“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://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”

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” — Michael McMahon

Or perhaps
a: conditions of the universe must allow at least one universe
b: Given this universe, such as it is, it is inevitable that bacteria exist

An epistemic argument can be formulated that only the Earth hosts intelligent life. If there ever was any other intelligent life we will never know due to the limitations on transmission of information from the cosmological past even with whatever technology we might develop in the future short life span of humanity.

In other words, bacterial life is just about certain, but if we can't discover extraterrestrial intelligence soon we never will.

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.

There’s no perspective in absolute time and space.

“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.

“Epiphenomenalism is the view that mental events are caused by physical events in the brain, but have no effects upon any physical events. Behavior is caused by muscles that contract upon receiving neural impulses, and neural impulses are generated by input from other neurons or from sense organs. On the epiphenomenalist view, mental events play no causal role in this process.”
-Stanford

Consciousness is invisible in the brain. But I don’t believe that makes free will redundant. There are examples of motionless physical systems where there’s still plenty of forces and potential energy. This happens in a state of equilibrium. Maybe whatever way consciousness operates it must always counterbalance itself. The “moments” of the sentience lever in the brain somehow neutralise themselves. That process would make it undetectable.

“In classical mechanics, a particle is in mechanical equilibrium if the net force on that particle is zero. By extension, a physical system made up of many parts is in mechanical equilibrium if the net force on each of its individual parts is zero.”
-Wikipedia

“A moment is the turning effect of a force.”
-BBC

“An object can store energy as the result of its position. For example, the heavy ball of a demolition machine is storing energy when it is held at an elevated position. This stored energy of position is referred to as potential energy.”
- physicsclassroom

I’ve already commented on illusory motion. Let’s elaborate on this virtual-reality headset comparison. Consciousness would remain in the same location while the body moves in different directions and the head rotates. In the same vein we can’t move to light speed because consciousness doesn’t even move to begin with.

That is to say light would seem to move at a constant speed irrespective of the illusory speed of the observer in a virtual reality setting.

https://www.thoughtco.com/thmb/i69TjbVjLXGiSRQo37rY1ILxbV4=/1005x1005/smart/filters:no_upscale()/brain_senses-56ccf48f5f9b5879cc5ba0e6.jpg
“The stimuli from each sensing organ in the body are relayed to different parts of the brain through various pathways. Sensory information is transmitted from the peripheral nervous system to the central nervous system. A structure of the brain called the thalamus receives most sensory signals and passes them along to the appropriate area of the cerebral cortex to be processed.”
https://www.thoughtco.com/five-senses-and-how-they-work-3888470

With the mind-body problem, what would happen if we divided the mind further? Your sense of touch would then exist inside your body throughout the peripheral and central nervous systems. Could we say that the qualia of vision are actually located outside of your body? Everything we see is really within our own consciousness. Although we can’t volitionally change what we see owing to subconscious factors and neurological mechanisms in the visual cortex. We aren’t telekinetic over objects in our visual system as light isn’t wholly material or tactile. This non-real interpretation would be as if external vision is a 2D projection screen while internal touch is 3-dimensional. Altogether one could view the mind and its different senses to be existent both inside and outside your sentient perception of your own head.

“the speed of light = 299 792 458 m / s”

Not only are we unable to physically move our body anywhere close to light speed, but light moves so fast that in a philosophical sense our speed is almost negligible in comparison. Even when we are moving in a plane we are essentially stationary relative the extreme speed of light.

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/4e/82/27/4e822700f45f09dd4b44857bdc572add.jpg

Even a fighter pilot breaking the sound barrier might as well be travelling at 0m/s relative to how much faster the plane has fly to get to light speed. Might our locus of consciousness be motionless with respect to the objects in our visual surroundings?

I was referring to metaphysical antirealism which is the idea that "nothing exists outside the mind"

Solipsism is the general term for this I believe.

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

I used to buy this, even though I had done a neuroscience degree for undergrad, which should have made me skeptical of this claim. What is conciousness? If you damage areas of the occipital lobe you can not only destroy vision, but the ability to imagine it, even in people who previously had sight. In someone who has had the major connections between both halves of their brain removed, you can get two distinct answers for what their ideal career is, one from each side of the brain. The sensation of volition when you decide to intentionally make any movement comes after the action has started. The sensation of volition itself can be damaged, so that the movement of leaves in a breeze around you can seem an extension of concious will. The qualia that make up conciousness seem to be fairly illusionary, distinct (not part of any comprehensive whole), and our perception of conciousness itself something retroactively fitted together.

In the cases of ego loss under nitrous or salvia I've had, I think I could still talk about experiencing, experiencing purely in the sense of some sort of loose cascade of qualia, but not of any I observing it as a being that could declare that something exists. If you keep upping the volume of gas in the blood, you get anesthesia, medically, the lack of conciousness, but there is no hard dividing line between the states.

The fact that we don't actually know how anesthesia works, and the reason it is so hard to determine the physical correlates of conciousness, to me, speaks to conciousness as a compound thing, and one that is likely far more illusionary and fleeting than we generally suspect.

An antirealist is "a person who denies the existence of an objective reality". — Michael McMahon

It's probably been touched on somewhere in this thread no doubt but where does someone who thinks the person or person(s) even if it is the majority or whole of society is.. I dunno, just wrong lol, fit in?

Happened before, geocentrism. Every person would have called Copernicus an "anti-realist", whereas in reality, he was surrounded by not just a society but an entire world of them. What of that?

Bah, either way. Raising a glass right now to the original conspiracy theorist, Copernicus! Or so we're told... :grin:

https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/b/meadow-hillside-near-forest-night-tall-grass-mountain-top-coniferous-full-moon-light-57277297.jpg

Light is indeed necessary to discern colour. But does that mean light and colour are identical properties? A tentative analogy would be the outside light acting as more of a medium for colour qualia within the brain. We can’t see the green sensation of grass at night unless there’s a streetlight. Grass exists as an external physical object with mass. But we’re also accustomed to the colour green being an inherent property of the grass even though we can’t see it through the darkness. Is the sentient shade of green still there even when there’s no reflecting light being shone on it? In this way light would apparently reduce the opaqueness of night; the green colour would just be hidden and muffled behind the dark blackness. The colour black is still perhaps an active colour of consciousness qualia. This is despite it being caused by the lack of light and physically passive in nature.

The imagery of dreams are still in colour without any actual light.

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

See Scientific Realism.

Seems to me, the main premise of “anti-realism” is, as it’s been expressed in the O.P., self-contradictory.

For if by “objective,” it’s meant (as it would quite plainly) “not-subjective,” that is, not determined by any subject, then the very premise itself is self-defeating. For if this is a fact, it must be so independently of any subject’s determination, i.e., it mustn’t be dependent on any subject’s determination; & therefore it must be an objective fact (an “objective” fact, as in a fact that’s not determined by any subject), & so is objectively real, an objective reality.

“Your Color Red Really Could Be My Blue”

Lets revisit that question to explore each option in the sample space.

1: My blue and your blue are very different.
This reminds me of people with colour blindness who perceive colours differently. If this were metaphysically true then we’d all be living in visually different unreal realities.

2: My blue is similar to your blue.
We have the same eye anatomy and brain physiology which might imply that we’re seeing the same approximate sensation of colour. Perhaps we might be seeing slightly different shades though. Therefore our different visions are based on the same objective physical world.

3: My blue is literally the exact same as your blue.
We not only agree on the names of the colours but also the identity of the in-between shades of different colours. Mixing yellow and red still produces the same secondary colour of orange for everyone. So maybe we’re in fact all seeing the very same subjective visual qualia. The only difference would be the geometrical angle from each of our perspectives. Consequently colour would somehow be part of a shared subconscious vision. Colour is seemingly part of an external world in our collective psyche even though it might not have a basis in the actual physical world. So we’d all be living in visually the same unreal reality.

https://www.radicalcentristmichael.com/post/anti-realism
I wrote a small overview of this thread on that webpage.

https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-keqS7UBoFJs/T0A_jkBAZWI/AAAAAAAAAHk/4GCpseGixBI/s400/homunculus1.jpg
It might be easier for a 2D visual system to fit inside the biological brain instead of a 3D microcosm of the world.



https://www.av8n.com/physics/scaling.htm
Objects get smaller due to perspective. The object itself is internally foreshortened. Our subconscious can glean the ratio between the approximate area of the front plane compared to the backward extent of the object. This represents a scaling law of surface area to volume which could be used to infer depth. Perspective affects the shape of an object unequally which can be indicator of distance. Perspective would be like a passive force within our sense of vision.

A TV programme looks 3D without any other proprioceptive eye cues. We simply rely on familiar size, perspective and scaling laws to view an ordinary 2D television screen image as appearing 3D. Could our own perception of external reality be a visual 2D representation of 3D tactile world?



There are lots of other depth signals:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depth_perception

“Convergence: This is a binocular oculomotor cue for distance/depth perception. Because of stereopsis the two eyeballs focus on the same object. In doing so they converge.”
-Our 2 eyes can be slightly angled inwards which helps parallax.

“Texture: Fine details on nearby objects can be seen clearly, whereas such details are not visible on faraway objects.”
- Another factor could be that the angle of central vision covers a larger area ratio against outer peripheral vision the more further out we look. We can focus on a skyscraper from a long distance away with it being equally blurry while only a small segment of it becomes much sharper as we approach closer to it.

It could be that depth perception occurs subconsciously rather than consciously because we’re relying on multiple depth cues together at once. We don’t have to depend on only one in particular.

This would help explain why a 2D visual reality could appear vividly 3D.

“The uncertainty principle... (is where) the position and the velocity of an object cannot both be measured exactly, at the same time, even in theory. The very concepts of exact position and exact velocity together, in fact, have no meaning in nature.

Ordinary experience provides no clue of this principle. It is easy to measure both the position and the velocity of, say, an automobile, because the uncertainties implied by this principle for ordinary objects are too small to be observed... Only for the exceedingly small masses of atoms and subatomic particles does the product of the uncertainties become significant.”
http://abyss.uoregon.edu/~js/21st_century_science/lectures/lec14.html

“In the philosophy of time, presentism is the belief that neither the future nor the past exists.
The opposite of presentism is 'eternalism', which is a belief in things that are past and things that are yet to come exist eternally.”
- science daily

“When an object moves toward the observer, the retinal projection of an object expands over a period of time, which leads to the perception of movement in a line toward the observer. Another name for this phenomenon is depth from optical expansion.”
- Wikipedia depth perception




With regard to quantum theories of consciousness, I think it’s intuitively easier to tell the position of the object rather than the velocity. Distant airplanes occasionally look to be travelling slowly in the sky because of the vast and still blue sky background. Normally we seem to know more about position than speed. We don’t have a photographic memory so we often can’t accurately weigh up the different locations for the moving object to determine it’s speed (speed = distance divided by time). We can use visual depth perception to instinctively know the location of the object relative to its surroundings. Therefore if consciousness has to compromise a variable in the uncertainty principle, it might be the velocity component. If the present moment passed by instantly, we’d still know a lot about the relative locations of objects even though our awareness of motion might be undermined. If the present moment was somehow stretched and elongated like a time-lapse video, we’d instead be more attuned to the various velocities and motion blurs.

https://ak.picdn.net/shutterstock/videos/5780483/thumb/1.jpg

“The thing that defines a panoramic image is the ratio. Like I said earlier the thing that makes an image a panorama is the fact that ratio of the image is wider (or taller) than the standard ratio given by your camera.”
- improve photography

“Aspect ratio describes the relationship of an image’s width to its height...
Through most of motion-picture history, directors have preferred frames that are wider than they are tall. Wide-screen formats can occupy a viewers’ whole field of vision, immersing them in vast landscapes, great battles and elaborate musical numbers. “We have two eyes side by side on our heads,” editor and colorist Gerry Holtz notes. “You see wider than you do tall, so it feels more natural to watch something in a wider format.”
- adobe

Does normal eye vision have its own natural aspect ratio? As already discussed, objects get smaller the more further away they are from us due to perspective. But this applies not just to those items directly in front of us but in all of the 360 degree orientations around us and equally so in the vertical plane. For instance, distant objects will also be smaller in the sideways and diagonal directions. We observe the world at head height and most things are below us at ground level. So maybe the brain could weigh up the varying aspect ratios of items in a 2D visual scene to ascertain depth perception.

Another general discussion of this:
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-aspect-ratio-of-human-vision

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

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




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





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





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

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

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





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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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