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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




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





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





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

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

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





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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




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

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

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

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

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



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

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



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

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

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

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

“Your Color Red Really Could Be My Blue”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Okay, the next feature of consciousness, after this marvelous unified conscious field, is that it functions causally in our behavior. I gave you a scientific demonstration by raising my hand, but how is that possible? How can it be that this thought in my brain can move material objects? Well, I'll tell you the answer. I mean, we don't know the detailed answer, but we know the basic part of the answer, and that is, there is a sequence of neuron firings, and they terminate where the acetylcholine is secreted at the axon end-plates of the motor neurons.”
John Searle Ted talk

“In physiology, medicine, and anatomy, muscle tone (residual muscle tension or tonus) is the continuous and passive partial contraction of the muscles, or the muscle's resistance to passive stretch during resting state. It helps to maintain posture and declines during REM sleep.”
- Wikipedia

Is the natural tendency of the human body to do biologically nothing if we weren’t always moving it with our conscious decisions? The muscles are actually always a bit active even when we’re simply resting. They often exist in a balanced system of antagonistic pairs. So the front and back leg muscles have to actively oppose each other when we are just standing still. This is called muscle tone and we aren’t always aware of it.

Maybe the body can indirectly exploit this complex and delicate system so as to conform with our conscious motor decisions. The brain might be able to passively weaken a muscle to reflexively achieve limb motion instead of actively moving the corresponding muscle in the antagonistic pair. This wouldn’t be too far off the idea of free won’t (a version of free will where we have the ability to veto decisions).

Likewise it can be easy to let the mind wander. It’s sometimes difficult to try to ignore our thoughts in a mindfulness session. So without exerting mental energy is the natural tendency of the mind to creatively or haphazardly think even without conscious decisions? Our consciousness in this case would serve to guide and analytically direct our racing thoughts. I’m not 100% sure though.

There’s no perspective in absolute time and space.

Can a universe be said to exist if there’s no consciousness inside it? Our visual perception of external objects would comply with the illusion of perspective. Although do non-sentient external objects themselves obey perspective? These tactile objects don’t have consciousness. So if these inert entities could perceive the world, what would it be like? If perspective is an illusion caused by our first-person view of the world, does that imply that external physical objects always remain the same size from a God-like bird’s eye view? But it’s difficult to even imagine a world where objects don’t get smaller in proportion with the increasing depth from a person.

https://static.boredpanda.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Worlds-Full-of-Lemons-by-Surrealist-Painter-Vitaly-Urzhumov8__880.jpg
Fantastical surreal art on google images. There’ll be no shortage of lemonade!

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d3/Vincent_Van_Gogh_-_Wheatfield_with_Crows.jpg
Even familiar rural scenes can be imbued with surreal qualities.


There’s much controversy these days about randomness, fine-tuning, quantum strangeness, etc.. What if randomness could be extended to the large-scale universe in general rather than any specific localised system? If the big bang was initiated by random means, would that process leave any residual imprint on our perception of events? So while the current motion of objects are deterministic, their original starting speed and location coordinates would be random. Someone could psychoanalyse the motion of particles to wonder how the object came to have its physical properties of speed and mass in the first place. We’ve lived in the world so long that it’d be as if we’re habituated and desensitised to the peculiar absurdness of our surroundings.

Definition of anthropic principle: “either of two principles in cosmology:
a : conditions that are observed in the universe must allow the observer to exist
— called also weak anthropic principle
b : the universe must have properties that make inevitable the existence of intelligent life
— called also strong anthropic principle”

“Basically, relativity said that the laws of physics couldn’t depend on how fast you were moving; all you could measure was the velocity of one object relative to another.
But when Einstein applied this principle to his thought experiment, it produced a contradiction: Relativity dictated that anything he could see while running beside a light beam, including the stationary fields, should also be something Earthbound physicists could create in the lab. But nothing like that had ever been observed.”
- National Geographic

If someone travelled at light speed, I guess they’d see a series of still photographic images. The light ahead of them would be stationary relative to their own speed.

There are obviously many different forces in physics such as the strong nuclear force. But from a philosophical stance, if consciousness isn’t a tactile material entity then for lack of an alternative it must be a bright photonic concoction. There’s simply no other substance that’s so far discovered with such unreal properties.

We only see light that enters our own eyes; so the light that other people see is invisible to us. Instead of viewing consciousness as a material substance trapped inside of the skull, what if your consciousness was the entirety of the actual light that you perceive in your visual system? Light itself is your consciousness.

A physical object can’t be accelerated to the speed of light. But if non-material consciousness is itself made of light, then obviously consciousness could effortlessly travel at speed c. It would be as easy as it would be for light emanating from household light bulb.

A mundane camera can essentially freeze time with a single photograph. Unconscious dreams often take the form of a series of seemingly related photographs through which we confabulate a movie-like dream narrative. Could sleep be where subjective consciousness zaps forward through time at light speed? That for sure would explain the bizarreness of dreams.

“In physics, a standing wave, also known as a stationary wave, is a wave which oscillates in time but whose peak amplitude profile does not move in space. The peak amplitude of the wave oscillations at any point in space is constant with time, and the oscillations at different points throughout the wave are in phase. The locations at which the absolute value of the amplitude is minimum are called nodes, and the locations where the absolute value of the amplitude is maximum are called antinodes.”
- Wikipedia

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hBH4c3MAACA

Pantheism is indeed a harmonious, pluralistic and tolerant belief. I think Pantheism can really square the circle; the statement of pantheism is simultaneously very humble and highly assertive.

“A luminous object is one that produces light. A non-luminous object is one that reflects light.”
- nbed website

If we assume “all is mind”, then a corollary is that luminous objects are also part of a person’s mind. Do we ever directly see an incident ray of light? Might we be only seeing the reflected colour of light? For example; when we glance at a yellow street light, is that yellow glow a result of the real light or simply the after-effects of that light? Is the amber colour merely a secondary consequence of the heated bulb and wires or it’s interaction with any surrounding fog?





“There’s no dispute over the constancy of the speed of light when measured over a round trip. But what of its speed over a one-way trip?”
https://www.google.ie/amp/s/www.technologyreview.com/2010/11/09/89763/the-one-way-speed-of-light-conundrum/amp/

If light exists in our own visual system, then logically we cannot ever sentiently get ahead of it in order to measure the elapsed time for a one-way trip.





“It’s not like superdeterminism somehow prevents an experimentalist from turning a knob. Rather, it’s that the detectors’ states aren’t independent of the system one tries to measure. There just isn’t any state the experimentalist could twiddle their knob to which would prevent a correlation.”
- backreaction website

We must rely on our own vision to read a light detector. The detector in turn probably depends on electronics and the quantum properties of light to track that very light beam. So even if we tried to circumvent the problem by using a tactile language like Braille to measure the results, it could still wind up being a bit circular.





“Most physicists of the time believed that light traveled through what they called the "luminiferous ether." In 1887, two American scientists, Albert Michelson and Edward Morley, built a device known as an interferometer, which they hoped would enable them to prove the existence of the ether.”
- amnh website

If the invisible luminiferous aether were so dense, wouldn’t there also be problems with light refraction as it entered Earth’s atmosphere? Would the light just be reflected straight back to the sun as happens in snell’s window? Or was the ether meant to also suffuse the air at ground level? I suppose reflection has the same result as a 180 degree refraction. Conceptually speaking, how does a massless particle know where the mass is located in order for it to be reflected? It’s on a par with asking how the sense of sight can be explained in terms of the sense of touch. Without one having a synesthetic sense, there doesn’t appear to be a visceral explanation.

“When light is incident upon a medium of lesser index of refraction, the ray is bent away from the normal, so the exit angle is greater than the incident angle. Such reflection is commonly called "internal reflection".”
- hyperphysics website

“The properties of light and water, and the refractive index of water leads to an interesting effect known as Snell's window. You will see a large circle of light, too large for most lenses, if you look up on a sunny day.”
- uwphotographyguide website

Synaesthesia: “a condition in which someone experiences things through their senses in an unusual way, for example by experiencing a colour as a sound, or a number as a position in space”







Just as an aside, the speaker’s last question ponders the dilemma of how space is connected to time!
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nrPPXU1MECk

The idea of gravity arising as a passive result of perpetual motion may not actually be too outlandish. The extremely fine-tuned orbits may initially seem too much of a coincidence. But the perimeter of an ellipse is actually arbitrary according to the video below.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5nW3nJhBHL0

A needle in a haystack: “something that is impossible or extremely difficult to find, especially because the area you have to search is too large.”

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4Lb-6rxZxx0&list=PLt5AfwLFPxWIUYlCb5ip9f_s4qm1zi8kc&index=19

Is that the same game though? If there were 100 doors, then to be consistent wouldn’t the game host have to close exactly 33 of them? So you’d then have your original choice with 66 other doors. A one out of 67 chance seems at first glance to be a harder challenge. Unless the number of prizes were also increased so there’d be 33 doors with the money behind them. 33 out of 67 is still 50:50 as we’re obviously forgetting about the infinite number of decimal places when 1/3 or 2/3 is converted to a decimal.

But if he closed 99 doors for there to be only one other door; it would certainly appear to be more than a coincidence. In that case you’d definitely change as there’s the notion of the complement (1-probability of it not happening). But if there’s two doors out of 3 as is the case in the original game; I’m not sure if that argument holds as strongly. Had you instead chosen a different door, that same door would also be able to exploit the law of the complement. So shouldn’t it just neutralise back to 50:50?

Keep/hold your cards close to your chest: “to keep your intended actions secret.”

Bluff: “To deceive someone by making them think either that you are going to do something when you really have no intention of doing it, or that you have knowledge that you do not really have, or that you are someone else.”

Maths is obviously a much more precise language compared to English. I’m afraid I haven’t tried at all to understand the maths arguments. So I’m not trying to take a verbal explanation out of context. It’s merely that I don’t understand why it’s relevant that the game show host knows the answer. It would appear to rely on a sort of cynicism or reverse psychology. Bluffing is an imprecise psychological technique related to tone and body language. So I don’t quite see how that could somehow translate into concrete maths.

Pseudorandom: “ (of a number, a sequence of numbers, or any digital data) satisfying one or more statistical tests for randomness but produced by a definite mathematical procedure.”

Even an individual’s first attempt in the Monthy Hall game isn’t completely random. They might have chosen a certain number owing to subliminal subconscious factors. Maybe 2 is actually their favourite number or that was just the first number they looked at on the stage.

Lucky charm: “an object that is believed to bring its owner good luck.”

“ ... supraliminal messages involve a stimulus that has both a conscious and subconscious influence. Unlike subliminal messages, supraliminal messages contain a stimulus that people can actually notice, but since people don’t know that it’s influencing their behaviour.”
- subliminal advertisements website

“However, the notion of seeing conscious choice work as a veto may be exactly what we need to focus on in order to stop engaging in nonconsciously initiated actions that are undermining our lives. We can veto our habitual actions if we make the intention to. We have free choice to invoke this "free won't!"”
- Psychology Today

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TVq2ivVpZgQ

I’ll just give my two cents on the problem! What if you approached it from a free will compatiblist viewpoint? How free is the player in the game to make a random choice in the first place?

Probability is not an exact science. It needs more than one trial to make an estimate. So intuitively it seems that the probability must be 50% for each remaining option. The fact that the host reveals another false option doesn’t seem to have any bearing on your remaining choices. Maybe for a single trial the probability really is 50%. The trouble would then occur when you try to add the probabilities of multiple trials for this unusual game.

The setup of the game is somewhat abstract. Perhaps a real life analogy would be if you were a tourist at an unfamiliar road junction. There were three different paths. A local person in the area knows the correct way. But the person is for whatever reason trying to be a bit cute and won’t give you the answer upfront. He tells you to take a guess. After you doing so he subsequently tells you that one of the other paths that you did not choose the wrong way.

Let’s imagine that you were in a state in the middle of America. You wanted to go to New York and the other roads led to Los Angeles or Miami. A city is a massive area so there’s no quantum strangeness or superposition of answers at play. In this case the goat wouldn’t be in a hybrid state of being dead or alive! The city is always at that particular location regardless of the choice you made. So your original choice and then “the road not taken” both seem to be equally likely. So for that junction both roads are at 50%.

But the road you take is windy and you encounter numerous junctions with each having 3 other alternative paths. Each one also has a stubborn local person. I think your next decision is inevitably going to be slightly biased by your previous choices. If you picked left the last time, you might then be tempted to pick the right turn on the following junction. You might mistakenly err on the side of caution and not pick the left path twice in a row. So the decision of the tourist/observer is not completely free to make a truly random choice on subsequent paths.

Maybe by always switching to the other path after talking to the local person, you as a deterministic agent might be able to counteract and overcome your own personal ignorance of the various probability fallacies. This could allow you to minimise the risk of going too far off track in terms of the junction analogy.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=b8DehsMIlkE

“I recommend that you take a look at the entry on "Relativism"...”
- magritte

Thanks. Yes I will have a read of it.



“Much of the human brain is arranged in a way that the right half of the brain controls the left half of the body and vice versa.”
https://www.essilorusa.com/newsroom/right-or-left-does-one-side-of-your-brain-control-your-vision

I remember when I was younger I had a fighter jet video game where you had to move the wheel scroller in the opposite direction to control the plane. It just reminded me of it when I mentioned the visual image being directed the other way towards the brain. Although I’m not too sure how much they’re related to each other!

https://howthingsfly.si.edu/flight-dynamics/roll-pitch-and-yaw

“But habitual use is not the only possibility. Inverting or not inverting may also involve differences in spatial perception and the interpretation of information on a screen. One theory involves how the player perceives their relationship with the character or vehicle they are controlling.”
https://www.google.ie/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/games/2020/feb/28/why-do-video-game-players-invert-the-controls