Comments

  • Anti-Realism
    When we vividly remember an event from weeks ago it might feel like our consciousness hasn't moved spatial position between now and back then.
  • Anti-Realism
    "Diffusion is the net movement of anything from a region of higher concentration to a region of lower concentration. Diffusion is driven by a gradient in concentration."

    Perhaps consciousness diffuses as far into empty space as your senses allow.
  • Anti-Realism
    What if the brain itself isn't conscious but that it's perceiving your own consciousness through the senses?
  • Anti-Realism
    What if our mind moves our body in a similar way to a dancer trying to rhyme their motion to the the beat of music; except for us our body moves relative to our thoughts and emotions.

    What if intense beats could force you to dance by possessing you and twitching your muscles?!
    Bob Sinclar - Rock This Party (Everybody Dance Now)

    Kelly Rowland - Commander ft. David Guetta

    There are caveats to this drumbeat possession logic in case we were to all lose the run of ourselves:
    Neo & Trinity Sex Scene - The Matrix Reloaded 2003
  • Anti-Realism
    If you know one depth value then you can work out the rest of your perception to the same scale using familiar size. For example you know the objective length of your body so you know what an arm length ahead of you corresponds to in distance.

    "Familiar size: Since the visual angle of an object projected onto the retina decreases with distance, this information can be combined with previous knowledge of the object's size to determine the absolute depth of the object. For example, people are generally familiar with the size of an average automobile. This prior knowledge can be combined with information about the angle it subtends on the retina to determine the absolute depth of an automobile in a scene."
  • Anti-Realism
    If we're looking in a slanted direction towards an entity then the distance we're see is the hypotenuse and we can infer the depth by approximating the hypotenuse and the width back to a position right in front of you.
  • Anti-Realism
    Each of our eyes has a different degree of perspective since different parts of an object right in front of us will be closer in diagonal depth to one eye over the other other.
  • Anti-Realism

    Pulp Fiction 1994 - Wolf

    Notice how the lower camera resolution in older movies doesn't always detract from the atmosphere and the way the colours appear highlighted can actually increase the tone, flow and ambience of the film. It gives it a subtle and almost indescribably different vibe in how the scenes temporally transition from one to the next. Walking around with sunglasses all day long doesn't have a major effect on your self-awareness but it can alter your visual concentration.


    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_symbolism
    https://www.lomography.com/magazine/339223-the-monochrome-effect
  • Anti-Realism
    Maybe it's possible to combine both options where our perception is in front of our face while our rational thoughts are behind us.
  • Anti-Realism
    Is someone's consciousness invisible and in front of their face in an undetectable manner? Or is it hidden from view behind the face inside the brain?
  • Anti-Realism
    If our visual perception were entirely in our brain, then the further out we look the deeper we are seeing into our brain,
  • Anti-Realism
    We're all living different lives. So how do we know how closely our conscious timelines are located to each other? For all we know another conscious mind might be a full lifetime away relative to our own. It'd be like the physical body and mental sphere were in different temporal realms. Another way to think of it would be that consciousness were like a spirit in the literal sense of the word; that is to say everyone's mind being separated by the oblivion of death.
  • Anti-Realism
    "So if I'm doing the flipping, then the mirror is not. Take an arrow and point it to the right. The reflection in the mirror goes to the right. Point it up, it goes up. Left, it goes left. Down, it goes down. Forward, it goes-- wait a minute. If I point the arrow forward, the reflection goes backward. So the mirror is flipping the image, but it's flipping it in the z direction."


    What if the page she flipped was see-through where we could still see the letters? Then we'd observe the word spelled right to left on the page and it'd be no surprise the mirror reflects the letters in that direction. A mirror would be like having an eye on the back of your head! Sadly I'm a bit angry so I might resort to name-calling anyone who dares to disagree with me a "doof-us"!

    https://www.flickr.com/photos/koons/48205397436/in/photostream/
    Glass buildings can serve as huge mirrors to observe direction reversal of reflections on the street.
  • Anti-Realism
    The image in a mirror is unusual because an object looks to be in the same location but it's horizontally facing the other direction. If our consciousness is looking backwards inside the brain to see an image then it would be like our perception is rotated halfway round a circle in a straight angle of 180 degrees such that it's pointing the other way round at the opposite end of the diameter.
  • Anti-Realism
    If the scene we see in our brain is really a virtual image then when we look in a mirror the objects should actually be the proper left-to-right orientation and it's our own usual perception that's always switched. For example our brain's motor system is contralateral.

    contralateral: relating to or denoting the side of the body opposite to that on which a particular structure or condition occurs.
  • Anti-Realism
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depersonalization

    What is the connection between depersonalisation and religiosity, spirituality or mysticism? In an extreme form depersonalisation can cause severe mental illness and confusion. But what about mild depersonalisation? When people talk about self-transcendence in terms of connecting with others through humility, identifying with a common cause such as a soldier fighting for his country or identifying yourself with a collective identity like a religion, I often feel that would entail reducing part of your own personality in order to incorporate an external entity. As people grow elderly their capacity for spiritual ways of thinking naturally increases. Depersonalisation is not the same as derealisation which is where you view your perception as fake. Depersonalisation is loosely described as a loss of your sense of freedom and lack of ability to control your own agency; as if you were a passive observer of yourself. That sounds similar to the philosophy of determinism but here it seems to be used in a different context. Instead of being determined by the material world, your personality is being determined by whatever are your metaphysical or spiritual views.
  • Anti-Realism
    We measure the length of objects relative to standard quantity such as a metre and not the amount of space it occupies in our vision. I couldn't tell you the actual size of my computer if I compared it only to how much of my vision it takes up. This would always change depending on how far or close it is to me. Therefore there's no way to visualise a true external object without qualia because it doesn't make geometric sense in our consciousness unless it merges to a point of perspective. We can only use shared units in a co-ordinate plane to describe external objects.
  • Anti-Realism
    An infinitude of time would mean that if the multiverse were random like the Boltzmann brain scenario then a deterministic system like our universe is possible to create from of a foundation of randomness seeing as everything conceivable happens an infinite number of times in an infinite universe. We could turn that on its head and say that if the multiverse is both infinite and deterministic then the starting point of subjective time is unknowable due to the immense timescales. Thus the specific beginning of time in our particular universe relative to the multiverse is random or arbitrary. So it's possible to reconcile determinism and randomness through a hypothetical multiverse.
  • Anti-Realism
    How could a deterministic system become random or vice-versa? That's the dilemma at the heart of quantum mechanics. Usually infinities and infinitesimals can render equations undefinable or negligible such as dividing a number by zero or subtracting infinity from infinity. Space in our universe is finite and objective time only stretches back to the Big Bang but what about subjective time? They say an observer in quantum mechanics doesn't have to be human and any detector would suffice. Although in that case could a micro-organism or a fish be counted as a non-conscious observer in quantum mechanics? Then subjective time of parallel streams of life could possibly be interpreted as an infinite quantity. Therefore when it comes to reconciling determinism and randomness we could speculate that subjective time might be infinite even if objective time is not.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undefined_(mathematics)
    https://www.philforhumanity.com/Infinity_Minus_Infinity.html
    https://www.space.com/whats-beyond-universe-edge
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observer_effect_(physics)
  • Anti-Realism
    Maybe it's possible to create different competing versions of scientific antirealism depending on which variables(s) are perceived in an immaterial way.
  • Anti-Realism
    Panpsychism where photons are equivalent to our qualia could bypass the combination problem of consciousness because our visual perception of external reality would be ready-made before the signals even enter the brain.

    "the combination problem: the problem of how objects, background and abstract or emotional features are combined into a single experience."
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binding_problem
  • Anti-Realism
    The chaotic, random quality of the beat distracts our attention from all of our previous thoughts such that we are more receptive to the lyrics whenever they arise. It temporarily destabilises and relieves the stress of our ordinary thoughts which might be interpreted cathartically. In reducing our concentration for whatever was our previous mental activity we can therefore use the music to refocus with more power on the lyrics. This creates a more potent effect compared to listening to the vocals alone without the background instruments or electric music.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDgU-rMkVNU
    Dj Splash - You Spin Me Right Round (Remix)
  • Anti-Realism
    Only light from our eyes and sensory nerve impulses from the body penetrates the skull.
  • Anti-Realism
    I was thinking more to myself about dualism. We could distinguish between two types of dualism: spatial dualism and temporal dualism. Spatial dualism has a limitation in that if consciousness is geographically distinct from the brain then it still has to penetrate the skull somehow in order to read the contents of the brain. Temporal dualism would have to rely on the mind being in a different timeline or timezone to the body; as if it were always 30 seconds ahead for instance. Everything is visible to our consciousness but our consciousness is invisible to everything else!
  • Anti-Realism
    I watch a lot of these driving and walking videos of foreign cities on YouTube when I'm bored. An easy way to visualise a stationary observer appearing to move is to watch a motionless screen of someone moving in a consistent manner.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8XyxasuTGw
  • Anti-Realism
    "e = 0
    The coefficient of restitution exists as a number between 0 and 1. In a perfectly inelastic collision, the difference in the velocities of two objects after a collision is zero because those objects stick together. This means that the coefficient of restitution for a perfectly inelastic collision is e = 0."

    Asteroids colliding into each other may have melted together and so the collisions might be inelastic. Therefore could asteroids perpetually colliding into each other create planets without the need for gravity?
  • Anti-Realism
    https://www.bardweb.net/language.html
    Shakespeare is amazing and ingenious at all aspects of the English language bar concision! Nowadays we have a very standardised way of structuring sentences. We are taught from a young age to keep sentences short and use lots of punctuation to avoid confusion. So maybe a historically loose way of connecting phrases meant people compensated by elaboration through vocabulary. In other words our modern language was holistically carved down from complexity rather than being built up from simplicity. Basic physical associations between some words and their referent objects may have been the final state rather than the beginning state of affairs for a language's evolution. Other languages have very unique ways of structuring sentences rather than mere differences in vocabulary. Perhaps this could influence different styles of creativity in how we each connect linguistic concepts.
  • Anti-Realism
    What if our perception is a simulation but it's based on a real physical reality?
  • Anti-Realism
    That way light would describe everywhere the matter isn't located which we can use to infer where the matter is hiding.
  • Anti-Realism
    An electron emits a photon when it moves into another orbital. In other words when it jumps across empty space in the atom it releases light.
  • Anti-Realism
    We don't see matter with our eyes; we see light. How matter and light relate to each other is not fully certain.The atom is made mostly of empty space. Then is it possible to say light is also the shape of empty space inside the atom? The colour would then change depending on the density of particles in the atom on the surface of the object.
  • Anti-Realism
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xc4xYacTu-E
    (6minutes 40s mark)
    The pencil attracts the Earth a few trillionths of a proton.
    (10minute 40seconds)
    There can be vertical deflection where the down direction of gravity has negligibly differences.
    (24minute 20seconds)
    Time moves faster for your head than your feet.
  • Anti-Realism
    An astronaut dropping an object on a spinning asteroid might perceive it as falling diagonally to the ground. Under this way of analysing gravity the Earth is just so massive that there wouldn't be any visible horizontal component to the falling entity.
  • Anti-Realism


    I think we're individually, subjectively observing an objective, shared reality. That is to say there's a physical world out there but we don't perceive it first-hand; we view it in a secondary way after our unconscious sense organs first analyse the data. The subjective existence of a subjective reality is like idealism where the physical world is alleged to be imaginary and there might not be quantitative overlap in all of our perceptions. An objective existence of an objective reality implies super-determinism where both our own thoughts and our perception is completely intertwined and materially reducible.
  • Anti-Realism
    When we learn to draw as children we're tempted to leave a white gap between the sky and the ground. Then the teacher reminds us that they meet at the horizon! The ground gets smaller in the same way that objects get smaller from perspective. The difference is the ground is much larger than the objects on top of it. We look at the ground from head height and parallel lines meet at infinity so we can interpret depth from an apparent change in height. So parallax can be gleaned from not only horizontal displacement between eyes but also height differences in each eye's perception. If we keep our head still and use only our eyes to look sideways at a car travelling on a straight road located perpendicularly to our line of sight, then one eye will always be marginally closer to the object than the other unless it's the moment where the car is directly in front of us. Therefore the car will look to be going slightly downwards until the midpoint where after it passes us by will then seem to veer upwards relative to our subjective visual field. This is an additional parallax clue. Another example of this is where you can tilt your head 45 degrees as you look with slanted eyes at car straight ahead moving up a hill.
  • Anti-Realism
    You'll have the same initial centripetal velocity as the Earth's surface when you're about to jump and at maximum height off the ground you'll have a microscopically higher centripetal velocity.
  • Anti-Realism
    The mass of the object is negligible in comparison to the mass of the rotating surface.
  • Anti-Realism
    The top of the cliff would be objectively travelling faster than the bottom of the cliff because velocity is proportional to radius. The relatively small cliff height is added to the radius from the bottom of the cliff to the core. So an object hanging in mid-air would “fall behind” the faster speeds of higher regions.
  • Anti-Realism
    Astronaut dropping feather and hammer on Moon:
    maxresdefault.jpg
    Centripetal velocities wouldn’t depend on mass.
  • Anti-Realism
    I’ll try to be more mathematically precise without getting bogged down in calculus! So the impression I get from Euler’s force is that it would be like the roughness of Earth’s surface. This could be approximated to be the same as the Moon’s jagged surface. So we could compare you being beside a steep cliff on Earth compared to the moon. The cliffs are of equal length; perhaps 50metres. So would I be right in saying the resulting Euler’s force is not the absolute value in outer space but only the difference in centripetal velocity between the top and the bottom of the cliff? Perhaps we could pretend there was only the deep crust and the Earth’s mantle was hollow. So the cliff will be travelling around 27 times faster on the Earth compared to Moon relative to the rest of the Earth; if you know what I mean?

Michael McMahon

Start FollowingSend a Message