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

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

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

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

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

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


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

Hoffman is a quack from what I gather on his book and from the science community not to mention we wildly misunderstands the concepts he uses for his arguments.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

Doesn't sound like a great way of understanding perception since you are essentially arguing that reality isn't real, which then makes one wonder why they should take you seriously and what you are trying to get at. This can be extended further to who are you saying all of this too if you are arguing against reality.

Sounds like a waste of time to me, also your evidence so far does not support anti realism either.

But again, a waste of time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not what I am getting at by any stretch but ok.

You say your reality is real to you but how do you know? I mean anti realism would be against such a claim. Some one's consciousness not existing in your reality is just a belief though, not a fact.

I can’t directly see what it’s like to be someone else but we can obviously still infer each other’s sentient existence through the other person’s corporeal body and brain. — Michael McMahon

No you can't.

One way of thinking about it is that we’ve a shared physical, spatial reality but we occupy different timelines. — Michael McMahon

This not only makes no sense in that there is no such thing as timelines but there is no evidence for it.

Maybe time and space are subjectively completely separate dimensions. “Spacetime” (the simultaneous experience of both space and time) would then be unique to each observer. I can more easily imagine time existing without space than I can think of space existing without time. So I think time is intrinsically more associated with pure consciousness while the coordinates and dimensions of space are more physical in nature. — Michael McMahon

No such thing as pure consciousness either. And time and space are not separate dimensions but one field.

So with all that dismantled I still have to ask on anti-realism, what's the point? Your argument amount to little more than shooting yourself in the foot.

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

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

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

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

Seems to me that much of this discussion is based on a misapprehension of what antirealism means. — Banno
What I’m trying to say is that our perception doesn’t literally have to be “real” even though it’s based on a real outside world. — Michael McMahon

When someone takes you seriously enough to critique what you say you should not just flippantly repeat what you're trying to say. Assume that the critique is valid and see where you went wrong. Else forget philosophy and take up tennis or something.

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

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


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

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





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

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





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

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




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

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

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





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

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

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

Again, still not answering my question. I've already told you that anti realism is a philosophy that shoots itself in the foot just like solipsism.

Antirealism is not a competing religion. There are different types realism each of which can be affirmed by that type of realist and denied by the corresponding antirealist. For example,

our perception doesn’t literally have to be “real” even though it’s based on a real outside world — Michael McMahon

those represent two different types of possible realism, either perception is real or the outside world is real, and an antirealist can deny either one or both, all will prove to be philosophically valid though incommensurate, and each of these can be scientifically useful in some applications. Then there is this,

Feminist postmodernism rejects traditional conceptions of universal or absolute objectivity and truth — Michael McMahon

reads as though they accept some objectivity such as their own views being consistent, but not "traditional" absolute objectivity and truth by correspondence.

Beginners are taught objective forehand, backhand, and serving grips for tennis shots. Advanced players extend their repertoire to a half-dozen or more that then they can objectively discuss. But pros are antirealists, they can and will use any grip for any shot depending of what they are trying to accomplish with the results being magical or circus shots as seen by a knowledgeable spectator.

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

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

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

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

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

I feel like I don't have to explain how nonsensical that claim is. You can see the same objects I see and vice versa, this is easy to demonstrate. Experience is not abstract though.

Also no, you can't interpret mind, however mind is still not abstract either. You can't relate to my emotions either, anger is different to each person same with sadness and love. I've never fallen in love so your words mean nothing to me if you did, assuming you have a mind.

Still I ask what is the point of all this? You aren't really talking with people on here, You're just waiting for them to finish saying something so that you can talk. I asked what is the point of all this and you haven't said anything. I've told you anti-realism is a self sabotaging philosophy but you don't address that problem. The people cited here (like the author of the case against reality) aren't credible sources (especially him, anyone endorsed by Deepak Chopra is a red flag).

So I'll ask you again, what exactly is the point of all this? It sounds like mental masturbation and nothing more.

Antirealism is not a competing religion. — magritte

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

mind is still not abstract — Darkneos

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

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

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

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

Again, way to avoid answering the question.

Consciousness is not a mystery as we know it to be made by the brain. The mind does not exist. But no, consciousness is only a mystery to those who still want it to be.

I'll ask again, and don't dodge it this time, what exactly is that point of any of this? You are avoiding the questions.

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

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

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

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

No it isn't.

And again, you avoid the question. Yes we know atoms are mostly empty space, my question is so what? What point is there in knowing that? You avoid the key remarks and just spout drivel.

For the last time, what is the point of all this?

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




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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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