A distant star illuminates the vast empty space directly between you and the star. Or else starlight is itself the white empty space between you and your own perception of the star.

https://www.google.ie/amp/s/theconversation.com/amp/when-you-look-up-how-far-back-in-time-do-you-see-101176

The starlight we see are light years away. This means we’re not seeing the real stars as such but a perception of them as they were years ago. Likewise we perceive close objects nanoseconds in the past. Yet we’re physically travelling through time at the same rate as those nearby objects. The image of our own body and hands are a nanosecond in the past. In other words our view of objects is not always based on the actual matter behind the photons but just the photons themselves. If we’re receiving a 2D image in our eyes, then perspective is akin to length contraction and demagnification. We could interpret our retinas as being transparent whereby light passes through our light-sensing cells without fully blocking the photons. Then the image we perceive is in fact still travelling at light speed! Then there wouldn’t be a time lag between your present moment and the room your in. Visually speaking you are at one with the photons you see! Sorry if I’m nitpicking but yourself and the room might both equally be a nanosecond in the past!

If something isn’t material then it can logically only be either empty space or else temporal and spiritual. So free will could be view as a temporal phenomenon occurring in each of our unique histories where my timeline is located separately to your conscious experience. Maybe your consciousness is all the empty space you perceive!

The choice between “realism” and “anti-realism” should be decided based on ethical and/or practical consideration rather than some decision of the veracity of a metaphysical picture. — Richard B

People say that physical determinism is the most objective stance. Determinism might lend to a stoic attitude of accepting our faith. We can’t control our fortune or misfortune. There will always be a few events that are beyond our control. Some accidents cannot be avoided. We can’t go back in time and change our mistakes. However I tend to believe free will is superior when it comes to being proactive. We can take the initiative and pursue our goals uninhibitedly. When we view ourselves as free agents we can take responsibility for both our virtues and vices. Free will is intimately entwined with antirealism because realism implies materialism which in turn connotes determinism. Free won’t also entails elements of antirealism though not to the same extent as it’s also compatible with aspects of materialism. Free won’t can be viewed as a middle ground in the debate!

Some people are much more discriminating when it comes to certain sounds that they've spent a lot of time understanding. — Marchesk

Same idea with things like wine tasting. — Marchesk

Indeed. Although doesn’t this disparity in our thresholds of perception hint at elements individuality in our senses more so than materialism?

“Habituation occurs when we learn not to respond to a stimulus that is presented repeatedly without change, punishment, or reward.
Sensitization occurs when a reaction to a stimulus causes an increased reaction to a second stimulus. It is essentially an exaggerated startle response and is often seen in trauma survivors.”
https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-psychology/chapter/biological-basis-of-learning/

Ever been in a room where people couldn't agree on whether the temperature was too cold or too hot? — Marchesk

Temperature is multifaceted. Infrared radiation is heat even though its technically invisible light. Pressure and convectional currents are the more tactile versions of heat. Latent heat is where an object changes state; from solid to gas (sublimation) or melting ice into liquid and boiling water into vapour. This consumes energy even though we don’t detect it. Therefore heat perception is more ambiguous than the other senses.



“Heat moves naturally by any of three means. The processes are known as conduction, convection and radiation.”
https://www.google.ie/amp/s/www.sciencenewsforstudents.org/article/explainer-how-heat-moves/amp

Cos we're all in the same big boat — Richard B

One way of looking at it is that people could speak long before the invention of writing. Therefore many of the mental constructs we use are based on sound. Likewise braille are tactile messages. Writing on the other hand is a more visual means of communication. How loud a voice is will be a shared perception. Audio is a longitudinal pressure wave through the air. The sense of touch also concerns the movement of pressure. My sense of hearing won’t be too dissimilar to someone else’s. Hence the sound of a singer will the same for both of us.

Nonetheless sound and touch still have traces of ethereal features such as proprioception. Sound is non-spatial yet we can detect where a noise is coming from. That locus of proprioception is unique and different for me relative to someone else’s proprioceptive direction. Our body has an irregular shape with a centre of gravity that fluctuates as we walk. Thus my sense of balance will be different to another person’s. However light travels much faster than sound and it’s spectrum is far more diverse. So maybe there’s more deviation in our visual perception compared to other senses like sound and touch along with their derivative forms of communication.

when we do we have this little invention
By pretending they're a different world from me
I show my responsibility — Richard B

There isn’t the same qualia problem for our sense of touch as there is for colour vision. My red might look different than yours. Athough a red apple probably has a similar texture and haptic feel for both of us. Touch is a more simple sensation than vision. An entity is either hard or soft, fluid or viscous. The pressure of an object against our hands is more describable through science than colour qualia. Our material world is the same and our visual world is definitely similar though maybe not identical.

One world is a enough for all of us — Richard B

If we were each living in a world of our own, then there’d be 7•9 billion unique perspectives within our planet’s population!

If colour is internally emitted then the multicoloured phosphenes would neutralise at a black colour as black absorbs all light.

https://www.colormatters.com/color-and-design/are-black-and-white-colors
The darkness of our eyelids contains all colours while we’re asleep!

Maybe we don’t actually lose consciousness as such during sleep; we forgo a sense of continuity.

During sleep we are detached from reality and disconnected to our body. We lose awareness of bodily sensations like touch and balance as we drift asleep. In a state of oblivion all we have left to connect with is our memories. Free from external stimuli our subconscious can hyper-focus on arbitrary recollections.

When I was at the beach lying down as a young child I noticed I could see these pulsating specks in the bright sky if I stared for a prolonged period. I was confused at the sight of this rapid flow of a faint purple colour. I rarely think of the sensation unless I'm relaxing somewhere and happen to be staring upwards where it catches me unexpectedly. As it turns out the phenomenon has a name; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_field_entoptic_phenomenon .So even the distant sky can be skewed by our internal perception!

If you are identical with your perception then the syntax and semantics guiding your very next thoughts relative to your previous thoughts can indeed be 100% deterministic. The catch is it'd be determined by a shared reality in a subset created by yourself. That sounds somewhat circular which means in that context you could have some degree of free won't. An analogy is that everything you do from the time of waking up until falling asleep is wholly mentally determined and the unconscious then alters the variables for the next day before we wake again.

How would an altered rate of perspective affect our sense of motion if we had some contraption of lenses or somehow changed the flow of time? Were objects to get smaller at a faster rate than normal where height was our depth cue, then our view of the third dimension would be contracted while objects moving away from us would appear to be travelling at a slower horizontal speed. Conversely an image where entities get shorter at slower rate than our normal vision results in an expanded third dimension. If we had the same inclusive field of view at a constant size then objects would appear to move faster relative to their actual speed. (Time=Distance/Speed so the longer the apparent distance the greater the perceived speed if time elapses at the same rate)

One way to investigate the effect of depth perception on anti-realism is through cinematography. Can different camera lenses alter not just how the movie looks but also how the movie viscerally feels? If so could perspective subconsciously affect how we emotionally view our own reality? By way of illustration, could long-distance 3D angles make the scene appear more materialistic while perhaps those focal lengths that emphasise shorter distances come closer to 2D phantasmagoria? Notice how the field of view with the camera in the linked scene appears deep and crystal clear. It helps create an unsettlingly vivid, impersonal and physical image that adds to the movie’s theme of objectification and psychopathy:

The newsman's sly nature has made him my favourite movie charcter!
Nightcrawer - home invasion scene

“Elswit shot the night scenes digitally, since the technology allows one to get clear images with minimal lighting setups. Compared with the daytime scenes, which Elswit shot on 35-millimeter film, the nocturnal sequences look slicker and dreamier. ("I found it beautiful,"Gilroy recently told journalist James Rocchi, "in the sense that you can see far and the neon lights sort of popped out and the yellow sodium vapor lights really gave it an interesting sort of glow.") On one level Nightcrawler is a knockout photo essay about the dark corners of LA—Gilroy and Elswit avoided famous locations, focusing instead on "the functional side of the city, the strip malls and the [suburban] sprawl." Often shooting in deep focus, Elswit creates images that allow us to look far into the distance—some of the settings seem to go on forever, suggesting a post-industrial desert.”
-chicagoreader


“Bokeh, an effect "that shows off light as round shapes, almost always in a blurred background" is used extensively in the film in order to separate Lou from the rest of the world, to put him apart from society, as well as to emphasize his deep connection to media. Achieved through the use of a wide-angle lens with a shallow depth-of-field, the bokeh in Nightcrawler emphasizes that Lou's existence is a mediated one (pun sort of intended). In this clip, the world around him fuzzes out at the edges, and indeed, while we are frequently viewing the same scene through the eye of the film camera and the eye of Lou's camera, it's only through Lou's viewfinder that the image appears crisp and real. Lou's interest in reality is contingent on whether or not it's being filmed, and how much he's getting paid (which, of course, hints at deeper issues.)”
-nofilmschool

Some senses are more indirect than others. Therefore our relative awareness of them might affect how solidly or spiritually we view reality. The sense of touch is the most immediate and materialistic of them all. Our vision is more circuitous in the way we consciously perceive an object that appears to be situated at a distance from our seat of consciousness. Sound seems to have a less diverse spectrum than light. Even so it can create a larger emotional impact in terms of hearing other people and listening to music. Smell is usually the weakest sense. The fact that we can smell something that is distant or otherwise hidden from our other senses means that a heightened smell might appear less real. It can be used to generally give an atmospheric vibe of a location.

Our mindset changes as we age so whatever is causing free will would have to be continuously updated rather than it being endowed once at birth. Dreams allow us to escape “collectivised” physical reality. They interrupt a continuous chain of causality in our lives. It disconnects us from the previous day. Absolute nothingness is pure time! If we’re struggling to derive free will from determinism than a shortcut is to start from the polar opposite of determinism; anarchy. The silliness of some dreams can merely be the unconscious telling us what not to do. The visual content of the dream such as dream characters, objects and surroundings all behave like decoys. Hedonistic impulses in a dream can be there to distract you by lulling you back unconscious. A dream could try to analyse our understanding of others and not just ourselves.
Dreams can convey the absurdness of our immediate goals. If we don’t like the message of a dream we can ignore it. If some of our thoughts are deterministic, then could those same thought patterns be computationally accelerated during sleep? If a dream isn’t physically real then it follows that thinking about a dream after you wake up no matter how little you remember will still contribute to your free will. It’s not just the dream itself but also your response to it during the day that also counts. Dreams are like our own version of a Boltzmann brain that you created out of the chaos of your unconscious.

Panentheism: God is in the tree, the rock, and the river.
Pantheism: the tree, the rock, and the river are in God.

However, a lot people with these beliefs don’t think carefully about this difference, so, practically speaking, pantheism and panentheism tend to overlap or blend, as they do with polytheism.

There’s many layers to this world and we can go however deep we want. There’s an interpersonal level to pantheism of merely trying to feel connected and compassionate towards others in general. There can be many ways to express that simple belief. We could just view the physical universe as being random in its creation. It’s easiest to understand other people compared to nonhuman spirits. As you say there’s also the imbuing of nature with spirituality. From this vantage point it’d be like the natural world was intentionally created by a spirit rather than randomness. We usually view nature as impersonal and incomprehensibly vast or even infinite. Nature worship can of course be compatible with pantheism. But our theory of mind and empathy is more geared towards fellow humans. In my mind the admiration of nature is within a very deep layer of reality and so it personally reminds me more of panentheism or mysticism. I’m not disagreeing with you about nature and pantheism. Technically you’re right that we’re all part of nature. But by its sheer size I feel nature worship sometimes places emphasis on the transcendent qualities of the world rather than interpersonal communication with others in our social environment. Therefore nature worship by itself is consistent with multiple worldviews and faiths to different degrees.

Imagining a personal spirit inside the sky:

Robert Miles - Children - Screenshot

Existence is proof that we are not the measure of all things. — James Riley

If time is infinitesimally continuous then everyone would be gliding through time at infinitesimally different rates of time.

Existence is proof that you don't take us with you when you die. — James Riley

I disagree! The universe will be so upset when I die that the whole place will implode.

One way to think of colour is that the sensation is infinitely complex. If that were the case, then no two areas have exactly the same colour. So even a red wall will have microscopic variations in shade. In that way every object has a different colour. Then colour could be perceived as the object itself.

When we’re close to a mirror where our head is in the middle we can move our eyes to look diagonally through it and see much further behind us in that particular direction. When we step right back from a mirror we can’t look diagonally at it with the same angle as the mirror gets smaller from perspective. But the mirror reflects more objects that are in front of us when we look straight at it from afar. So it’s not a simple case of the mirror reflecting more field of view when we change position. The area of a mirror surface is always the same and so the 2D visual volume it reflects will be the same.

Or for all we know the image on the mirror is actually the real size of the object and it’s our own perception that’s arbitrarily enlarging objects to twice the size!

The mirror we see exists inside our own mind so to speak.

As the mirror moves back it gets smaller itself due to perspective from your point of view and so your image remains the same size even though the field of view within the mirror is increasing.

Anyone who spends enough time admiring themselves in a mirror should know the answer to that question!

If our image on a mirror is somehow always the same size then wouldn’t that have to apply vice versa where the mirror is moving instead of us moving? So if a mirror was moving back several meters as your position remained the same does your actual size on the mirror change?

What would happen if we viewed the brain as purely physical; as though it’s simply where all of the sentient memory is being stored? Then your consciousness would literally “be” the entire world that you see with it’s myriad colours and diverse qualia. It would be like perspective were a real physical force in your subjective sense of photon vision. Although it’d clearly have no effect at all on the actual matter of objects or indeed the living minds of others.

Needless to say that there can be an absurd element to the world sometimes. An infinitude of time is incomprehensible. Who knows what belief system humans will have tens of thousands of years in the future. I don’t think having faith in a particular belief system must contradict a recognition of the absurd: we can always be understanding of others who have espoused different faith beliefs based on their own unique experiences of the absurd or nihilistic features of existence. So an appreciation of the absurd can increase our tolerance of other religions. It’d be like our spiritual beliefs of what we view God to be like were a subset of the total universe where a particular God might exist within an infinite amount of absurdness!

“Camus states that because the leap of faith escapes rationality and defers to abstraction over personal experience, the leap of faith is not absurd. Camus considers the leap of faith as "philosophical suicide," rejecting both this and physical suicide.”

Dualism might appear to be more usually associated with free will. But what would happen if we instead combined dualism with determinism? Then our visual reality and our tactile sense could exist in parallel without directly interacting. So long as they both have the same initial conditions and that our volition during the day is in some way deterministic, then hypothetically light and matter doesn’t really have to interact.

We can wonder if colour is spatially real when it applies to material objects. It’s not like a more vivid shade of blue alters the density of that substance. But can this question of unrealness be extended to the temporal dimension? If colour wasn’t real in terms of time then it’d be as though the colours were eternal and timeless. What are the options? Colour might have arisen just like matter in the Big Bang. In that case the colour of a green forest would of always been there even if no one was ever there to observe it. Or else in a biological sense the qualia of colour might derive from primordial human evolution where our perception of red is based on ancient memories and associations that have trickled down by way of our genes. Alternatively we could perhaps view the sensations of colour as originating from the deepest parts of our own unconscious mind. This would be where the brain superimposes the feeling of touch and balance on top of an initial, fundamental layer of these inexplicable colours (rather than it being the other way round where colour would just be secondary or epiphenomenal). So in that scenario colour would seem to be the primary reality. To be honest I don’t exactly know.

Another motive for believing in heaven is not just eternal happiness but also the hope that we can see our deceased friends again. I interpret reincarnation to mean that we can see the souls of the people we know though of course in a different bodily form. It’s hard to think about death and the next life so it’d be doubly hard to consider ourselves dying once again in that next life followed by an endless series of deaths! So maybe in a probabilistic sense you’d be able to bump into an erstwhile friend in one of those future lives without ever realising it. We might not see them all in our next life but maybe during our 4th or 50th round at reincarnation! Maybe if there is a God He could bias the probability such that friends might see each other in reincarnated lives more frequently. This could theoretically happen through group reincarnation. I often think reincarnation will be the final stage of heaven but at death I simply wouldn't be prepared for such a radical alteration. Sometimes I'm amazed at how easily cultures like China or religions like Hindus can brace people so easily for reincarnation. Perhaps the way they live in such large population centres reminds them of their kindred spirits for reincarnation.

Panentheism: “the belief that God is a part of the universe as well as transcending it.”

I think pantheism and panentheism can be two sides of the same coin in the way that the destruction of death transcends your own consciousness. Death is incomprehensible and outside of our control. Our state of consciousness at death appears to be outside of causality and time. Yet we’re obviously all conscious now at the same time in parallel and simultaneously rather than in a delayed system of one death after another. So there’s a lot that separates everyone in a literal sense. We clearly don’t ever want to feel very connected to or responsible for people who perform evil actions. But I suppose we can try to feel connected to a spirit of goodwill.

how can one explain the astonishing degree of agreement between you and I and Aunty Millie and Fred over there, if there is no 'reality' that is somehow shared by us all?

Two possibilities occur to me, neither of them very palatable. Perhaps me and Aunty Millie and Fred over there are your creations, you being all that there is. Or perhaps you and me and Auntie Millie and Fred over there all partake in some 'overmind' that sets us up to think much the same thing. Solipsism or panpsychism. — Banno

Even if we can’t directly observe the physical actions of someone’s consciousness on their materialistic neuronal brain, we can always discern the after-effects of their mental processes through their apparent free will and ability to spontaneously adapt or improvise to you and their surroundings. So if you can infer that you yourself have free will and that other people can change based on your input, then logically they must also have this same capacity for free will and consciousness.

“In terms of length, the average brain is around 15 centimeters long.”

If the world were like a projection in our brain where our eyes are somehow in front of what we see rather than behind it, with the visual screen extending backwards into the brain, then the third dimension of depth would have to be abbreviated to a maximum length of that of the brain itself. So in that scenario the depth axis would be minimised and an apparent metre of visual light qualia would be a lot less than the real tactile metre it corresponds to.

It’s quite easy to distinguish a flat 2D screen from it’s surroundings as it’s small and lacks resolution. But our retina has a much higher resolution than a TV screen. So even if the retina conveyed a 2D version of a 3D world we’d really still perceive it as 3D. The plank scale of our physical world is a lot more miniscule than an electronic pixel:

“The proton is about 100 million trillion times larger than the Planck length...
The Planck scale was invented as a set of universal units, so it was a shock when those limits also turned out to be the limits where the known laws of physics applied. For example, a distance smaller than the Planck length just doesn’t make sense—the physics breaks down.”
-symmetry magazine


“Pixels are the individual points of light that make up a digital picture. For example, an 8K TV has 33, 177, 600 pixels. To note, the term 8K refers to the number of pixels (about 8000) displayed horizontally per line.
However, in human vision, eyes do not contain pixels. The closest comparison would be the rods and cones in your eyes that help you see. What’s more, what you resolve is the picture you are able to put together with your eyes and brain, not what necessarily exists in reality.
Since the human eye doesn’t see in pixels at all, it’s pretty hard to compare them to a digital display.
But curious minds want to know, if you could compare the two, how many pixels would the human eye likely have? It turns out, someone smart used some pretty complex math and (assuming 20/20 vision) got to 576 megapixels. 576 megapixels is roughly 576,000,000 individual pixels, so at first glance, it would seem that we could see way more than an 8K TV has to offer. But it’s not that simple. For instance, we see in 576 megapixel definition when our eyes are moving, but a single glance would only be about 5-15 megapixels.
What’s more, your eyes naturally have a lot of flaws that a camera or digital screen don’t. For example, you have a built-in blind spot where your optic nerve meets up with your retina. You might also have a refractive error like nearsightedness or farsightedness. You might have also been born with (seemingly) super-powered eyes, like tetrachromats: people with four cone cells in their eyes instead of three. This means they can see many more colour varieties and therefore, when looking at a TV, could potentially distinguish much more than the average person...
So if you’re wondering if your potentially extreme high-definition 576 megapixel eyes can see more than an 8K TV has to offer, consider this experiment: think of when you are at the beach. If you look down at the sand closest to you, you can easily count the individual grains, right? But the farther you look, the more difficult or impossible it becomes. That’s because distance plays a huge role in our resolution.”
https://www.lasikmd.com/blog/can-the-human-eye-see-in-8k

Perhaps we could eventually use a binoculars or a telescope to discern distant areas on a high-resolution TV screen!


“Steve Jobs introduced the Retina display like this: "There's a magic number right around 300 pixels per inch, that when you hold something around to 10 to 12 inches away from your eyes, is the limit of the human retina to differentiate the pixels." In other words, the individual points of light would, theoretically vanish, creating a seamless image.
But Raymond Soneira, president of DisplayMate Technologies and a frequent critic of screen-makers' marketing claims, calls that "marketing puffery." He says that your eye’s resolution isn't counted in pixels. Instead, your eye is limited by its angular resolution. "The angular resolution of the eye is 0.6 arc minutes per pixel,” he wrote in an e-mail to tech publications in 2010. "So, if you hold an iPhone at the typical 12 inches from your eyes, that works out to 477 pixels per inch." The bottom line: "The iPhone has significantly lower resolution than the [eye's] retina. It actually needs a resolution significantly higher than the retina in order to deliver an image that appears perfect to the retina."
Now, it's worth noting that his analysis wasn't universally accepted. Phil Plait, who spent years calibrating the Hubble Space Telescope's optics, wrote that Soneira's numbers hold true only for people with perfect vision. If you have average eyesight, Jobs's claims are fine.”
- scientificamerican: Why Hi-Res Isn’t Always Better

Light travels so fast that it’s unaffected by the curvature of Earth. It’s only under certain circumstances of massive stars that there’s any gravitational lensing. We’ll feel the effects of gravity on solid objects when we touch them. But our sensation of colour is unrelated to mass.

“A gravitational lens can occur when a huge amount of matter, like a cluster of galaxies, creates a gravitational field that distorts and magnifies the light from distant galaxies that are behind it but in the same line of sight. The effect is like looking through a giant magnifying glass.”
-hubblesite

“Past research in experimental psychology and human physiology showed that perceiving the vertical and the “up” direction is based on multimodal integration of vestibular, somatosensory, and visual signals. Vestibular receptors located in the inner ear are directly sensitive to linear accelerations, and the vestibular system has been shown to play a crucial role in sensing the vertical... Another reference for the perception of the vertical and “up” direction is a body-centered reference based on somatosensory information emanating from the receptors distributed in the muscles, joints, skin, and viscera...
Although most research on internal models of gravity has focused on the perception of visual stimuli in motion, it is very likely that representation of the vertical and “up” direction may modulate the perception of static visual stimuli as well...
Our data show that pictures of a human body that is tilted in the direction opposite to physical gravity (“up”) are judged as more stable than pictures of a body that is tilted in the direction of physical gravity (“down”)...
Collectively, the present data point to the highly adaptive role of the representation of the vertical and “up” direction and that humans constantly update this representation on the basis of multisensory cues, not only to maintain balance for standing upright or achieving acrobatic feats... but also for accurate visual perception.”
https://jov.arvojournals.org/article.aspx?articleid=2122063

It would look very weird if we didn’t perceive the ground as below us. It’d be like everyone was abseiling as they walked vertically up and down the footpath. It would seem as if gravity was acting horizontally on our physical body if we were at the equator. But that’s not how we perceive gravity and it’s like wherever on earth we look out towards the horizon is the top of the earth. Everyone almost perceives themselves to be at the north pole in the way that we can’t directly see the curvature of our planet on the ground in front of us. Location and space is relative that way so what I perceive as up in Ireland will be inverted in Australia. I’m not sure how exactly it is that our physical sense of balance can realign our perception of completely massless light given that light and gravity don’t seem to interact too much. Is the image rotated a bit in our brain?

Other people have a different perspective than you; both metaphorically and literally. If someone looks at a scene and then moves away so that I can look from the exact same position, will we have both experienced the same perspective and depth perception from that vantage point? Will there be any slight geometrical differences? My sense of perspective will obviously conflict with another person’s view of perspective when we’re at different locations. If an object is closer to you than it is to me then you’ll perceive it as being bigger. So if I’m at the centre of my reality that doesn’t make me the visual centre of anyone else’s reality; we each have a unique locus of perspective.

The image we see can represent a far greater area than the surface area of our eye. The scale of the background could be 1000s of times the size of our eyes. However we could still interpret the external image as being the same size as the eye. Consequently everything you see, from the floor below to the sky above, would be miniaturised and only a few centimetres long in total image height. The image would be almost entirely parallel to your eyes as you look straight ahead. Your perception of the ground would counterintuitively be at the same height level as the lower half of the eye. Perhaps a shortcut to think of this idea would be that the image we see exists inside of the eye rather than behind the eye in the brain or in front of the eye in external reality. An analogy for it would be like the visual image we see with its colour qualia is almost directly inside the vitreous humour itself. Invisible external light needs to first enter the eye to become visible while the brain subsequently reinterprets and resizes the image even though the image itself is right inside the middle of your own eye. We interpret light as being external because we cannot sense the fact that it has been refracted as it enters your eye. For example in the case of virtual images we view light as having travelled in a straight line even though it might have been redirected or reflected several times before it reached your retina.

Definition: “The vitreous humour (also known simply as the vitreous) is a clear, colourless fluid that fills the space between the lens and the retina of your eye.”

We often think of perspective as being epiphenomenal because it obviously has no effect on physical objects. Changing your sightline relative to a moving object won’t make it veer off course. Clearly the changing size of distant objects won’t result in them experiencing any strain or deformation forces. The mass and density of objects remain constant irrespective of your conscious location. That said, perspective is still a major depth cue. The change of size affects the area and volume disproportionately through the square cube law. Of course it’s not that objects are orbiting around you but visually speaking you are essentially the centre of your own subjective perception. Light travels in straight lines from the top and bottom of the object to your eye. But we’ve no way of seeing the absolute size of the object seeing as we can only see it’s subsequent apparent size due to perspective. So the way that light gets translated into colour qualia might be indirect. Motion parallax seems to exploit this mismatch between apparent and absolute size. An identical eye movement from left to right will correspond to a larger visual displacement the further out into the horizon you can see. So if your head is directed downwards the eye movement merely equates to a few meters of the ground below you. If you look out in front of you from a high vantage point then this same eye angle across will cause a change of perhaps a kilometre.


“Q: Can you explain the "square-cube" law in easy to understand terms?

A: It’s not that hard to get. The square-cubed law is about the relationship between volume and area.

Let’s take a water tank that holds 1 cubic metre of water. If you double every side of it, how much more water can it hold? And how much more material will you need to build one?...

To build the first tank, you need 6 sides of 1 square metre, so 6 2 of stainless steel. To build the second tank, you need 6 sides of 2x2 m of stainless steel, or 6 sides of 4m2=24m2 of stainless steel, four times as much.

So if you double the size in length, the surface area is double-squared, while the volume is double-cubed. Okay?

And this has all kinds of consequences in real life. Say that you are an airplane manufacturer and you have a very successful airplane. But now you need to scale up. To remain competitive, you need to offer a plane that can carry eight times as many passengers.

Oh, simple, you say. Just take the old plane and double every measurement. We can probably save tons of money because we will only need four times as much material on the hull. Right?

Wrong. You see, while carrying capacity (in terms of fuel, passengers, kilograms, whatever) is determined by volume, the lift of the wing is determined by area. So if you double every measurement, you will have 8 times as much aircraft, passengers, fuel, cargo etc, but you will only have 4 times as much lift. And that means that your scaled-up plane will not be able to get off the ground – it will only have half of the lift per kg airplane than your original one.

There are lots of other examples, from sailing ships (sail area is squared, cargo volume is cubed) to rocket engines (heat transfer in rocket engines depend on the area of the nozzles, not on the volume of fuel).”
Quora