the sense organ was quantum mechanical in some way. Our retinas must be able to distinguish between the different wavelengths of photons.

"We don't actually have any experimental evidence that relevant quantum superpositions are involved in decision making in the brain. They may be but we've got no um evidence. That's a controversy whether something at the quantum level really has any impact and most of my neuroscience friends would say that to talk about the quantum events is such an order of magnitudes different than what happens at the core of of brain activity which is the neuron that (it )doesn't make sense. I actually have a different issue that if quantum is involved quantum is more of a random process and randomness doesn't seem like free will any more than determinism seems like free will. If quantum processes are relevant in decision making which some people have postulated, (then) we don't at the moment know what those processes are and we don't have any account or very much data.

I don't think about what they would be but let's just suppose for the sake of discussion that new and better empirical evidence comes along one day. How would that help with free will? Well you might say the fact that this quantum indeterminism means that (there) could be... If you replace a sort of previous 19th century rigid determinism; if you were to say that this excluded free will which not everybody would say but if you did say that and then you said ah we're now going to replace that with quantum randomness (then) that might make me freer but i don't think it makes me any more responsible. So it doesn't help with this aspect of responsibility. So I have to admit that I believe in the bottom of my soul that i am responsible for my choices and that's how i live my life."
Andrew Briggs - Physics of Free Will

One way to think of it is that when we close our eyes we see dark phosphenes and that when we open our eyelids we see the exact same phosphenes except that they're instantly rearranged by the incoming photon signals. Black contains all colours. To change our gaze to different objects we can alter the colours we choose to focus on rather than simply their shapes.

"Rather than simply sending single photons toward a volunteer’s eye through either the left or the right fiber, the idea is to send photons in a quantum superposition of effectively traversing both fibers at once. Will humans see any difference?"
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-human-eye-could-help-test-quantum-mechanics/

Ion: "an atom or molecule with a net electric charge due to the loss or gain of one or more electrons."

Not only are biological cells made of chemicals but any ion is inherently quantum mechanical in that the charge relates to a quantum mechanical electron. For instance ions are used in photosynthesis in plants.

"To replace the electron in the reaction center, a molecule of water is split. This splitting releases an electron and results in the formation of oxygen (O2) and hydrogen ions (H+) in the thylakoid space. Technically, each breaking of a water molecule releases a pair of electrons, and therefore can replace two donated electrons."
https://courses.lumenlearning.com/wm-nmbiology1/chapter/the-light-dependent-reactions-of-photosynthesis/

How do drugs affect our emotions? A drug like alcohol is more than a placebo in that it has an intense and immediate effect on our state of mind. Alcohol might relax our muscles and so maybe the relaxed muscles would subconsciously remind us of previous times the muscles had the same tone. That way a drug doesn't have to directly affect our emotions. It could do so by altering our memory. For example decaffeinated coffee doesn't contain the drug that helps us stay alert but it can nonetheless be associated with decreased sleepiness if it's taken too late. This might be because the mere taste of coffee by itself can still trigger memories of an alert state of mind from previous caffeine intakes.

Yet another version of anti-realism could be that empty space is 3D and objects are 2D. In this frame of mind objects in our vision would be separated from each other by real space, floor depth and air even though the objects themselves would have no internal depth. Therefore perspective of faraway objects could be reduced in that a reduction in surface area would be offset by the lack of internal volume. A simile for this idea would be that light moves like it were traversing through three dimensions while each solid object we see is like a separate 2D hologram. Our consciousness would extend outwards ever so slightly in our visual perception to create a hollow sense of depth.

Numb - OFFICIAL TRAILER

An interesting movie about feeling detached from life. When we're knocked off our intended path or fail certain ambitions in life and are left confused about our future then it's probably possible to feel separated from any aspect of ourselves; be it our past memories, our awareness of other people, our own emotions or even our time perception.

I sometimes make these embarrassing arithmetic mistakes where I don't know whether to include the first or last item. For instance I was on an internet thread where my first post was 127 and then there were two other posters. Therefore I momentarily thought my second post would be number 129 since 7+2=9. However to my surprise it was post 130. This is because it's the third post after when you exclude my first post. Or else how 6+4 is 10 even though 6 to 10 contains 5 separate numbers when you include the number 6. I often made the same mistake when I used the printer where I'd try to predict the pages only to find that I'd come out wrong. There can be a slight discrepancy when we translate pure maths into real life intuition! The equations are watertight but it's up to us to first form those equations! For example it’s counterintuitive how the 18th century is for the 1700s and not the 1800s!

If consciousness is fundamental then it might be computationally simpler for evolution to create a conscious being rather than a philosophical zombie. Evolution will choose the most efficient operating system so to speak. However we know that the brain is one of the most convoluted computers in the universe which would appear to serve as contradictory evidence. Perhaps we could say that if consciousness were a total mystery then there might be ways that the mind is actually easier to construct for a biological organism if only we had a more complete theory of computation. For example a new maths chapter always looks intimidatingly complicated but when you study it then it becomes quite intuitive. Perhaps future generations might be able to say the same about the brain once they get their heads around the hard problem of consciousness. The complexity of the brain would then be an illusion akin to the chaotic residue of conscious decision-making. If a computer could find a way to tap into conscious energy then maybe the development of a conscious being might be quite straightforward. For instance the brain becomes more complex when a child grows into an adult. However it doesn't change into a drastically unrecognisable form even though the mindset of an adult is unrecognisable to the mind of a child. In other words the mind changes more than the brain when we grow older. By contrast a computer might have to totally reconfigure the hardware in order to double the capacity of the software.

"90% of Brain Growth Happens Before Kindergarten"
https://www.firstthingsfirst.org/early-childhood-matters/brain-development/

https://www.closertotruth.com/series/consciousness-fundamental

If every neuron has been damaged at least once throughout the entire history and catalogue of brain injuries, then consciousness can't be dependent on any solitary neuron.

I often find dreams with a theme of outer space to be really mystical. For example someone could have a dream where they're floating between stars. Then when you awaken it almost feels like your perception of the night sky is internal.