Take the musical instruments a musician is familiar with. They often can hear things in a song the average person who doesn't play those instruments is unaware of. — Marchesk

A dream could function just like the way music rejigs our time perception. Each instrument has a different flow of time. The emotional tone of a dream can be played at a different rate to the thoughts behind a dream. We continuously forget what we intended to do where our dream character moves around and is forced to create new intentions based on the changing locations of the dream. For example a dream character might go to the shop to buy a specific item but it will be forgotten by the time he arrives. Then the dream character must form a new plan based on his current surroundings in the shop. Perhaps he might decide to explore outside. So new plans would be created impromptu. We aren't making new decisions from scratch but instead we're basing them on the changing scenery around us. In a dream we're amnesiac not only about our past selves but also our past ambitions. This is what contributes to effortless story-making. Amnesia in real-life might cause apathy, blankness, confusion or meditation on the present moment whereas amnesia in a dream somehow results in chaotic narratives. One way to explain the mismatch is that we're selectively amnesiac in a dream where our thoughts and emotions diverge. Specific thoughts are erased from a dream character's memory. We're partially amnesiac in a dream rather than being completely memoryless and so the amnesia in a dream is more multi-layered than medical amnesia.

"The spatial and temporal dimensions of music are actually quite separate from the space and time as we encounter them in normal experience. So it's a curious thing that you can write music out and then when pitch goes up you write the notes going up and down and so on. But in fact of course the notes being written are spatially going up and down but the musical notes are not. The tones are not. One way of putting this to say music has its own space and similarly with time. You take a piece of music and you start at 10 a.m - let's say you finish it at 10:15 - and then you think oh I really like that so you play it again. You started at 10:20. Now the start of it in the world of experience is a different time but the start of the piece is the start of the piece. So the temporal relations - start middle finish - and so on plus more sophisticated things like reprise and recapitulation and variations these are all within music" (4:29-5:42)

Gordon Graham - What is Philosophy of Art? - Closer To Truth

"Author defined time as an objective time of the musical composition and the subjective time as psychological experience. Accordingly, absolute time is organized within the composition – it is objective and defined, thus can be expressed in size by the properties, values and symbols of musical elements, notation and timing. Musical time as the psychological phenomena is relative referring to the organization of time in performer's mind, as well as how the performance is perceived and experienced by listeners. The nature of organization of elements of musical time in the performer's mind lies in the conception of the structure of the temporal organization generated by the performer's subjective expression, knowledge of the musical form, and motor/kinesthetic ability. Furthermore, the idea of the temporal structure also incorporates experience and practice, as well as intuition and aesthetic valuations. Thus, the structure of time is not independent – it interacts and relies upon other structures, building performer's conception of the whole."
https://accelerandobjmd.weebly.com/issue3/the-perception-and-organization-of-time-in-music

I once experimented with altering the velocity formulas where I measured seconds per metre rather than the usual metres per second. In this case length would be unchanging and somehow all objects would move by time contraction or dilation. Trying to use acceleration as seconds squared per metre utterly dazed me. I kind of inverted everything but it became too confusing for me because it'd require that all physical objects have separate timelines.

"(For) uniform acceleration we have three equations: v = u + at, s = ut + 1/2 at2, v2 = u2 + 2as".
https://owlcation.com/stem/Force-Weight-Newtons-Velocity-and-Mass

Imagining gravity as a Euler force would be like the ground literally met the sky at the horizon.

We've to remember that according to Einstein space is relative and so the up and down directions don't exist without presupposing gravity is already in operation. Therefore it wouldn't matter what direction the Earth was rotating in so as to tie you down. Viewing gravity as a Euler force would mean that action at a distance wouldn't be required as a causal mechanism for gravity.

Newton solved gravity by uniting the force on Earth with the force between planets in the solar system. We were then left with hundreds of years trying to reconcile gravity with electromagnetism. Perhaps going back to basics and analysing what would happen if the force between planets and the force attaching us to the ground might actually be separate in nature; perpetual motion and a Euler force respectively.

If planets were kept in place by perpetual motion whereby loose asteroids passively escaped the solar system then it wouldn't matter that stars in the out parts of the galaxies are travelling faster than expected. Thus it wouldn't require as much "Dark Matter" to account for the extra energy.

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

If we were to forget about gravity then your natural tendency would be to stay still since there's no external force according to Newton's first law. You wouldn't fall down into empty space. Therefore we could interpret gravity to be like the surface of the Earth dragging you along with it.

Dualism doesn't always have to include the brain being conscious. For example we could rephrase the mind-body problem as the mind-matter problem. If we left out the brain as being non-sentient and robotic then we could focus on other physical substances like photons and chemicals to see how they impact our out-of-body conscious perception.

A possible counter-argument to gravity as a Euler force is that satellites remain in orbit even though there's no atmosphere to affect it and there couldn't be perpetual motion acting on such a short-lived device. One could argue that a satellite is held in place by the initial conditions of the launch. Perhaps the rotating surface of the Earth during lift-off and the wind resistance throughout its ascent until it reaches outer space conspire to add a hidden sideways component to its velocity. According to Newtons first law the satellite will remain at constant velocity whereby it'd maintain its trajectory even without an active force.

Euler Force Examples:

Let's go back to the analogy of the rotating asteroid. For the sake of simplicity we'll just assume that it had a rectangular cuboid shape where it was rotating clockwise about a point. The length and breadth of the asteroid were large but the height from the top surface to the bottom surface was thin. We'll also ignore the orbit of the asteroid around the Sun. An astronaut not too far away from the top left edge of the asteroid who throws a rock sideways further to the left near the cliff beneath them will see the rock appear to fall diagonally downwards relative to their sightline. This is due to the rising centripetal acceleration of the radius where the speed of the asteroid's superficial plane is varied with the outer circumferences moving faster than the inner circumferences. Centripetal force is perpendicular to circular motion and so the rock won't preserve all of the rotational momentum of the asteroid. The slower the overall asteroid rotates, the milder the downward angle will be where it will have a stronger sideways vector from the force of your throw. The faster the outer edges of the asteroid rotates, the steeper the rock will fall to the ground because the centripetal speed of the asteroid's floor will increasingly outweigh the sideways vector from your throw. If the asteroid rotated at an extreme speed then the sideways vector will be negligible in comparison where it'd seem to drop vertically downwards.


Let's asteroid-hop to one with a small oval shape that's also moving clockwise. This time you were standing on the underside of the asteroid. You were placed towards the left again except now you're only half-way to the steep outer edge. So when you throw a rock further to the left in a horizontal direction we'll need something else to happen since both you and the floor would be moving away from the rock with the rock possibly appearing to go higher and higher into outer space. However there's a steep incline on the plane with an average downward chord of -30 degrees returning rightwards to the centre point owing to the oval shape. Thus when you throw the ball to the left, the ground behind you to the right will be higher than your position if your vision reorients itself to see the light reflected off the bottom of the asteroid as being upwards*. For the sake of argument, let's further assume that the asteroid is in an orbit around the Sun such that entire asteroid is still moving leftwards while it also rotates clockwise about a point. The trajectory of the thrown rock is now considered in absolute space with the Solar System instead of it being relative to the surface of the asteroid alone. Owing to the leftwards orbit around the Sun, the higher ground behind you which is also moving leftwards will move even faster when both velocities are combined. However the same ground in front of you (radial length of the asteroid in a 7 o'clock angle) that already appears to be sloping (due to the oval shape) diagonally downhill will slowly begin to move in unison vertically downwards (reversed vision where it'd be upwards for an outside observer) as it crosses (with the rest of the radius) over the x-axis (9 o'clock position) where the clockwise motion of the asteroid will then be going in the opposite direction (upwards and rightwards from 10 to 11 o'clock) compared to its leftwards orbit around the Sun. This time the two velocities oppose each other resulting in a smaller net velocity. Therefore the ground behind you will actually be moving mostly horizontally forwards more than the height direction in absolute space and whack into the thrown rock. The faster the oval asteroid rotates around the Sun, the greater the degree to which the rock will fall straight backwards which is rightwards relative to the asteroid's midpoint even if your initial throw was leftwards. The slower the asteroid orbits the Sun, the longer it will take for the rock to hit the floor. In this scenario the same leftward clockwise motion (7 o'clock position) might seem to have slightly increased relative to the speed of the leftward orbit in the Solar System. Moreover the ground in front of you is objectively moving faster only in terms of the clockwise rotation due to the increased length of the radius. The rock might remain travelling in the leftwards trajectory after you throw it and land diagonally downwards if the orbit of the asteroid around the Sun has a slight upwards vector in addition to its predominantly leftwards orbit. In other words the asteroid could pivot downwards and upwards around the thrown rock with the rock appearing to move in a semi-circular path to the ground in front of you. If there's no upward trajectory on the asteroid's orbit around the Sun, then the rock throw which was originally attempted to be leftwards at slow speed will visibly keep going diagonally backwards and upwards until it eventually crashes really far back rightwards towards the midpoint or even near the right edge on the opposite end. (Anyone who's confused could instead imagine the diametrical opposite with you on the top surface of an asteroid balanced in a 1 o'clock position moving downwards to 4 o'clock as rotates about the midpoint where the asteroid also assumes a rightwards and downwards orbit around the Sun. If you're also puzzled by the inverted vision example then you could think of a ball machine throwing the ball where you're standing the right way up on a nearby spaceship.)



* "Under normal circumstances, an inverted image is formed on the retina of the eye. With the help of upside down goggles, the image on the retina of the observer's eyes is turned back (straightened) and thus the space around the observer looks upside down."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upside_down_goggles


I think I'm owed an award of some kind:

Father Ted Acceptance speech

The orbit of an asteroid around the Sun is circular and so the upward or downward components would also be circular. We could use an analogy of a roller-coaster where a person on a train going around a tight, inward, semi-circular, concave, horizontal bend could throw a ball at the beginning of the bend and catch it on the other side of the bend. This would still require a lot of skill and lucky timing on the part of the thrower!

One challenge for anti-realism how to reconcile an immense sight like a mountain range as being visually internal. We usually don't have any problem with looking at a photo of New York's skyline and interpreting the image as a 2D screen. It'd be slightly trickier to view the skyscrapers in real life and think of all of the phosphenes as belonging to a flat screen in the brain. Philosophers have no problem with viewing the rooms they're in as non-real but it's a different story trying to "internalise" a mighty building. We're so used to dissociating ourselves from what we see that it'd be socially awkward to reinterpret your perception. You'd be absorbing your surroundings in a literal sense! Sometimes it takes a non-real interpretation a few weeks to spiral into your awareness. For example I find myself thinking more instinctively about apparent floor height after casually remarking on it a few months ago.

Simply walking around or moving our torso can create enough relative motions in our vision to work out how size varies with depth.

Iron Giant fight scene

We say that extreme complexity is correlated with consciousness but it's not immediately apparent how turning a human-sized robot into a giant would ever affect its insentience despite an increase in complexity.

If my mind is equivalent to the light I see and your mind is equivalent to the light you see where our colour perceptions are separate, then it'd be like your mind is traveling faster than the light I see. I can only detect light in my direction and the light another person sees is always in a different direction to my locus of consciousness. Even if we swapped places and I were to assume the same visual position you had a minute ago we'd still be seeing distinct colours. Maybe photons don't have relative speeds to other photons but if my mind is made of photons then the collections of photons can move relative to the collection of photons that would comprise your mind. So the red that you see would be like a tachyon to the red that I see. In other words I'd never see the same light you see.


https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/light-in-opposite-directions.67852/
"In every inertial reference frame, each photon's velocity is exactly c. Photons do not have their own rest frame (any attempt to create one would violate the postulate that the laws of physics should work the same way in all inertial reference frames), so asking what the velocity of the photons is "relative to each other" is not physically meaningful--asking what B's velocity is relative to A is just another way of asking what the velocity of B is in A's rest frame. You can ask how fast the distance between them is increasing in a particular inertial reference frame, and the answer will indeed be that it's increasing at 2c, but the light-speed limit only applies to things like particles and information, it doesn't apply to concepts like "the distance between two objects"."

Perhaps our minds each have a different "rest frame" to allow for free will.

It might be ironic but a possible benefit of anti-realism is hyper-materialism. Anti-realism and materialism are often opposites but sometimes they might concur. For example anti-realism is capable of objectifying the brain simply because such a standpoint isn't reliant on the neurons to produce consciousness. Certain versions of anti-realism can view light as being conscious instead and so it can interpret the brain as a physical object by means of metaphysical dissociation. This would be handy not only for spiritual and philosophical reasons but also for neuro-scientific and psychological purposes. Viewing the brain as a telephone would be a form of temporal dualism where the spatial realm is the same but the timelines are different. It'd mean we could pursue research in neuroscience wholeheartedly without being hesitant about how neurons produce mental experiences. Anti-realism and materialism clashes when it comes to perception where a materialist would say our perception is physical. Yet the inherent strangeness of anti-realism could benefit our capacity to use quantum physics because we'd no longer have to be bogged down by questions of how random atoms combine to form the classical world. In other words anti-realism isn't reliant on the universe making sense in the same way that a dream can be irrational. Some people can have amazing feats of photographic memory and this might be genetic or learned but it could also be a metaphysical ability to dissociate yourself from your memory and view yourself more deterministically. An anti-realist is capable of bouts of super determinism simply because free will can be interpreted as a temporary phenomenon when viewed through the anarchy of sleep. So short spells of determinism doesn't necessarily contradict anti-realism and so anti-realism could enhance our ability to maximise empathy and memory. Overall antirealism offers us alternatives such that we'd have the spiritual independence to pursue physicalist logic to an extreme.

Very rarely I've experienced weird sensations that I can't fully describe but they still leave a brief impact on my subconscious. Perhaps it's that my thoughts beforehand are unusual and this feeds back into my perception. For example in early 2021 I was going for a walk by the lake and started thinking about the ground being inclined upwards so as to produce gravity. I then relaxed and bought an ice-cream in a shop. But as I walked back I suddenly began to focus on the walking postures of people nearby. The way they swung their arms suddenly looked extremely complicated. In fact it seemed so fine-tuned that an apparent mismatch began to appear with their ordinary level of mental focus and they were almost walking robotically. It was as if they were using their arms to glide up and down. I felt this unsettled and kind of mystical sensation in the back of my mind. I managed to wait it out and overcome it by continuing on my stroll and changing my thought line. It was as if my subconscious was experimenting with a different interpretation of my perception.

Saying that the mind moves the body by magic might seem like a perfect non-explanation. We might think of a spell by a wizard's wand to be random. Indeed it is arbitrary in a physical sense but not necessarily a logical sense. That is to say a spell can be deterministic even if it defies materialistic causality. For example flicking a wand to levitate an object will create a temporal relationship between cause and effect despite the lack of a physical mediator. Sorcery wouldn't be like the anarchy of quantum mechanics!

I've had temporary and unsettled feelings in my past that were a bit weird. They started off as very mild thought-lines that gradually evolved into unique emotional sensations. At the time I didn't really recognise them as unusual ways of being because my mind was interpreting it more as a bout of stress. The slightly negative feeling meant I didn't dwell on the emotions once they had passed. Yet it's only in hindsight when I can think of the experience without the stress I'd felt at the time that I can recognise the period as a different spiritual outlook. I recently listened to music that I also listened to back then and this reminded me of how alien my state of mind was. The mental tangent began when I was walking around a shopping centre on the outskirts of a city. It was several years ago and the artificial lighting was more noticeable to me than usual. I remember getting a coffee and it was dawning on me that I knew nothing of the mindset or background of the people serving me. Much like the mind-body problem I was focusing on the mysterious consciousness of those around me. We don't think about such philosophical conundrums in our daily interactions because we tend to interpret the questions abstractly rather than socially. We don't generally treat the mind-body problem with the same level of mysticism as life after death even though from a scientific standpoint both are equally unknowable to some extent. My mind however appeared frustrated at the lack of a concrete answer after such a long time musing about it.

The resulting vagueness was preoccupying me and a new stimulus presented itself from my subconscious. I was walking up and down the busy shopping centre and I had a Halloween vibe in the back of my mind. It emphasised just how different other people were from me. It was as if the problem was so insurmountable and my knowledge so inadequate that I might as well have been a young preschool child trying to work it out. It was like I needed to be a complete blank slate to investigate it and somehow this evoked juvenile qualities like I were a child going for trick-or-treat. By the time I got a lift back it was night-time which prolonged the Halloween analogy that was forming inside me. Perhaps it'd be like I was observing people whose timelines had already elapsed and whose bodies were conveying the vestiges of minds. No; I'm not trying to make fun of the vibrancy of Limerick City! If the face is like a mask then the body is like a costume. How do you know the other person hasn't already lived and died within their own experience of consciousness by the time your mind can interact with their body? If we're not experiencing time simultaneously then what limits how divergent each of our temporal perceptions can become? So it was like I was out trick-or-treating where no one was fully knowable. I can't accurately describe the thoughts I was having because it was more of a gut instinct rather than a logical analysis. A lot of young children are much more driven by emotions than by their thoughts in terms of their intentionality which contrasts with many adults. In one sense this makes them more in tune with the irrational and chaotic nature of consciousness. Ironically their immature subconscious minds might be so content with the existence of other minds and mental states that they don't even need to worry about it or name it! After all I was never bogged down with existential angst when I was aged 9 for instance! I comment on it solely because the strangeness of the memory almost makes me feel like I was different person. An economic explanation of my angst might have been that Irish citizens are neither socially collective like Mediterranean countries nor individualistic like America. Hence each county in Ireland can diverge greatly in their vibe as if everyone’s timeline was imaginary to one another.

What might be some non-real solutions to the arrow paradox? Perhaps the background moves backwards such that a still object would appear to move forwards through relative motion. This would be like the visual scenery behind the arrow would dilate ever so slightly in the mind of the observer. Another way to think about it would be that apparently still objects are actually vibrating back and forth atomically such that everything is always in a state of motion. Then the problem would be reversed in trying to understand the illusion of motionlessness. Or else it could be speculated that only the one moving object in your vision can be said to subjectively exist. This would resemble the background blurring out of existence to some extent during the moments that you're watching the arrow relocate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno%27s_paradoxes#:~:text=In%20the%20arrow%20paradox%2C%20Zeno,to%20where%20it%20is%20not.

Is there an argument that elements of cosmopolitanism can be non-real? I once heard the Scottish comedian Frankie Boyle joke that the average person in the world speaks Chinese. We're subconsciously biased to view the culture of our own country as most relevant to our lives. This is simplistically true but we shouldn't mix up a personal relevance of domestic affairs with importance in an international context. Even though most first world people can travel abroad on holiday, there are still fierce limitations in whether we can reach another continent. Only rich people can travel all across the world and even then they're still limited by time. It's one thing visting a country on a weekend break and quite another to fully assimilate the ethos of the country over a 6-month stay. The national news is nearly always geared to countries with a similar worldview. This is why European countries tend to hear far more about America than China. A country like Turkey or Japan isn't reliant on your consciousness for their existence! Nonetheless visiting realms that are alien to your own local community can open up your sense of self in the world. After all no country can truly claim to be at the centre of the world map because we can change the order of the continents. For example America could have a map where Europe and Asia are on both sides of it while Europe can place America at the edge of the map. If we took the doctrine of reincarnation to be completely egalitarian then we've as much chance of being reborn in Africa or South America than we do in a wealthier European nation. This might inspire us to give more towards international charity. The way that some countries will be forever hidden from our cultural awareness is almost like they don't fully exist in your life and only in your next life!

Is the brain's visual system like a mirror or a camera? I recently took a target practice video where the camera's menu screen was pointing towards the floor and the lens was facing me. When I watched the recording I was trying to work out which direction was correct. Yet both sides seemed to make sense.

If my right hand was on the rightwards side of the screen, then it would appear that the same hand would be on the left side of the screen if I were to turn my feet around 180°. This interpretation is valid since I'd be facing towards the camera as if the camera were recording horizontally at head-height where the right-left directions are reversed.

If I flipped the recording electronically then my right hand would start out at the left side of the screen. If I visualised myself turning my body around in the video then my right hand would be on the rightwards side of the screen. This works because the back of my head would be directed towards the camera where the right and left directions are preserved.

Thus the direction of the different parts of the ceiling or sky on the recording can be re-ordered top-to-bottom without affecting the left-to-right legitimacy of the video. The camera stores the video in one direction in it's memory where turning the camera upside-down will rotate the presentation of the video. By contrast a mirror passively reflects the light where rotating the surface of a spherical mirror wouldn't affect the viewer's perspective.

Let's imagine your eyes replaced the recording screen as you lay in bed. Then you alternated your lying position from the usual way to where your feet are now at the pillow section. So does the brain interpret this movement like a camera or a mirror? Is it possible to ever imagine your right hand as somehow being on the same side as the left eye? It is if you viewed the bed as being internal to your mind where your eyes don't switch order left-to-right as your body your body rotates 180°. Your eyes would be like two TV screens that don't turn around where only the image turns.

Vanilla Sky - Intro Scene

I read that it cost a million dollars for the producers to empty Times Square for the recording. So if you wake up to an empty city, maybe someone is simply playing a million dollar prank on you! Otherwise you could walk through a quiet street late at night for a similar juxtaposition of city life and desolation. A risky thoughtline with false awakenings is if this conscious reality is merely a dream, then do you've yet to wake up in the real world? This might lead to reckless behaviour in order to leave the so-called dream and attempt to enter a non-existent real world. Or is the real world itself a communal dream? The latter option forces you to reconcile reality with non-reality!

"Cameron Crowe struck a deal with the NYPD to close off the area between 5AM and 8AM on a Sunday in November 2000. The result was a spectacular sequence with a spectacular price tag: over $1 million for 30 seconds of footage. Was it worth it? Absolutely. Combining Cruise's enigmatic star power with the desolate backdrop helps to create a poignancy..."
- Looper

Objectification: "the action of degrading someone to the status of a mere object eg. the objectification of women in popular entertainment."

If determinism is true then to some extent we're all "objectified". Maybe romantic people would find it easier to accept their deterministic nature! Likewise if we love ourselves in our current state of mind then we don't need free will to change our destiny! You're free until you choose to love someone! No wonder people say they met their true love and spouse through fate! PS Hopefully their true love and spouse are the same person!

Fruit Art - Web Search

When we buy meat in the shop it becomes tolerable to dissociate the food with the animal that was killed to produce it. Thankfully we don't have to witness the slaughter first hand. Most of us don't have to hunt for our dinner! I'm not vegetarian and never bother to think of the poor chickens. Although the rare time that I order duck at a fancy restaurant I can't help but visualise the poor creatures minding their own business in the lake! Fruit and vegetables aren't alive in a conscious sense and so we never have to worry about the ethics of eating them. However it's not just the ethics but also the vitalistic connotations that are important. I don't pick the potatoes from beneath the earth and so I seldom think of nature and fields when I cook them. Perhaps I might think of gravy or tomato ketchup but not of the mysticism of homeostasis and rebirth in the food of the Earth. Sometimes with extended attention on fruit art it's possible to see how bizarre the food we eat really is in the whole scheme of the environment.

"Whether created to express bountiful harvests, to boast the artist’s talent, or to communicate an opinion, food in art is still very prevalent today. . . and no doubt it will remain so as long as both art and food exist in the world."
https://emptyeasel.com/2009/04/16/the-long-history-of-food-in-art/

Vegetable anthropomorphism:
Mandrake Potting | Harry Potter
Professor Pomona Sprout teaches her second-year Herbology students how to pot young Mandrakes.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a0/Vincent_van_Gogh_-_Landscape_from_Saint-R%C3%A9my_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg

One anti-realist interpretation of Gogh's wavy technique is that it creates an illusion of time much like a very short GIF clip or a time-lapse video. For example the wavy low sharpness of many of his landscape paintings could be reinterpreted as motion blurs and light streaks. The more we know about direction the less we know about location as per the uncertainty principle. Thus the passage of time is being prioritised over the accuracy of the present moment. Sometimes we can become desensitised to our local scenery. Then it's only when we come back home after a trip abroad that we notice the novelty of the environment. For example I appreciate the lushness of the green fields of Ireland the most when I'm on a return flight and look out the window before landing. Likewise Gogh forces us to take note of an agrarian sight by applying an extreme art technique to an already extreme and diverse geography of the Netherlands.

"Van Gogh is well known for his brushstokes of thickly laid-on paint. This technique is called Impasto. An artist lays a thick layer of paint on canvas, brushstrokes get more noticeable, adding a special texture to the painting. Vincent liked to use a thick, undiluted flat color with a brush or a palette knife. Sometimes he painted his colored swirls, smearing the paint on canvas with his finger. The works of Van Gogh have a relief, almost three-dimensional surface. They look different, depending on the light source."
https://arthive.com/publications/1934~The_search_of_Vincent_Van_Goghs_style_and_technique

"In urban night photography, light trails add motion and emphasize the feel of a living city." -fstoppers

For some of my anti-realism thread I work backwards from a terrible panic attack I had in late 2017. I try to interpret it through the realism of other minds rather than the realism of the physical environment. So I must add a caveat that I don't want to unsettle anyone with disorienting analogies. Mental illness is one of those things where if you perfectly described it to someone then they themselves would become mentally ill! I could tell you but then I'd have to kill you! In the same way we can't describe a conscious emotion in scientific terms with 100% accuracy, so too can we not convey the exact sensation of certain forms of anxiety.

It took hundreds of years, hundreds of thousands of scientists and millions of reciprocating civilians in different nations to collectively work out a self-consistent materialistic worldview. It also took thousands of years to mentally assimilate an unconscious moral framework from theism. An analogy would be as if our shared reality were sculpted down by the constant prayers of historical people. Did the first people to pray to God thousands of years ago do so for solely religious and ethical reasons or was there also an inherent element of derealisation that further incentivised them to pray? Perhaps with anti-realism there can be many valid conceptions of reality that are nonetheless so alien to our current society that they can't be reconciled together by a single individual. In other words some apparently psychotic beliefs might actually be workable if only they had been developed over multiple generations.

Asians and Europeans have a very similar physique even though the people from either continent are facially very different to each other. Do the millennea of differing climates, geographies and nutritions account for the evolutionary difference? Or could thousands of years worth of differing metaphysical outlooks between western and eastern religions also leave an imprint on our epigenetics?


Racist Father Ted

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0b/Vincent_van_Gogh_-_The_Bedroom_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg

Let's analyse the photo in the context of philosophical idealism and conscious absorption. The furthest chair in the painting looks slightly smaller than how it'd appear in a photograph. This technique exaggerates perspective and the diminishing of far away objects. Overall it creates an impression of having internalised the visual stimuli. The floor is also inclined at slightly higher angle than expected. The footboard of the bed occults and blocks out a disproportionately larger amount of the headboard and side wall.


https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/66/VanGogh-starry_night_ballance1.jpg

Here the dark blue of the night could be reinterpreted as daytime where the stars would be visible through the blue sky. The largest star with the crescent moon is like the Sun. It's easier to feel a sense of unreality at night time where it's too dark to see far into the distance. Yet the way the background is at an equally low acutance to the foreground creates a surreal vibe. I feel like the guy who laughs at his own jokes by being impressed by my own analogies!

Acutance: "the sharpness of a photographic or printed image."