Anti-Realism
An antirealist is "a person who denies the existence of an objective reality". It sees "no access to a mind-independent reality, even if it exists". But "if you don't believe in scientific
realism, you can still do and use science. You can believe that science may not tell us about a physical world but rather tell us about a mental one instead".
Physical reality is 3-dimensional. So would anti-realism imply that the mind is 2-dimensional due to the seeming non-existence of the physical world? Reality would be like a TV screen with no actual substance behind what you see. What would the the effect on optics? For instance, perspective is defined as "the way that objects appear smaller when they are further away". Wouldn't antirealism need an alternative way to explain this if external objects don't exist in the first place for light to bounce off? Perhaps a related discussion is the holographic universe; https://www.southampton.ac.uk/news/2017/01/holographic-universe.page.
Lastly, even if reality was solely mental, I think the world would still be real in the sense that other people exist to perceive it. Even if it isn't physical in nature, it would have to be some sort of projection that we're all participants in.
realism, you can still do and use science. You can believe that science may not tell us about a physical world but rather tell us about a mental one instead".
Physical reality is 3-dimensional. So would anti-realism imply that the mind is 2-dimensional due to the seeming non-existence of the physical world? Reality would be like a TV screen with no actual substance behind what you see. What would the the effect on optics? For instance, perspective is defined as "the way that objects appear smaller when they are further away". Wouldn't antirealism need an alternative way to explain this if external objects don't exist in the first place for light to bounce off? Perhaps a related discussion is the holographic universe; https://www.southampton.ac.uk/news/2017/01/holographic-universe.page.
Lastly, even if reality was solely mental, I think the world would still be real in the sense that other people exist to perceive it. Even if it isn't physical in nature, it would have to be some sort of projection that we're all participants in.
Comments (461)
Wouldn't the mind remain objectively real?
- Sam Harris
How so?
These quotes and your interpretation of them are all made from an implicitly realist point of view, and furthermore, one which sees ‘mind’ and ‘matter’ or ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ as totally seperate domains (as Fresco notes). So in this understanding, ‘reality’ is either ‘objective’, really there, given; or it’s ‘subjective’, ‘in the mind’.
But I don’t think the issue is nearly so clear cut as that. What I think the realist view forgets, ignores or excludes is the role of judgement in anything we see or know about the world. After all there is no light inside the skull. When we see something, the process of seeing relies on the interpretation of visual sensations - even apparently simple knowledge acts are interpretive. And I think a credible ant-realist epistemology simply acknowledges the fundamental role that the mind plays in any knowledge act, whether of objects or anything else.
- Lehar
Superdeterminism: "not only is our behaviour determined, but it is determined precisely in such a way as to prevent us from seeing that the world is deterministic".
So are you saying our own thoughts and judgements are not real; perhaps they are deterministic and not truly our own? That brings up the problem of free will. Perhaps the different issues in consciousness are related. Must an antirealist also be a determinist? It's a big topic.
That's for sure. Have a read of this.
by metaphysical antirealism, do you mean idealism? One such popular proponent, at least in early modern era, was of course Berkeley. But Berkeley's idealism is a bit different (as far as I can tell) from modern conceptions of antirealism, many of which are presupposed from constructionist perspectives...antirealism can refer to anything from skepticism (in epistemology) to better understanding the role language/society has on our conceptions of reality (intersubjectivity)...
I used to consider myself an antirealist, largely because I was led to it through the constructivist conception of reality-I still enjoy various tenets in antirealist thought, especially with regards to the problem of consciousness. New Mysterianism (or anti-constructive naturalism/cognitive closure) can be reconciled with antirealism, that is, it holds that certain knowledge is outside the domain of human understanding (if it exists at all), at least for now.
I've always seen metaphysics with a very definitive line between the two, that is, the "realist" and "antirealist" camp, and within these two dichotomies, one can (usually) reconcile various theories within and overlapping other areas of philosophy (this is a very over-simplified explanation, all of these concepts become increasingly complex in their own right)
realist: materialism, physicalism, reductionism, eliminativism ect.
antirealist: idealism, transcendentalism, subjectivism, noumenon?, constructivism, skepticism, post-modernism, qualia,
I'm currently putting forward an argument along these lines, that while an 'objective' and absolute account of reality may exist, us as human beings, do not have the capacities to appreciate or otherwise understand and comprehend such a reality-as we are forever entangled within our subjective realities (as @Wayfarer has noted)...for more on this, start with Nagel
I presume, that other beings, insofar as they experience subjective reality (I argue also that most, if not all, living things experience some form of subjective reality) cannot escape their subjective realities either, and while humans have made valiant attempts at categorizing, and otherwise understanding the (what appears to be at least) physical world, these attempts are incomplete, and in some cases grossly incorrect, laden with human biases and undetected human limitations.
To answer your original question, science is threatened. There is a large break between science and philosophy that occurred in the last century or so...hence why philosophy is largely relegated to the page of uselessness, while science is upheld as the new faith, new religion (scientism). Nagel mentions this too. Science reassures us of our human superiority, safety, and ability, it plays on the man vs. nature trend, and in recent times, is famed as being what will "save us" from ecological collapse. These are major issues within the theoretical understanding of science as a field, that I hope in the next decade or so will come under scrutiny.
That doesn't sound right because it references the objective, which is to suggest an external reality that the anti-realist can't commit to. What you described seems like indirect realism.
"Indirect realism is broadly equivalent to the accepted view of perception in natural science that states that we do not and cannot perceive the external world as it really is but know only our ideas and interpretations of the way the world is." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_and_indirect_realism
Or your skull is below the sky, and notes the sky through the imprint the sky leaves upon it - though it cannot directly note the sky.
Of course going back to the original query, that begs the question, how does what shouldn't be there leave an imprint? And a different question: are you incapable of directly seeing the sky, even if you haven't done so yet?
Quoting Michael McMahon
Look at a multiple choice test.
All the answers are predetermined, but you're free to pick whichever one you like.
There's choice in chance and chance in choice. You're free to make of it what you will.
Going back to:
Quoting Michael McMahon
That would be self-denial.
An anti-realist would have to deny his anti-realism to comply with it.
Any imposition against reality is inescapably objective by itself, and likewise subjective when viewed as a part.
That's the thin version. There's a bit more to it than that. It's more about the meaning of propositions than about the reality of the objects around us.
A realist might say that "Here is a cat" will be true exactly if there is a cat, here. The cat is independent of the utterance, and will be there whether the utterance is made or not, and indeed independently of the meaning of the utterance.
An antirealist might rather say that the truth of "Here is a cat" depends at least to some extent on the circumstances in which the utterance takes place, especially the way the utterance is used to 'carve up' the world; so to some extent for the antirealist there is only a cat if we all decide that's how we will talk...
Given what I said above, I hope it is clear that there is little difference between realists and antirealists in what they assert about the way things are. Both will say that there is a cat.
Nor need an antirealist deny that there is a physical world. It is open to them to say that if we talk as if there is a physical world, then by that very fact there is indeed a physical world.
And this is I think a very salient point; for 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.
Good post ! If you are following my 'Existence is relative' thread, you may find we have some common ground.
Ive looked over your thread, its a bit waylaid by opposing opinions but I think I understand and appreciate what you are getting at. :)
I've been thinking a bit about dualism. If the mind is fundamentally and ontologically separate from the body, then how does relative motion occur between the mind and the physical world? If someone walks forward 10 meters in space, doesn't their sentient mind also move forward precisely 10 meters with their body? But in order for this corresponding relative motion to occur the mind would necessarily have to be part of the physical world. Only material objects can move relative to each other. Unless the locus of consciousness were somehow forever stationary; that the brain just relays signals to a static and unmoving mind. This would imply that the motion of the mind is illusory and that only the body moves. The mind would solely move through the dimension of time.
I do not see why "physical reality" being three dimensional means that "physical reality" has a monopoly on three dimensional realities.
I feel no obligation to accept your definition of anti-realist. I am unaware that there is any consensus on a definition of an anti-realist.
I question whether our (human) modes of access to being necessarily exhaust all modes of access to being.
I would be surprised if they did.
Likewise short-term behaviour (like whether I choose to lift my hand or not) might be completely deterministic. But perhaps there's scope for free will to act in a more gradual way that affects long-term memory and personality.
That's radical idealism...
Since this topic was resurrected, I want to point out the contradiction of antirealism, defined in the OP as "denial of the existence of an objective reality" and the statement quoted here of "nothing exists except X" where X is the mind in this case. Those two definitions are mutually exclusive, the latter being a form of realism typically knows as idealism, which posits the reality of experiences.
I personally have found 'existence of an objective reality' to be a meaningless concept, and hence see no reason to assert it, which is a little different than actively denying it, so I'm not sure if I qualify as an antirealist.
In other words, anti-realism logically leads to solipsism. Where is this consensus taking place if not in the real world with real human beings? "Consensus" is a term lacking any meaning for an anti-realist.
What does "talking" mean if there isnt a medium that carries this information (that there is something called a physical world that contains cats) between minds?
What would the phrases, "living under a rock", or "living in a bubble" mean for an anti-realist?
Are there other minds, or other bodies? Why do we perceive other minds as other bodies?
Only actual antirealist position I can think of is outright nihilism, and from what I understand of that, no, minds and bodies (not even ones own) exist.
lol, so anti-realism defeats itself by rejecting it's own existence as a belief? A non-existent nihilist? :lol:
Quoting noAxioms
What do you mean by, "'existence of an objective reality" to say that it is meaningless?
- physicsclassroom
While the image my mind perceives will have the identical quantitative dimensions that a camera would have, there still seems to be some qualia attached to our vision. A camera appears to pass on colour to our brain rather than being the source of the colour itself. A colour-blind person would see different colours when looking at the same camera screen or photograph. However, we’d both agree on the objective spatial and proportional features. What gives?
It seems subjectively inconceivable that the sentient contents of my visual system could themselves be projected onto a screen no matter what brain-scanning technologies one might have in the future. Might an upshot of this be that the real image our eyes receive must somehow be converted into a virtual image in the brain? That is to say an image which “cannot be projected onto a screen because the rays never really converge”. Phosphenes are incongruous entities: “an impression of light that occurs without light entering the eye and is usually caused by stimulation of the retina (as by pressure on the eyeball when the lid is closed).” The apparent irreducible and internal nature of phosphenes makes it hard to imagine them ever being by some means transplanted onto an external screen. Another person can’t see exactly that which I observe in my mind’s eye.
The image formed by a plane mirror is the same size as the object.
Why does the image look smaller, then, the further we go from a mirror? It's a simple matter of perspective. Something the same size, but further away, takes up a smaller angle of our vision. Therefore it seems to be smaller.”
- cbakken website
With regards 2D/3D space and perspective, I found an interesting and counterintuitive result on a Vsauce YouTube video. Plane mirrors don’t seem to have perspective despite looking equivalent to our reality. The explanation seems to revolve around similar triangles. The mirror surface itself gets smaller as we move away from it due to perspective. This appears to have a neutralising effect on the size of the image it produces.
It’s after time 4:20 on “Inside a Spherical Mirror”:
https://youtu.be/zRP82omMX0g
True, but then this doesn't explain why we think a modern scientific account of the physical world is better than some previous mythological or metaphysical one. There has to be some explanation for why empiricism works better for understanding whatever reality is and how technology improves.
For example, It's problematic to say we evolved from a common ancestor because we agree to talk that way, as if Darwin and other biologists were better at propaganda than their opponents. Or that lasers work because we agree to talk about light as if certain physical theories were the case.
As for the cat on the mat, the cat itself doesn't care what we agree on. I realize you're not an antirealist, just wanted to add what has always bothered me about the position.
Quoting Banno
SO we have solipsism and panpsychism, neither of which has much appeal; and the rather more mundane view that there is a real world within which we function.
Of course, on these forums it's solipsism and panpsychism that get all the attention. One supposes those who think there is a real world feel little need to enter into debates about it.
Odd, that this thread should return to the living after a year.
- Michelle Carr Psychology Today
I think the sense of touch is a very necessary but not entirely sufficient reason to conclude that the world is real. I think the sense of touch is a prerequisite as it would be very difficult to imagine reality without it having a tactile component. But one would need extra reasons to further validate the reality and consistency of the world. How can one infer that they weren’t still being deceived in a dream by tactile hallucinations?
“In addition, there has been considerable discussion of how touch and vision might differ in terms of their spatial features. Vision, it seems, provides a rich felt awareness of objects in a spatial field–an area where there are potential objects but where none currently reside (that is, we seem in vision to be able to see empty space). Touch, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to present features in this way. Instead, like audition, touch seems only to bring awareness of individual objects that each seem to occupy a specific location... When we press against a solid object, the resistance to our agential act of pressing gives our experience a more solid epistemic foundation than what we experience through the other sensory modalities. Only in touch do we seem to come into direct contact with reality, a reality that actively resists our voluntary actions.”
- Stanford website
Cognitive Psychologist Don Hoffman is not an anti-realist, according to your definition. But he has written a book, The Case Against Reality, which uses your analogy of a TV or computer screen with graphic symbols (icons) that stand in place of a more complex underlying Reality. You may find that his "hidden realism" is similar to your own "mental" reality. :smile:
The Case Against Reality : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_D._Hoffman
Interface Reality : http://bothandblog6.enformationism.info/page21.html
Reality is Ideality : http://bothandblog5.enformationism.info/page17.html
Thank you for the links. Yes there perhaps exist a spectrum of views within anti-realism about the extent of the unreality.
“ “Artificial intelligence will never get jokes like humans do,” he told the Associated Press. The main problem, Hempelmann says, is that robots completely miss the context of humor. In other words, they do not understand the situation or related ideas that make a joke funny...
Puns are a kind of joke that uses a word with two meanings. For example, you could say, “Balloons do not like pop music.” The word “pop” can be a way of saying popular music; or, “pop” can be the sound a balloon makes when it explodes. But a robot might not get the joke. Tristan Miller says that is because humor is a kind of creative language that is extremely difficult for computer intelligence to understand...
Comedy, on the other hand, relies on things that stay close to a pattern, but not completely within it. To be funny, humor must also not be predictable, Bishop said. This makes it much harder for a machine to recognize and understand what is funny.”
- voanews
Does the tone of a person’s speech reveal the fact they are conscious more so than the actual content of what they are saying? There are so many subtle nuances of words in the English language that the meaning of a statement can change a lot depending on the context. There are just so many synonyms and “simply equivocal” or analogical terms. So I think being able to speak fluently inevitably means that they are sentient as they must be able to truly comprehend the dynamic meaning of the words and all of the word’s connotations. A robot wouldn’t be able to suss out the ambiguity of language. Of course we can sometimes tell the emotional state and intention of a person from their tone of voice. For instance, if they are serious or angry they might slightly raise their voice.
“However, even though the language is widely used, it’s not easy to learn. There are many confusing oddities such as homophones, homographs, homonyms, and inconsistent spellings that conspire to make English difficult to learn and easy to misunderstand... A bat can be a flying mammal or what you use to hit a baseball... There’s no shortage of examples of odd and curious inconsistencies with English.”
-owlcation
- Wikipedia
We are not conscious of photons themselves. Our vision doesn’t actually extend outward when we look at a distant object. Our brain can only sense the curved 2D surface of the retina through the optic nerve. The eyes are not telekinetic so the 2D image we detect seems to be retroactively rendered into 3 dimensions in our brain using depth perception cues.
Wikipedia: “In physics and cosmology, digital physics is a collection of theoretical perspectives based on the premise that the universe is describable by information. It is a form of digital ontology about the physical reality. According to this theory, the universe can be conceived of as either the output of a deterministic or probabilistic computer program, a vast, digital computation device, or a mathematical Isomorphism to such a device.”
“Inter process communication (IPC) is used for exchanging data between multiple threads in one or more processes or programs. The Processes may be running on single or multiple computers connected by a network.”
- guru99
If consciousness is entirely physical then it would seem like each person behaved as a parallel computer. The universe obeys deterministic laws so it’s as if our minds are concurrent computations within the supercomputer universe. But how can we be mutually aware of so many people in a large gathering at the same time?
I’m not a computer scientist but I understand there are limits as to how fast a parallel computer can communicate. So how do we communicate with each other in real-time? The communication seems external relative to me when I talk to someone. But isn’t it actually all internal communication from the standpoint of the universe itself? Our minds would be physical entities inside the physical universe.
There’s the problem of other minds as well. I can only infer that you’re conscious by your physical communication. I can’t sense you directly as if I meet someone the image I see of them itself exists within in my mind. We run into the same difficulties of conceptualising other people as we would inferring external objects:
“Another argument for the substance theory is the argument from conception. The argument claims that in order to conceive of an object's properties, like the redness of an apple, one must conceive of the object that has those properties.” - Wikipedia
“In general, knowledge of the external world is knowledge of the existence of a thing distinct from one’s mind.” - https://iep.utm.edu/locke-kn/
“Yes, I'm looking at you, looking at me, looking at you, looking at me, looking back at you.”
- Sammy Hagar
If my mind could directly observe another person’s mind there would be infinite regress as seen in the above quote. There would also be problems with identity as their mind would inherently become a subset of your own if you knew exactly how they felt.
Nice addition Banno. So, I'm firmly in the realist camp, in that regard. However, I do not hold that predictions about what will happen can be true/false at the time of utterance, and someone somewhere, once told me that that 'makes' me an antirealist.
Not that I really care about those names. By my lights, far too much time is spent regurgitating such things rather than just making whatever argument needs to be made. Phorrest, for example has his thinking steeped in such. While those names may be useful identifying some conventional position, they are rather useless for understanding someone who has a view stitched together from various different people from various different schools of thought...
Given those two choices, I can't even imagine anyone actually being an antirealist.
Realism is a useful but unnecessary philosophical fantasy. A non-philosopher can just ignore all philosophical theories and go on with their life. A philosopher can work on their own ideas without concern for such a logically restricting possible universe. There are plenty of others waiting for an unfettered fertile imagination to explore.
The Earth isn’t a perfect sphere. There are uneven parts (mountains, ocean trenches, rift valleys, etc.).
“Even though our planet is a sphere, it is not a perfect sphere. Because of the force caused when Earth rotates, the North and South Poles are slightly flat. Earth's rotation, wobbly motion and other forces are making the planet change shape very slowly, but it is still round.” -NASA website
But an irregular object has different velocities on the outer surface when rotating as centripetal acceleration is inversely proportional to the radius: ac=v2/r.
But would an object launched from such a large object be subject to Euler’s force:
“In classical mechanics, the Euler force is the fictitious tangential force that appears when a non-uniformly rotating reference frame is used for analysis of motion and there is variation in the angular velocity of the reference frame's axes.”
- Wikipedia
For example, an asteroid has an irregular shape.
“Asteroids, without artificial gravity, have relatively no gravity in comparison to earth.” - Wikipedia
If you jumped off a rotating asteroid you’d just fly straight up into space with the same circular speed of the asteroid. This is from the lack of external forces as seen in Newton’s first law. But if the asteroid had an atmosphere you’d be slowed down by the air resistance. So you’d no longer have the same centripetal speed as the asteroid and you’ll have a negative relative speed with the rough perimeter of the rotating asteroid. So instead of you going straight up into space, the sharp edged surface of the asteroid would catch up with you and then hit you. Would that scenario be similar to the effect of gravity? Instead of you falling down to the ground, the uneven ground actually goes upwards and hits you.
“Newton's first law of motion states that there must be a cause—which is a net external force—for there to be any change in velocity, either a change in magnitude or direction. An object sliding across a table or floor slows down due to the net force of friction acting on the object.” - khan academy
“Perpetual motion is the motion of bodies that continues forever. A perpetual motion machine is a hypothetical machine that can do work infinitely without an energy source.” -Wikipedia
Even though the solar system isn’t technically infinite in time, is it nearly like perpetual motion relative to us mortal beings? If one applies a planetary version of the anthropic principle instead of gravity, any large object that doesn’t conform to a steady orbit around the sun would have eventually collided with and been absorbed by other planets over a billion year time frame. Or else it would just hurtle off outside the solar system.
“The anthropic principle is the philosophical premise that any data we collect about the universe is filtered by the fact that, for it to be observable at all, the universe must have been compatible with the emergence of conscious and sapient life that observes it.” - Wikipedia
I’m not a mathematician but I might muse on the issue nonetheless! Can the lack of information inadvertently serve as information itself?
For instance in probability theory the likelihood of an event happening is calculated through the chance of it not happening:
Law of the complement: P(not A) = 1 - P(A).
Also consider prior knowledge, plans and arrangements. So two people could come close together and devise what actions are to be performed depending on the receiving of signals or the lack thereof. So when they are separated by a great distance, the absence of a certain signal could itself be interpreted as a cue to carry out a certain operation.
This might be a similar notion to something like cruise control:
“In control engineering a servomechanism, sometimes shortened to servo, is an automatic device that uses error-sensing negative feedback to correct the action of a mechanism.”
- Wikipedia
Dualism: “In the philosophy of mind, mind–body dualism denotes either the view that mental phenomena are non-physical, or that the mind and body are distinct and separable.”
If our perception of reality were like a closed system, would that resemble dualism? So our vision would be like a microcosm mimic of the actual physical reality. In a sense the brain is trapped inside the skull and it only interacts with the world through our different senses.
“A closed system is a physical system that does not allow transfer of matter in or out of the system, though, in different contexts, such as physics, chemistry or engineering, the transfer of energy is or is not allowed.”
- Wikipedia
Yet that was impossible. For starters, such stationary fields would violate Maxwell’s equations, the mathematical laws that codified everything physicists at the time knew about electricity, magnetism, and light... Worse, stationary fields wouldn’t jibe with the principle of relativity, a notion that physicists had embraced since the time of Galileo and Newton in the 17th century.”
- National Geographic
The physical photons seem to be travelling at a mind-boggling speed. But the actual sensation of colour appears boringly stuck to the object; be it stationary or moving.
Idiom:
“Like watching paint dry.”
- used to refer to an activity that you consider extremely boring.
“Your Color Red Really Could Be My Blue”
https://www.google.ie/amp/s/www.livescience.com/amp/21275-color-red-blue-scientists.html
The qualia of colour doesn’t seem to “jibe with” any metric of classical physics such as volume or weight. Two physically completely different objects may both have the same colour. So the different shades of wall paint seems to stubbornly defy our ordinary perception of physical reality. We can only conclude that the various colours are caused by the chemicals or dye in the paint. While the physical properties of colour can be distinguished by its wavelength, the sentient colour we perceive remains a dissatisfying mystery. The colours aren’t seemingly caused by objective dimensions such as mass or inertia.
“Brilliant White / Winter's Tale / Carraig Grey/ Goosewing / Blue Grey /Atlantic Way / Achill White / Cobblelock”
- a mocking Dulux Paint catalogue!
"If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?"
- Wikipedia
We can only see the colour of the outer surface area of the object. Visually speaking, the object might as well be hollow. Sorry to belabour this “philosophy of paint”, but would painting over a blue wall with yellow render that blue to be temporarily metaphysically nonexistent?
“Radar is a detection system that uses radio waves to determine the range, angle, or velocity of objects.”
“Two types of technology share the name "sonar": passive sonar is essentially listening for the sound made by vessels; active sonar is emitting pulses of sounds and listening for echoes.”
“Diffuse reflection is the reflection of light or other waves or particles from a surface such that a ray incident on the surface is scattered at many angles rather than at just one angle as in the case of specular reflection.”
What if one way of interpreting it would be as if the colour were the reflected echo of light? The real physical photons would then corresponded to the incident wave of light. So we wouldn’t directly perceive an object. It would be like we see the precise depth that’s between our eyes and then the border of the material substance. So our colour vision would essentially be equivalent to the shape of the empty space which encapsulates an object. So the irregular microscopic contours of the empty space that’s contiguous with the physical object would give rise to the image we see. The rough intricate boundaries of all of the chemicals on the outer surface of the object might reflect the light in different ways. This diffuse reflected light may produce something like a small interference pattern that we perceive as colour.
But I haven’t fully thought this through so I don’t know. I’m just putting it out there!
“The same is true for all of humankind. When you plop down in a chair or slink into your bed, the electrons within your body are repelling the electrons that make up the chair. You are hovering above it by an unfathomably small distance.”
https://futurism.com/why-you-can-never-actually-touch-anything
“They have no definite volume. This means that gases always spread out in all directions to fill the container into which they are placed. This spreading out of gases to fill all the available space is called diffusion.”
- exam learn website
(In this comparison colour would be like the complex nanoscopic boundary between the gas and the physical container.)
Plato’s point: the general terms of our language are not “names” of the physical objects that we can see. They are actually names of things that we cannot see, things that we can only grasp with the mind.”
https://faculty.washington.edu/smcohen/320/cave.htm
If an astronaut on the moon could actually see the motion of the shadow on the moon’s surface from the small object on earth (Vsauce clip), could it be used in a similar way to a flag semaphore? The outline of the flag would be delineated by the shadow.
“Flag semaphore is the telegraphy system conveying information at a distance by means of visual signals with hand-held flags, rods, disks, paddles, or occasionally bare or gloved hands. Information is encoded by the position of the flags; it is read when the flag is in a fixed position.”
- Wikipedia
- time 2:50 untill 5:45
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MMiKyfd6hA0
The objects illuminated by light get smaller the more further away from you they are. But would a photon itself obey perspective? If light causes perspective, does the light beam itself get smaller as it recedes into the distance? Would it have its own quantum meta-perspective? So if a photon occupied any sort of volume, that volume itself would remain the same size irrespective of the distance to the observer. But if it remained the same size, then wouldn’t it appear to increase in size relative to the diminished size of far away objects? It appears a bit circular if one tries to visualise a photon.
“ Science has taught us, against all intuition, that apparently solid things, like crystals and rocks, are really almost entirely composed of empty space. And the familiar illustration is the nucleus of an atom is a fly in the middle of a sports stadium, and the next atom is in the next sports stadium. So it would seem the hardest, solidest, densest rock is really almost entirely empty space, broken only by tiny particles so widely spaced they shouldn't count. Why, then, do rocks look and feel solid and hard and impenetrable? As an evolutionary biologist, I'd say this: our brains have evolved to help us survive within the orders of magnitude, of size and speed which our bodies operate at. We never evolved to navigate in the world of atoms. If we had, our brains probably would perceive rocks as full of empty space. Rocks feel hard and impenetrable to our hands, precisely because objects like rocks and hands cannot penetrate each other. It's therefore useful for our brains to construct notions like "solidity" and "impenetrability," because such notions help us to navigate our bodies through the middle-sized world in which we have to navigate.”
- Richard Dawkins TED talk
It sometimes feels as if our minds are located somewhere directly behind our eyes; that the nearby objects we see are closer to our locus of consciousness than those objects in the far periphery of our vision. Technically the sentient image we perceive begins in front of the eye at the near point of accommodation:
“In visual perception, the near point is the closest point at which an object can be placed and still form a focused image on the retina, within the eye's accommodation range. The other limit to the eye's accommodation range is the far point.”
- Wikipedia
But the entire depth of the visual 3-dimensional image is wholly and equally existent in our consciousness. The brain is obviously critically important to consciousness. But the fact it just so happens that our eyes are directly in front of the brain doesn’t itself translate to there being a spectrum of our consciousness receding out into the visual field. Objects that are located an intermediate length away from our physical body are not necessarily closer to our visual seat of consciousness than the distant objects we see. Our perception of all the entities in our vision might as well be silhouettes; we can’t escape our own mind.
Indeed other animals have eyes at the each side of their head. So where would they feel their sentience to be located?
IMG_9914.jpeg
https://hardinthecity.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/pans-labyrinth-monster-creature-eyes-hands.jpg
https://education.abc.net.au/documents/10181/185971/Parrots-have-eyes-on-the-sides-of-their-heads.jpg/ae6c0be0-fe27-4070-9f85-65cbe948b2d9?t=1536045251796
The answer lies in the concept of perspective and the difference between apparent size and actual size. These phenomena exist because of the optics of our eyes and how they process the rays of light that reflect off of objects so that we can see them.
For example, the actual size of the Arch doesn't change. It can be measured in meters or feet. Its apparent size, however — what we perceive its size to be — depends upon an angle, which can be measured in degrees.
The visual angle that determines apparent size can be thought of as the angle at the top of a triangle. The eye is the top of the triangle, and the bottom of the triangle is formed by the ends of the object you're looking at.
As an object gets closer, the visual angle increases, so the object appears larger. As the object moves farther away, the visual angle decreases, making the object appear smaller.”
https://wonderopolis.org/wonder/why-do-things-appear-smaller-the-farther-you-are-from-them
Isolating the variables is common technique in maths. So maybe to try to understand consciousness, what if you tried to keep the physical world stationary? We could then analyse the apparent motion of the observer. The only geometrical property that seems to change as you move is perspective. Is there anything more than meets the eye to this phenomenon?
“When you have an equation with one variable and you need to know the value of that variable, your task is to isolate the variable x. It’s called “isolating” because at the end of the process the variable is alone on one side of the equation (and we can see what it equals).
The basic technique to isolate a variable is to “do something to both sides” of the equation, such as add, subtract, multiply, or divide both sides of the equation by the same number. By repeating this process, we can get the variable isolated on one side of the equation. The trick is to know which operations to perform in which order.”
- gmatfree website
Could perspective be understood in terms of magnification? Instead of passively changing in size due to light intensity, the visual object would be actively magnified as it got closer to the observer. Therefore it would appear to demagnify and diminish in size as it moved away from the observer. Consequently the scale of the magnification would be irregular and it would depend on the distance to the person. The mass of the object remains the same.
“Magnification is the process of enlarging the apparent size, not physical size, of something.”
- Wikipedia
“Scale: The ratio of the length in a drawing (or model) to the length on the real thing”
- mathsisfun website
It would be hard to envision a world without perspective. Objects have to get smaller the further away you look. Otherwise your field of view would expand exponentially if external objects stayed the same size.
https://media.evolveconsciousness.org/2013/11/solipsism-all-about-me.jpg
“Consciousness is real. Of course it is. We experience it every day. But for Daniel Dennett, consciousness is no more real than the screen on your laptop or your phone.
The geeks who make electronic devices call what we see on our screens the "user illusion". It's a bit patronising, perhaps, but they've got a point.
Pressing icons on our phones makes us feel in control. We feel in charge of the hardware inside. But what we do with our fingers on our phones is a rather pathetic contribution to the sum total of phone activity. And, of course, it tells us absolutely nothing about how they work.
Human consciousness is the same, says Dennett. "It's the brain's 'user illusion' of itself," he says.”
- BBC
If consciousness were like an image on a screen, then what direction would this 2-dimensional screen be facing? Would it be an opaque screen? So the image we see is facing out towards the physical world. It would be in the opposite direction to the light we perceive.
Or if it was like a translucent screen the image would be in the same parallel direction to the incoming light. It would actually be facing inwards towards the brain.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=G0azrs_yPvg
“Emission theory or extramission theory (variants: extromission) or extromissionism is the proposal that visual perception is accomplished by eye beams emitted by the eyes. This theory has been replaced by intromission theory (or intromissionism), which states that visual perception comes from something representative of the object (later established to be rays of light reflected from it) entering the eyes. Modern physics has confirmed that light is physically transmitted by photons from a light source, such as the sun, to visible objects, and finishing with the detector, such as a human eye or camera...
While emission theory does not correctly explain vision, it does correctly describe the mechanism underlying echolocation and sonar. Namely, rays are emitted from the sensing organism or device, and information about the environment is inferred from the rays reflected back by objects.”
- Wikipedia
Physical photons convey the spatial qualities of an object. But colour seems to be internal; we can only observe our own sensation of colour. Could the image we see be multifaceted in having both physical and conscious features? If colour was projected outwards, would that have any testable predictions? The coloured image would then be magnified by the lens of the eye in the opposite direction to the rays of the incoming photons.
https://theswaddle.com/seeing-colors-when-eyes-closed-phosphenes/
https://blogs.transparent.com/german/the-german-colour-eigengrau/
https://d3jlfsfsyc6yvi.cloudfront.net/image/mw:1024/q:85/https%3A%2F%2Fhaygot.s3.amazonaws.com%3A443%2Fcheatsheet%2F11508.png
I recommend that you take a look at the entry on "Relativism" at the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (IEP) and especially at the three related articles by Westacott,
Moral, Cognitive, and Aesthetic relativism.
Edit - You're in a foreign land, the sights and sounds are bewildering. Learn the language of the natives.
- 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
- 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
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
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.
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?
Back to your OP on that all is mind. The conceptualized mysteries ever baffle, not being able to be found in any haystack; they are led to, if your all-mind proposal is so, by Consciousness's fragmentation of the Whole that can be seen straight out by Awareness (the objectless kind). So, the smaller reality, r, would be the multiplicity formed by consciousness making distinctions, while the larger, real Reality would be the Unity.
To show mind to be all you might want to show that there is no real substance, 'Something', but still note that there cannot be 'Nothing', leaving mind as all.
For example, point 'particles' claimed by Physicists have no size/dimension, so then they cannot be substance. Look for more such cases.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5nW3nJhBHL0
- 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
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
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”
Or perhaps
a: conditions of the universe must allow at least one universe
b: Given this universe, such as it is, it is inevitable that bacteria exist
An epistemic argument can be formulated that only the Earth hosts intelligent life. If there ever was any other intelligent life we will never know due to the limitations on transmission of information from the cosmological past even with whatever technology we might develop in the future short life span of humanity.
In other words, bacterial life is just about certain, but if we can't discover extraterrestrial intelligence soon we never will.
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.
-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
“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.
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.
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?
I used to buy this, even though I had done a neuroscience degree for undergrad, which should have made me skeptical of this claim. What is conciousness? If you damage areas of the occipital lobe you can not only destroy vision, but the ability to imagine it, even in people who previously had sight. In someone who has had the major connections between both halves of their brain removed, you can get two distinct answers for what their ideal career is, one from each side of the brain. The sensation of volition when you decide to intentionally make any movement comes after the action has started. The sensation of volition itself can be damaged, so that the movement of leaves in a breeze around you can seem an extension of concious will. The qualia that make up conciousness seem to be fairly illusionary, distinct (not part of any comprehensive whole), and our perception of conciousness itself something retroactively fitted together.
In the cases of ego loss under nitrous or salvia I've had, I think I could still talk about experiencing, experiencing purely in the sense of some sort of loose cascade of qualia, but not of any I observing it as a being that could declare that something exists. If you keep upping the volume of gas in the blood, you get anesthesia, medically, the lack of conciousness, but there is no hard dividing line between the states.
The fact that we don't actually know how anesthesia works, and the reason it is so hard to determine the physical correlates of conciousness, to me, speaks to conciousness as a compound thing, and one that is likely far more illusionary and fleeting than we generally suspect.
It's probably been touched on somewhere in this thread no doubt but where does someone who thinks the person or person(s) even if it is the majority or whole of society is.. I dunno, just wrong lol, fit in?
Happened before, geocentrism. Every person would have called Copernicus an "anti-realist", whereas in reality, he was surrounded by not just a society but an entire world of them. What of that?
Bah, either way. Raising a glass right now to the original conspiracy theorist, Copernicus! Or so we're told... :grin:
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.
See Scientific Realism.
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. For if this is a fact, it must be so independently of any subject’s determination, i.e., it mustn’t be dependent on any subject’s determination; & therefore it must be an objective fact (an “objective” fact, as in a fact that’s not determined by any subject), & so is objectively real, an objective reality.
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.
I wrote a small overview of this thread on that webpage.
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.
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
- 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 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)
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
Projection definition:
“The presentation of an image on a surface, especially a cinema screen.”
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
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.
What I’m trying to say is that our perception doesn’t literally have to be “real” even though it’s based on a real outside world. Light travels in straight lines as it approaches us but the lens inside our eyes then distorts and redirects the light as it enters the vitreous humor and on towards the retina. So the image we see doesn’t even have to be a precise true to life scale of where the hard external objects are located. There only has to be a proportional correspondence between our visual qualia and the actual physical entity in order for us to navigate around. Colours could be simply a representation of the object rather than the material object itself.
https://www.lei.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/eye-diagram-2.png
The 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
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.
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.
Quoting 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
Sounds like a waste of time to me, also your evidence so far does not support anti realism either.
But again, a waste of time.
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.
You say your reality is real to you but how do you know? I mean anti realism would be against such a claim. Some one's consciousness not existing in your reality is just a belief though, not a fact.
Quoting Michael McMahon
No you can't.
Quoting Michael McMahon
This not only makes no sense in that there is no such thing as timelines but there is no evidence for it.
Quoting Michael McMahon
No such thing as pure consciousness either. And time and space are not separate dimensions but one field.
So with all that dismantled I still have to ask on anti-realism, what's the point? Your argument amount to little more than shooting yourself in the foot.
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.
When someone takes you seriously enough to critique what you say you should not just flippantly repeat what you're trying to say. Assume that the critique is valid and see where you went wrong. Else forget philosophy and take up tennis or something.
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
Antirealism is not a competing religion. There are different types realism each of which can be affirmed by that type of realist and denied by the corresponding antirealist. For example, Quoting Michael McMahon those represent two different types of possible realism, either perception is real or the outside world is real, and an antirealist can deny either one or both, all will prove to be philosophically valid though incommensurate, and each of these can be scientifically useful in some applications. Then there is this, Quoting Michael McMahon reads as though they accept some objectivity such as their own views being consistent, but not "traditional" absolute objectivity and truth by correspondence.
Beginners are taught objective forehand, backhand, and serving grips for tennis shots. Advanced players extend their repertoire to a half-dozen or more that then they can objectively discuss. But pros are antirealists, they can and will use any grip for any shot depending of what they are trying to accomplish with the results being magical or circus shots as seen by a knowledgeable spectator.
“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
I feel like I don't have to explain how nonsensical that claim is. You can see the same objects I see and vice versa, this is easy to demonstrate. Experience is not abstract though.
Also no, you can't interpret mind, however mind is still not abstract either. You can't relate to my emotions either, anger is different to each person same with sadness and love. I've never fallen in love so your words mean nothing to me if you did, assuming you have a mind.
Still I ask what is the point of all this? You aren't really talking with people on here, You're just waiting for them to finish saying something so that you can talk. I asked what is the point of all this and you haven't said anything. I've told you anti-realism is a self sabotaging philosophy but you don't address that problem. The people cited here (like the author of the case against reality) aren't credible sources (especially him, anyone endorsed by Deepak Chopra is a red flag).
So I'll ask you again, what exactly is the point of all this? It sounds like mental masturbation and nothing more.
Quoting Darkneos
Consciousness has been a scientific mystery for a long time. I suspect it’s not just the structure of the brain that’s causing the confusion; maybe our “non-local” visual perception also contains hidden mysteries. Light allows us to perceive a far-away object without directly touching it. Yet our sense of touch doesn’t contain as many distinct qualia as all of the unique colours. That is to say that our perception of ordinary medium sized objects might be more complex than we currently understand. So while materialism indeed reigns supreme at the moment, perhaps in the future when consciousness is finally scientifically understood there’ll be more appreciation for some “unreal” aspects of reality.
Nonlocal meaning: “not of, affecting, or confined to a limited area or part.”
Quoting Darkneos
Quoting magritte
Even the manner in which we look at an unmoving object is surprisingly very intricate. Our eyes are always moving in saccades (1) but it’s performed unconsciously. So the image we see may not be as unified as it appears to be. Perhaps our visual field is cobbled together afterwards with all of the depth perception cues.
If the entirety of the mind isn’t itself the brain, then it’s as if that small subset of consciousness that’s independent of the brain would be controlling and acting (2) on the the neurons from an imperceptibly slight distance away.
1: “Saccades are rapid, ballistic movements of the eyes that abruptly change the point of fixation. They range in amplitude from the small movements made while reading, for example, to the much larger movements made while gazing around a room. Saccades can be elicited voluntarily, but occur reflexively whenever the eyes are open, even when fixated on a target (see Box A). The rapid eye movements that occur during an important phase of sleep (see Chapter 28) are also saccades.”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK10991/
Subjective colours are like a continuation from cartoonish dreams.
2: “Action at a distance is typically characterized in terms of some cause producing a spatially separated effect in the absence of any medium by which the causal interaction is transmitted.”
https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/action-at-a-distance/v-1
Quoting Darkneos
Perhaps one way of expressing the same problem would be wondering if consciousness could ever be replicated on computer microchips. If neurons are themselves conscious then microchips would struggle to mimic any sort of consciousness as neurons are biologically and genetically complex. If however neurons aren’t identical with sentience and only stored their memory and retroactively conveyed the traces of someone’s consciousness, then maybe the qualia of colour perception really could leave imprints on microchips. It would be like tuning into the right frequency signal.
I think if you could interact with a true conscious entity that’s physically made of only inert microchips, you’d have to conclude that their mind is somehow more abstract than their representative computer chips.
https://petcentral.chewy.com/wp-content/uploads/iStock-532190589-1.jpg
Could non-rational minds be transmitted by mere microchips?
“Light... far-away object without us (the body) directly touching it.”
Consciousness is not a mystery as we know it to be made by the brain. The mind does not exist. But no, consciousness is only a mystery to those who still want it to be.
I'll ask again, and don't dodge it this time, what exactly is that point of any of this? You are avoiding the questions.
We seem to mostly rely on our sense of vision to interpret our surroundings; our sense of touch only provides information on objects beside us that we can feel. Light is deemed more fundamental than matter because it travels faster. If anything we’d expect light to be more familiar and ordinary as it’s our primary sense; it’d actually be the nature of tactile matter that’s mysterious. What if we thought of it the other way round; like matter was the hidden external reality that we share while sight was merely our own internal representation of the world? This would mean that our sense of touch is operating “outside” our sense of vision. What would that imply? It might be that nothing in our vision could actually be said to contain mass. Tactile mass would only physically appear and affect us when we happen to touch the specific object. For example, the objects shown in 2D photographs don’t have any mass whatsoever even though its colours outline where the mass was located. Through this comparison it would seem that our sightseeing perception is made at bottom of light. The objective matter we can touch is the concealed shared external world that represents the tantalising unreachable limit of our subjective perception.
“What we perceive as solid objects like desks, chairs, cars, even ourselves, is actually just a big conglomeration of tiny particles separated by what is practically infinite nothingness. This absurd truth has everything to do with atoms...
Every human on planet Earth is made up of millions and millions of atoms which all are 99% empty space. If you were to remove all of the empty space contained in every atom in every person on planet earth and compress us all together, then the overall volume of our particles would be smaller than a sugar cube.”
- interestingengineering page
No it isn't.
And again, you avoid the question. Yes we know atoms are mostly empty space, my question is so what? What point is there in knowing that? You avoid the key remarks and just spout drivel.
“Light is not only a wave but also a particle.”
https://photonterrace.net/en/photon/duality/
“Somehow, even for a straightforward, deterministic set of equations, a minute change in initial conditions yielded radically different behaviour.
As he would later note, in what was dubbed the ‘butterfly effect,’ the extreme sensitivity to initial conditions meant that the flapping of a butterfly’s wings over the Amazon could influence the weather in China. This phenomenon, pioneered by Lorenz and others, has found widespread application as deterministic chaos.” - Forbes
We often ask if we’re able to predict where the light will be. But on the flip side could light in turn predict where the object will be? Since the innumerable photons of light travels so fast, could a single instance of reflecting off an object give light the ability to know all of the item’s sensitive initial conditions? If this were so, light could anticipate the short-term future trajectory of the entity. Therefore it could show an observer where the object is without the continuous feedback between the short intervals of time. It would be as if the next minute of time is superdetermined so that light could continuously relay on objects position with only intermittent signals of photons. Although in this case light wouldn’t know the medium or long-term future as it travels at a finite speed c. Colours are attached to the piece and would resemble the traced path of an object into the future. Light would be a time tracer.
“Particles can also tunnel through solid objects, which should normally be impenetrable barriers, like a ghost passing through a wall. And now scientists have proven that, what is happening to a particle now, isn't governed by what has happened to it in the past, but by what state it is in the future – effectively meaning that, at a subatomic level, time can go backwards.”
http://m.digitaljournal.com/science/experiment-shows-future-events-decide-what-happens-in-the-past/article/434829
Superdeterminism: “That not only is inanimate nature deterministic, but we, the experimenters who imagine we can choose to do one experiment rather than another, are also determined.”
https://www.informationphilosopher.com/freedom/superdeterminism.html
- Stanford
I feel a question which naturally arises from panpsychist theory is how it is that our minds don’t all “collide” if each of our consciousness were visually located outside of our eyes in the same physical reality. Could it be that we’re all seeing the same physical reality but through different versions of light?
“Eye beams” of emission theory doesn’t add up as we can’t light up a dark room with our eyes; we must use an actual light source. Yet somehow colour qualia seems internal. Maybe it’s as though we’re tuned into slightly different frequencies of the same visual spectrum. So light remains external but it’s marginally unique to the individual observer. So the light that another person’s brain receives exists inside the invisible spectrum of light relative to the light that you perceive; and vice versa.
The potential benefit of this line of thought is that qualia could be said to exist outside of the brain without in any way impinging on the location of other minds. The visual spectrum itself covers an immense span of wavelength compared to the sub-atomic size of the photons. The light that others see would in some way be hidden between the wavelength gaps of your own line of sight.
“A typical human eye will respond to wavelengths from about 380 to 750 nanometers. In terms of frequency, this corresponds to a band in the vicinity of 400–790 THz.” - Wikipedia
“What Is Non-Visible Light?
The human eye can only see visible light, but light comes in many other "colors"—radio, infrared, ultraviolet, X-ray, and gamma-ray—that are invisible to the naked eye.
On one end of the spectrum there is infrared light, which, while too red for humans to see, is all around us and even emitted from our bodies...
On the other end of the spectrum there is X-ray light, which is too blue for humans to see...
Non-visible light can also be found in your home in a device you most likely use every day: remote controls! Your remote control uses infrared light to transmit signals to the television and other electronics. While the signal is invisible to you, your television can process the light and respond.”
https://www.essilorusa.com/newsroom/visible-and-invisible-light
- letstalkscience ca
Consciousness affects our thoughts and motion, but the most viscerally immediate way it operates is through our very eye movements. Are we actively pushing the eyes towards an object or is our subjective visual field actually rotating in the opposite direction? If vision were like a TV screen, it would really be fixed at one location while the darting image passively pulls our eye’s attention towards a different perspective.
“Stand up in a clear space and spin round. It is not too difficult to turn at one revolution each two seconds. Suppose the Moon is on the horizon. How fast is it spinning round your head? It is about 385,000 km away, so the answer is 1.21 million km/s, which is more than four times the speed of light! It might sound ridiculous to say that the Moon is going round your head when really it is you who is turning, but according to general relativity all co-ordinate systems are equally valid, including rotating ones. So isn't the Moon going faster than the speed of light? This is quite difficult to account for...
Nevertheless, the modern interpretation is that the speed of light is constant in general relativity and this statement is a tautology given that standard units of distance and time are tied together using the speed of light. The Moon is given to be moving slower than light because it remains within the "future light cone" propagating from its position at any instant.”
https://www.desy.de/user/projects/Physics/Relativity/SpeedOfLight/FTL.html
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/91177/how-our-eyes-see-everything-upside-down
How would we know if the image we see isn’t resized relative to the actual size of the physical objects? Could our visual “screen size” be enlarged or minimised in terms of square area to help us concentrate? So if the overall horizontal and vertical dimensions were expanded, what effect would it have on our forward depth and volume perception? The innumerable photoreceptors convey such acuity that the resolution of the image wouldn’t appear to be less sharp were it to be scaled up.
Could the conscious screen size be much bigger than the eyes? So maybe in terms of perspective the individual objects in the background are the same visual size as close objects, except that far away items seem smaller because of the increasing number of objects in the visual field with the further out you look. Objects moving outwards would appear smaller due to the apparent increase in relative size of the entire background.
“On 2D displays, such as computer monitors and TVs, the display size (or viewable image size or VIS) is the physical size of the area where pictures and videos are displayed.” - Wikipedia
(Even without altering the aspect ratio, the width and height could be equally lengthened relative to the tactile objects themselves. For instance, both subjective height and width could be together doubled or halved.)
Counterrotate: “rotate in opposite directions, especially about the same axis.”
Origin: “a fixed point from which coordinates are measured.”
The apparent height of an object is directly proportional to its actual height and inversely proportional to its distance from the eye. Apparent Height = Actual Height / Distance. So to find the actual height of a distant object, multiply its apparent height by its distance. Conversely, you can divide the known actual height of a distant object by its measured apparent height to arrive at the distance.
There is another geometrical distance relationship called the Inverse Square Law. This applies to all qualities projected by a distant object, including light bouncing off of its surface. Application of this law explains why a distant object may appear fainter than a near object.”
- physics stackexchange
That piece explains three distinct ways in which to infer distance by the phenomenon of perspective.
“Point sources of gravitational force, electric field, light, sound or radiation obey the inverse square law.”
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Forces/isq.html
A small object placed right beside your eye will appear to decrease significantly in apparent size when its moved to an arm’s length away. It might be half of its original size. If you were to look at a distant house on your street and took a step back from it then the house will only look marginally smaller with respect to its apparent size. Perhaps its still 95% of its previous size. However both the arm length and stride length back are almost the same length in the examples above even though the proportional change in size due to perspective is very different. Therefore the rate at which objects get smaller due to perspective is decelerating in its overall effect as the distance from you increases. This is related to the inverse square law. So the size of the various objects in your peripheral vision around your main object of focus can also provide clues as to how far away it is.
“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
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.”
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?
“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
“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
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.
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.
Quoting Harry HinduNot claiming to be one, so I'll let them answer that. I make no claims of the unreality of anything.
I favor a relational stance (Rovelli), so I'd say that other people exist to me, and I to them. We measure each other, so each exists relative to the other. This has nothing at all to do with people, mind, consciousness or epistemology. I exist relative to my keyboard because it measures me (I have a causal effect on it). I do not exist relative to the current state of Betelgeuse since that 'system' has not measured me. I suppose I exist to some future state of Betelgeuse, but not necessarily any future state.
Per Rovelli, I do not exist relative to myself, which makes sense, and is essentially why Schrodinger's cat, perfectly capable of sensing its various parts, cannot collapse its own wave function relative to the outside of the closed box.
I favor such a view because it seems to avoid the general paradox of realism which is its inability to explain the reality of whatever the realist considers to be real.
Quoting Harry HinduThat's their claim it seems. They give meaning to the property of existence, but claim nothing has that property. I see little point in positing a property that nothing has, but other than that (and your wonderfully worded argument from incredulity aside), I see no contradiction in the stance, even if it isn't my stance.
No relation specified, so the statement is meaningless in my view. For something to exist objectively, it would have to exist in relation to, what?... something more encompassing than the universe at least. The proverbial view from nowhere it seems. Is a member of the set of all that exists, except the set cannot list itself for the reason given above.
Well, this may be a roughly Neo-Kantian or Rationalistic-Idealist understanding, but I believe it to be accurate nevertheless. The idea would be that what we see and experience is an interplay between whatever is "out there" with some innate capacities to structure, shape and imbue experience with meaning.
So the "external world", as it is "in itself" is not something we can know. This does not imply at all that all the ordinary things we take for granted "trees", "rivers", etc. are illusions at all, no, they are the most evident aspect of our conscious experience, but these things aren't mind-independent.
Some argue that modern science may tell us about "things in themselves", others are more skeptical and think that science only tells us about the structural aspects of reality, and not there inner nature. I tend to side with this latter view.
But I should add something which I think is important, which Chomsky has pointed out. The word "real" is honorific. So when we say "this is the real truth" or "this is the real deal", we are not saying that there are two kinds of truth or deals, we are only emphasizing our statements. In this sense the word "real" can often lead to confusion, though not always.
:point:
That's one important use of 'real.' I'd go farther and say that it has many uses. 'Are you for real?" 'This almond butter is really good.' 'That's unreal, bro.' 'The real is that which resists.'
'Is that gun real?' 'See you all later. It's been real.'
IMO, we are great at using the word in ordinary life. Philosophers tie themselves in knots when they try to pin down an official or absolute meaning, which is like catching the wind in a net.
Absolutely. It's hard not to confuse the words we use with the things we are talking about.
The NWF used to have a saying something like "A forest is more than just trees." They were distinguishing between the awesome biodiversity of a forest vs a tree farm. But it got me to thinking, if a tree falls in a forest, there is never no one there to hear it fall. Existence is proof that you don't take us with you when you die. Existence is proof that we are not the measure of all things. The fact that I am because I think, does not mean nothing else is. Just because shit's getting real doesn't mean it hasn't been real all along.
And if you are All, then, of course, not, too.
If time is infinitesimally continuous then everyone would be gliding through time at infinitesimally different rates of time.
Quoting James Riley
I disagree! The universe will be so upset when I die that the whole place will implode.
Everyone and everything.
Quoting Michael McMahon
Now you do have a point there. A=A & -A.
The newsman's sly nature has made him my favourite movie charcter!
“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
The darkness of our eyelids contains all colours while we’re asleep!
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!
But when we do we have this little invention
By pretending they're a different world from me
I show my responsibility” The Police
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.
That is to say: if we construe the grammar of the expression of sensation on the model of ‘object and designation’ the object drops out of consideration as irrelevant” Wittgenstein , PI
“I don't want to bring a sour note
Remember this before you vote
We can all sink or we all float
'Cos we're all in the same big boat” The Police
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.
Some people are much more discriminating when it comes to certain sounds that they've spent a lot of time understanding. Take the musical instruments a musician is familiar with. They often can hear things in a song the average person who doesn't play those instruments is unaware of. I heard about a cricket researcher who could discriminate all sorts of cricket sounds which sound the same to most everyone else.
Same idea with things like wine tasting.
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
Quoting 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/
I'm not defending materialism against consciousness. I'm pro-consciousness.
This sounds like a stimulus-response model of perception A bit outdated, considering the wide range of Gibsonian-influenced models of perception ( O’Regan and Noe, for instance) that have emerged over the past few decades. Expectation plays a fundamental role in perception , which is why the concept of qualia is incoherent when applied to perception.
If you say, the mind would react as if real, this distinction then seems useless: thus let us commit it to the large pile of useless ideas that have littered humanity’s long intellectual history.
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!
We live on the time we borrow
In our world there's no time for sorrow
In their world there is no tomorrow
One world is enough
For all of us
One world is enough
For all of us
Lines are drawn upon the world
Before we get our flags unfurled
Whichever one we pick
It's just a self deluding trick” The Police
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!
That might also be the case if visual perception were internal. Thus our sense of vision would be distinct from the external material objects that our visual perception is based on. If vision were 2D, then perhaps our perception of light would appear static in the third dimension. What would happen if photons moved at 0m/s? Then a potential photon is stuck to every tiny piece of space. Is a photon sent out of a torch the same photon one second and 299 792 458 m later? If a photon was like a pixel then any individual pixel is motionless and its apparent motion is in fact separate pixels. Is a photon being “pushed” out of the torch or is it the opposite direction where the torch “pulls” photons from any object in its path? Maybe light could travel through empty space because the oblivion of black is itself a colour and so light “is” an excitation of empty space.
This is a bizarre “anti-realist” way of putting.
Let me put it like a typical scientist would “The starlight we see is light years away. This means we see these stars as they were years ago.” “Real” and “Perception” is drop out because they are superfluous.
Yes your entitled to your point of view. But many stars appear not just younger than they truly are but also in a different location to wherever they’re currently situated. So the light is not just older but also misdirected from the real star in present time. That is to say there’s no mass directly behind our visual perception of many stars in different galaxies. That mass is now in another location somewhere. Scientists have to work out the real coordinates of stars indirectly through red shifting, laws of gravitation, stellar parallax and brightness.
“if that star is hurtling away from us, all those absorption lines undergo a Doppler shift and move toward the red part of the rainbow. This is what we call a redshift. For stars heading toward us, the opposite happens, and the lines are shifted toward the blue end of the spectrum; they are blueshifted (generally, astronomers only use the term redshift to simplify things, and just put a negative sign in front of it if it’s a blueshift). By measuring how far away the lines are located from where they’re supposed to be in the spectrum, astronomers can calculate the speed of a star or a galaxy relative to Earth, and even how a galaxy rotates: by measuring a different redshift for one side of the galaxy compared to the other, you can see which side is moving away from you and which side is moving toward you.”
https://earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/what-is-a-redshift/
“when you look at a star, you are actually seeing what it looked like years ago. It is entirely possible that some of the stars you see tonight do not actually exist anymore.”
https://www.wtamu.edu/~cbaird/sq/mobile/2017/04/02/since-a-stars-light-takes-so-long-to-reach-us-how-do-we-know-that-the-star-is-still-there/
Yeah, like if I watch a movie tonight and see a group of actors. It is entirely possible that some of the actors I watch in a movie tonight do not actually exist anymore.
“One world is enough
For all of us
It may seem a million miles away
But it gets a little closer everyday
One world”
The Police
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/geoopt/mirray.html
We often view the retina as a sensor but what if the brain interprets the curved retina like a concave mirror? There’d be a virtual image in the brain.
What I was getting at is that there might be a non-real or spiritual aspect to emotions. It’s like our language allows us to express 90% of those emotions. Maybe foreign languages might capture certain states of mind better than English. For example French has a more fluent sound which might increase closeness and familiarity between speakers. Anyway my emotions are fine-tuned differently to someone else’s. There are lots of different varieties of the same emotion. Just think of how many synonyms there are of happiness: bliss, contentment, relief... Unless we’re Shakespeare we can’t fully articulate the subtle differences in an emotion. If someone asks me how I am then I usually respond in a brief sentence as a formality but also as a cognitive inability to reply in long poetic verses! Think of words like quixotic and machiavellian that can be used as adjectives even though they carry multiple connotations because they refer to whole works of historical literature.
Quoting Richard B
Indeed. Sometimes an emotion can create thoughts. For instance being bored can make your mind wander. Other times thoughts create emotions like where realising a mistake was made induces stress and confusion.
Quoting Richard B
Most of our thoughts do occur semantically and logically. Although it’s possible to have visual thoughts apropos of nothing. I could close my eyes and think of a forest. I’ll momentarily see vague outlines of tress in my mind’s eye. But the flickering image is automatic and I don’t have to semantically state how many trees there’ll be for the imaginary scene to arise. I suppose my subconscious just loosely amalgamates previous memories and pictures of forests. Remembering is a form of thinking even though it can refer to nonverbal experiences.
One metric that language fails to immaculately communicate is intensity. Let’s take a negative emotion like fear. We can say that an event was mildly disconcerting or extremely petrifying. But there’s a range of fear situated between all of those descriptions. We could try to quantify the fear by saying we were 80% afraid though we’d then lose the tone and fluency of our intended statement.
((It is anything but a matter of course that we see ‘three-dimensionally’ with two eyes. If the two visual images are amalgamated, we might expect a blurred one as a result)” Wittgenstein, PI
“The colour of the visual impression corresponds to the colour of the object (this blotting paper looks ponk to me, and is pink) - the shape of the visual impression to the shape of the object (it looks rectangular to me , and is rectangular) but what I perceive in the dawning of an aspect is not a property of the object, but an internal relation between it and other objects.” Wittgenstein, PI
“Some people who have lost their vision find a “second sight” taking over their eyes – an uncanny, subconscious sense that sheds light into the hidden depths of the human mind... What causes the conscious and unconscious to decouple so spectacularly?”
Could it be that they are in fact consciously seeing the object but are then instantly forgetting it like a dream? That way they’d have a subconscious intuition of where it’s located.
I am among the ones who believe that there is no objective reality. Yet, I consider myself a realist, in the sense of a person who accepts a situation as it is and is prepared to deal with it accordingly ...
I believe an anti-realist can also be pragmatic. Our power is limited in this world whether it’s real or not. The subconscious mind has involuntary parts that I can’t change. I’m unable to volitionally swap the colour brown and green in my vision because it’s not under my control. Colour might be internal but that doesn’t mean I can alter it. The laws of physics are impartial arbiters so we can’t interfere with someone else’s consciousness in either a real or non-real world without affecting their physical brain. Our communication is mediated by physical matter and not mental signals.
Quoting Alkis Piskas
Anti-realist isn’t the same as anti-realistic! It doesn’t dispute the existence of a shared space. What anti-realism implies is that our perception uses some mechanisms that might not be materialistic in nature. However there are other procedures the mind uses that are materially reductionistic. For instance the shapes of objects are reductionistic.
Quoting Alkis Piskas
I feel when the hard problem of consciousness still defies scientific explanation after hundreds of years then all options should be scrutinised. Let’s remember the goal is not necessarily to find only a materialistic explanation but at least an intuitive understanding of how consciousness affects the physical world. An example of this is where a hypothetical proof of consciousness being fundamentally untraceable would also ironically count as a solution to the hard problem.
Quoting Alkis Piskas
Were the world completely physical and yourself the only conscious being then that wouldn’t be a real world as such. If someone else could somehow witness my dreams then the dream would actually be real in the sense that there’d be shared agreement on its content. Therefore other conscious agents besides ourselves are necessary to validate our world.
Quoting Alkis Piskas
Yes sense perception is needed to find our way around the world we live in. Although self-awareness is usually part of our definition of reality. Thus the mental universe also holds some importance.
Quoting Alkis Piskas
If a tree falls in a forest and there’s no one to see it then it’s location is unknown to all of us. If one person is there to witness it, it remains a mystery to the rest of us until they choose to tell us. Thus one conscious observer doesn’t instantaneously remove the randomness from your own perception. From a soldier’s point of view a bullet aimed at them is randomly located until they get hit or hear it whizzing by. If your consciousness is in a separate location to mine then maybe an external object hidden in your vision truly is in a random superposition. We could perhaps combine entanglement with the problem of other minds. If each of our minds occupy unique, non-interacting streams of consciousness experience then maybe we can’t agree on an absolute nanosecond timeline of events.
https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/the-quest-to-test-quantum-entanglement
I’m a mere lay person but the situation goes from pure randomness to absolute determinism with only one observation. Maybe the person receiving the second predetermined particle is conscious at a different time to the sender.
You are right about being pragmatic. I also agree with other things you say.
BTW, I have removed the rest of my comment because I consider it actually "off-topic". Sorry about that!
If perception is part of our consciousness under panpsychist models then it follows that removing all perception will stop consciousness. Therefore the brain couldn’t be computationally alive on its own without the body and a sensory medium like touch or hearing. Patients in locked-in syndrome still have some neuronal senses and meta-senses working such as vision and hearing the sound of their inner voice. The brain in the vat conundrum is not only important for understanding whether our reality is real but also the connection between mind and body should the body be fictitiously detached from the brain and spinal cord without somehow causing death.
Intricate touch receptors wouldn’t be easy to imitate through electrical wires to the brain in a vat.
https://eschooltoday.com/learn/the-sense-of-touch-2/
https://www.google.ie/amp/s/www.vulture.com/amp/2018/11/the-25-greatest-not-dead-yet-scares-in-movie-history.html
Why have a brain in a vat when you can have a brainless body? Ever had a dream where a character gets impaled in a sword fight and they continue on nonchalantly?
This is a fascinating claim, "Our power is limited in this world whether it's real or not". From an anti-realist perspective, this claim does not make much sense. If there is not "a world out there", what sense can we make of the idea that we can have shared agreement about this world's content?
But let us assume for a moment that there is a world we conceptualize together, what is being articulated when we question whether it is "real or not"? This distinction has no meaning when applied to the world as a whole. Think how we come to use this concept of "real". Usually after contrasting two different situations or objects, we find it useful to make a distinction in calling it "real" or "not real". In the case of the "world as a whole", what am I contrasting? I have no experienced of two different worlds, there is just one. What about looking at it it from a scientific perspective? How would a scientist go about determining if this world is "real" or "not real"? Or, take the hypothesis that this "world is not real", what experience(s) could falsify such an idea?
What if I said that the world is one of three possibilities: real, not real, and null. You may ask, "what is null?" and I replied, "the world is exactly as we perceived it if it was real or not, but it is neither, it is null." Have I really described three possibilities here? Maybe there is not three possibilities, but only one actual.
The mind is more arbitrary and whimsical in nature than the physical structures we observe. What would a random universe look like? For starters we can’t change the past and so the passage of time means every random decision is conditional on previous random outcomes; thereby reducing latent randomness. In that way our “power is limited”. Evolution says the human body is random yet we are never surprised by looking at fellow humans because we’ve grown accustomed to our physiology. We think donkeys are funny while a donkey probably thinks we look weirdly amusing with our flat faces and short noses! A person from a different planet would think our gravity is utterly bizarre though we’re so familiar with the way objects fall down that everything seems ordinary. For all we know the big bang was entirely random in the laws of physics it developed and the subsequent early universe may have become progressively less probabilistic.
“The probability that any given person has a cough on any given day may be only 5%. But if we know or assume that the person is sick, then they are much more likely to be coughing. For example, the conditional probability that someone unwell is coughing might be 75%, in which case we would have that P(Cough) = 5% and P(Cough|Sick) = 75%.
Conditional probability is one of the most important and fundamental concepts in probability theory.”
How random would we view our place in the world if we could see planets with the naked eye?
I guess the mind is not “arbitrary and whimsical in nature” when we determine the physical structures we observed so we can make the claim “the mind is more arbitrary and whimsical in nature than the physical structures we observe.”
Perfect circles don’t exist in nature and pi has an infinite number of digits. So when you rotate around and move forward in a certain direction, we don’t ever know with perfect accuracy what that direction is. We see with the 3-body problem that movement can be chaotic between multiple connected objects. Fractal and chaos theory tells us the object’s constituent particles might be impossibly complex to understand reductively. A material object is physical but sometimes it’s not just chaotic but multitudes of chaos built on top of yet more chaos. Maybe it’s not technically random but neither is it predictable or deterministic. Thus it’s more open-ended and subjective: should we interpret it closer to being material or random?
So, if I understand this correctly, if we can’t prove without “perfect” accuracy the outcome of some predicted event, this is evidence the world is not real. This is an odd conclusion. For example, I shoot a cannon ball and predict with current scientific principles that it should travel 15.01 feet. But when I measure it, it is only 15.00 feet. So, I must conclude the world is not real? Maybe we should consider other possibilities, measurement error, technology limitations, revision to principles, etc. Historically speaking, we have become more accurate with our scientific prediction, by Special and General relativity. So does this means the world in becoming more real? No, we can just make better predictions.
I watched a YouTube philosophy video that mentions a “frustrator”. It’s about trying to predict whether someone will press one of two buttons when they are alerted to your prediction in advance. It alleged that the person could change tack even when you know every law of physics about the situation. A real life version is when Libet could predict your decision from your brain waves a half-second before you consciously decided to move. There’s debate about a veto power in that instance. Let it be known that if anyone comes to me and makes a secret prediction from my neurons about where I’ll be in an hour and afterwards meeting up to see that they were right, then this would persuade me that I’m a wholly physical being. The catch is predicting that I’ll be in the sweet shop doesn’t count!
Wittgenstein, PI, 628
Wittgenstein, PI, 624
In a dream we often have a semblance of a body even though we often don’t take any notice it. So if you were swimming in a dream then maybe you’re right and it’s just an electric current tingling our senses to simulate motion while our actual bodies are stationary. Could these motor currents be used to change dreams? For instance would mimicking uphill walking change my dream narrative from whatever it was to a different memory where I was climbing or trekking?
Quoting Richard B
Perhaps while we’re asleep we first think of a cool sequence of events and then forget the order so that we can visually re-enact it. Then our subconscious would have “foreknowledge” of what will happen to us in a dream.
No way ever to verify this and there never will be.
We tend to think the brain is behind where we feel our eyes to be. Although we also view colours as being internal which seems to contradict the previous sentence. If the visual cortex is situated at the rear of the brain then perhaps most of our brain is located in front of our field of view. The invisible brain could be interpreted to be behind the image we see. In this comparison the non-conscious eyes passively collects external light and the brain reorganises it to create the qualia in front of us. It may appear counterintuitive to non-neuroscientists that the visual cortex is at the back of the brain. If I never saw a brain diagram before I’d be tempted to think the visual cortex would be right behind the eyes or scattered throughout the brain. Instead the optic nerve goes to the opposite end of the skull.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NhjAKTZhUS4&t=185s
Which are the differences between "Astral Region of creation" and "Causal Region of creation?"
Why the brain is not involved in those at all?
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14321616/is-it-possible-to-prove-if-a-sequence-is-random
I don’t know the context of where these equations are used. I’m wondering is it the specific answer that’s important or the consistency in which it’s used? So hypothetically if they used a different answer but modified every single other equation there is in maths to conform with the new result, then would this new number still work in physics? In other words might there be an interdependency involved with other infinite sequences?
We don’t see the surface of the earth rotating when we throw a ball straight up into the air. But the deep layers of the Earth’s crust below us are always in rotation. So when the ball is at maximum height it’s now marginally above a different point of the Earth’s mantle. It’s so far to the Earth’s core that microscopic deviations above the surface get amplified relative to deeper layers. Could this differential rotation help gravity?
Centripetal velocities from the Earth’s daily rotation wouldn’t depend on mass. It’d be like air resistance was the sole source of gravity.
Whats the difference between posing the subjective existence of a subjective reality only and the objective existene of an objective one only?
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.
This example shows that there is an objective existence of two relative frames. Relatively rotating wrt each other, that is.
(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.
Yes. This causes the tidal force (a non- local force). Relative to a proton the Earth weighs the same as the proton. Its an objective state of affairs.
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.
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?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8XyxasuTGw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDgU-rMkVNU
Dj Splash - You Spin Me Right Round (Remix)
"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
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)
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.
contralateral: relating to or denoting the side of the body opposite to that on which a particular structure or condition occurs.
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.
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
"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."
What if intense beats could force you to dance by possessing you and twitching your muscles?!
There are caveats to this drumbeat possession logic in case we were to all lose the run of ourselves:
Perhaps consciousness diffuses as far into empty space as your senses allow.
Bee Gees - You Should Be Dancing - Saturday Night Fever
It's also possible to a be an anti-realist about God along with being an anti-realist about the physical world. One way to describe visual anti-realism would be that the quantitative outline of empty space which we see is the same for each of us but our impression of the colours within the objects are individualistic. The colourful empty space I perceive is in a different conscious location to the void that you perceive. Consciousness in this context would be equivalent to the vacuum of empty space.
The Monkey Business Illusion
"This finding was a particularly dramatic example of "inattentional blindness," the failure to see something obvious when focusing attention on something else."
https://news.illinois.edu/view/6367/205580
Sexy B*tch - Versión en español
Eiffel 65 -- I'm Blue (Mister Perfect Remix)
I remember years back I went through a stage of listening to every remix of this trance song. I was even inspired to buy a grey jumper afterwards! Even though the verse's lyrics of "I'm blue da ba dee da ba di" is semantically nonsensical it's still catchy somehow. It adds to its theme of confused wonderment. This emphasises how much the emotional tone is appreciated of whatever is being sung no matter what the actual written content is even if it's ridiculous.
Kang and Kodos - Simpsons Aliens
Imagine speaking to a visible brain without a skull in real time!
A loss of gravity would also mean that the planet would stop pulling down air, water and Earth's atmosphere. That's where the apocalyptic devastation somewhere along the lines of a Michael Bay movie come in. A sudden and significant loss of air pressure would immediately shatter everyone's inner ear. Think about the pressure that builds when you're flying or scuba diving; this would be much more intense and immediate. Concrete structures would crumble as oxygen – an important binding agent – left the planet."
https://science.howstuffworks.com/science-vs-myth/what-if/what-if-earth-lost-gravity-for-five-seconds.htm
So we'd spin back against the Earth's direction of rotation if gravity disappeared. But then the air in the atmosphere would also move backwards and downwards against the rotating segment of the earth. Therefore even without traditional gravity there'd still be a downward force exerted on you from atmospheric pressure and Eulur's force.
Here I wonder about the scientific implications of anti-realist philosophy. What would unreality entail for our sense perception? There must be knock-on effects. In order to follow suit from this mysterious initial premise, all other scientific variables would need to be adjusted accordingly. Through illusory parallax we can detect depth when the world in the background almost appears to conter-rotate when we stare at a close moving object. The organised chaos of language can help verify the existence of other minds. A lot of our communication might be based on arbitrary symbols or random starting points in conversation but it can deterministically progress into complex patterns of behaviour. A computer would struggle to write metaphorical poetry. (Anyone who got a D- for their Shakespeare essay is a robot.)
We usually take the physical world for granted. Even religious folk often concede that our lives in this world are boringly materialistic in order to make their belief of a certain afterlife in a spiritual realm more compelling. But what if the physical world itself is more open-ended and exciting than first expected? There are many interpretations of quantum mechanics so maybe in the future when we know more about it there could be multiple competing versions of how we should perceive reality. Maybe there’ll be several perfectly valid solutions to the mind body problem even though they’d be somewhat incompatible with one another. We could each focus on different layers of reality.
Metaphysical beliefs can be shown to deterministically affect our physical behaviour. Christians tend to live a different lifestyle than Hindus for example based solely on their spiritual beliefs. We can each be either more or less attuned to different parts of our sensory input and end up seeing the world differently. So perhaps a deterministic agent who believes themselves to be free really will gain some degree of freedom by way of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Therefore free will isn’t wholly irreconcilable with determinism. We can take it as literally or symbolically as we want.
In terms of our vision, every single object we see is ultimately only made of light. We can’t synaesthetically see mass or atoms. We can feel tangible objects with our sense of touch. But matter is a different sense to sight even though photons happen to illuminate and correspond to where the physical substance is. Physical entities are invisible in and of themselves. The way light somehow locates tactual solid elements might be indirect. (I learned the following in a failed science interview about attempting to minimise the solar system where density is constant) If every object was equally minimised it would have no effect on the speed of light (the speed of gravity = speed of light). Another way to put it is that photons are real while colour exists within our virtual image of the world.
Light moves so fast that we don’t actually see it move directly. We can only see colours after the light has already moved and not their original frequency. Although colours can still move much like they were pixels turning on and off in a screen. It would be like the colour of a moving object simply replaces the previous colour of the background using the same pixels. All we can detect is the retina. We’re not aware of the individual muscles that move our head so it feels like we’re leveraging our entire field of view in order to rotate our neck. If our perception is just an approximation of reality then it doesn’t have to be the same size to create a ranking of the relative depth of all objects. A 3D TV screen can do so through emphasising a few mere centimetres in difference to convey an apparent distance of several meters.
I suppose a mental shortcut for imagining a holographic reality would be if your eyes were like a mirror where everything you see is behind you inside the brain. The optic nerve is directed backwards towards the brain. If our vision is 2D then that would imply that our perception of empty space isn’t real and is simply a rendered version of external reality. I’m not too sure what that would translate to; maybe the overall shape of the object appears far away even though their constituent colours are all right beside you. The minute atomic perimeter of the boundary between two large coloured objects are so complex that they’re like a fractal pattern.
Objects get smaller from perspective because our subjective impression of an object is based in some way on an external entity and a world bigger than ourselves. One could reinterpret that by saying perspective doesn’t exist in external nature and is self-imposed and self-created through magnification in our visual subconscious. Objects can remain the same size regardless of distance if we had the capacity to zoom with our eyes like a camera lens. Perspective minimises the flat area of an object evenly so length and breadth at eye level are proportionately changed. But the internal volume is excessively reduced relative to the frontal area and appears foreshortened. Objects above or below eye level will have an uneven aspect ratio in terms of area. The further away an object the blurrier it becomes as our eyes don’t have infinite resolution. The way we perceive and move through depth is different in a dream.
No one can ever withstand an infinite amount of pain even if the pain sensation and our own response to it are both deterministic. So we can’t be deterministically programmed to be somehow fearless in a literal sense. Therefore there’s an element of both determinism and free will in the idea of “free won’t”.
The mind body problem has been a puzzle forever. I’m not sure about you but at least my mind can affect my body because I must be a pure genius! It’s just that the unique talent comes to me so naturally and effortlessly that I’m actually unable to describe it to others! I suppose the most immaterial entity we know is light. I know it’s simplistic to combine mysteries but my guess is that consciousness has something to do with light given how ethereal both substances are. It’d be like each of our own consciousness were the medium of light that we perceive. When we’re awake we’re each travelling at light speed into the future one second at a time! Our mind would be like a tachyon that never goes below speed c. And just to reassure you I never took speed; just a few mild doses of anti-psychotics!
Does consciousness perfectly coincide in time with the physical world? If consciousness lagged behind by 1 second that would actually make a big difference in terms of the mind-body problem. It’d mean consciousness could read our senses as a memory in the brain instead of a location in real-time. An analogy is a horse rider that sits behind the horse to steer it with the reins even though the horse is moving by itself. A timeless universe means we don’t actually have to be conscious all at the same time!
The brain is physical so dualism would imply that your consciousness doesn’t actually have a brain and that only other people could perceive our brain. Speaking to the brains of others would be like you were making a telephone call to another mind who’s own reality isn’t real or palpable from your point of view; as if their brain were a tachyonic antitelephone! It’d be like a phone call that’s separated not by distance but a chasm of time. Are other people conscious at the exact same time we’re conscious? How do we know other people’s minds aren’t in a different timeline altogether where all we can observe are their insentient physical selves?
Not only can we not detect other minds but we don’t even observe their brains in absolute space. If we don’t see physical reality directly then even though it’s counterintuitive it’d logically mean we don’t perceive other people directly either. They too are part of our visual perception with the rest of the physical world. If my consciousness weren’t inside my brain then to be consistent that would mean other people’s minds aren’t inside their physical brain that we perceive inside our own vision. Everyone else’s brain is coloured red but of course we are told that any red we see is merely a qualia within ourselves. Something has to give! Might it be like our bodies were inert robots that follow around after our conscious mind! Anyone who disagrees can feel free to excuse themselves from my vision!
If one thinks of the Turing test then any information the deceptive computer gives is ultimately programmed by another conscious agent initially even if the computer itself isn’t currently conscious. That is to say inert computers don’t make themselves. They don’t exist in nature. People make complex computers and so any comeback the computer gives can still be used to infer the existence of other minds in general even if that computer itself isn’t conscious. It’s like a secondary version of consciousness. It shows the after-effects of other conscious beings. If someone spent long enough inquiring about my personality and feelings then I’m sure it will be theoretically possible to encode all of my responses on a lifelike machine. Even though my clone wouldn’t be conscious it’d prove to an unknowing spectator that the clone was based on the true existence of a conscious being even if they didn’t know the real me. Therefore they can disprove the robot being conscious by outsmarting it but they can still derive the consciousness of an entity somewhere external to their own mind.
I remember a panicked feeling I had a few years back where it seemed my visual perception was somehow inside me which motivated me to investigate anti-realism. Perhaps it was possible to describe our perception of the physical world differently. I tried to work backwards from that dizzy sensation. Even though anxiety can play tricks on the mind and the effect disappeared after 30 minutes, I was amazed afterwards that my perception of the world as unreal seemed visually self-consistent. I’d to rely solely on my understanding of other people as being external to me for the anxiety to eventually go away. This was instead of saying everything was physical and back to normal. Other people have information that’s too complex for our own subconscious minds to have made it up. When we empathise and visualise with what someone has told us then you’ve to use your own mental concepts but in a different way than you’d normally think yourself. It’s both understandable and novel relative to ourselves whereas a foreign language is novel but not readily understandable. Chaos and complexity in and of itself is never subjectively understandable and so the physical world by itself doesn’t prove it’s fully real in the sense that there’s other minds.
As conspiratorial as this may sound, the thousand year mystery of free will might attest to radical flaws in not just our academic understanding but also our very own sensory perception of the ordinary medium-sized objects around us (rather than solely quantum-level mysteries or larger-scale gravitation). The weirder the idea the more realistic a chance it has of been correct! So we can keep coming up with as many random solutions as possible to try to home in on the eventual answer. Colours are hollow and fail to describe anything other than the surface area of a solid object. So colour by itself doesn’t show any volume. Their emptiness could be perceived as fake and unreal. At the end of the day our brains are medium sized objects. Anti-realism acknowledges the existence of a shared and objective material world but reminds us that we could be perceiving it indirectly through immaterial colour qualia.
Antirealism may be understood in both the ontological and the epistemic sense.
The belief that nothing material exists outside the mind is the ontological antirealism usually associated with Berkeley.
The belief that physical things do exist outside the mind but are completely unknowable as they really are, constitutes the epistemic antirealism of Immanuel Kant.
The Kantian view includes the following ideas:
(1) When the senses encounter a real thing, the mind creates an impression of it in such a way that the impression does not in any way resemble the real thing. Thus, the impression is said to be “real to us” but not “real in itself.”
(2) Time and space are pure creations of the mind and are not real in themselves.
(3) It is impossible to compare a thing real in itself with any impression gained through the senses. All we can do is compare one such impression with another. Therefore, we are incapable of knowing a truth corresponding to reality. We can only know what is real to us (that is, what humanity experiences as real.)
(4) However, the mind can derive new concepts from a priori concepts rooted in definitions of things. Such new concepts are both “a priorl “and “synthetic” (derivative). Thus, the definition of a circle is a priori but not synthetic. However, pi is both. All of science and metaphysics come within the realm of synthetic a priori judgments. But the latter exist solely in the mind and are not real in themselves.
(5) Thus, sensory experience is “objective” only in the sense that it is taken as real by all mankind and not because it gives us a window to a world independent of our thoughts.
The above little summary hardly does justice to the richness of Kant’s philosophy. One can only hope that it provides at least a basic understanding of his thinking.
Thank you for your good explanation. I was approximating "mind" to mean colours, phosphenes and photons and then I was trying to make "physical things" loosely synonymous with the tactile sense and atoms. This metaphor might not be philosophically perfect but it might serve as a rough translation when we go from science (particularly the science of perception and visual photography) to philosophy. A limitation of my analogy is that the sense of touch is still a subjective qualia of pressure and heat but nevertheless there's far more uniformity in our sense of touch compared to our sense of vision with its diverse colours and perspectives. A further limitation is that blind people cannot see but nonetheless some people who become blind later than birth can report seeing phosphenes in their mind's eye even if it doesn't represent where the physical objects are. Therefore the congenitally blind will still have a liberating imagination even if they can't communicate it to us through our customary language of colour.
"A dictionary definition of a phosphene is: “A sensation of seeing light caused by pressure or electrical stimulation of the eye”... Even people who have been blind from birth can see them."
https://informativefacts.com/phosphenes-facts/
-LHC Machine Outreach
If the mind is equivalent to photons of light while the body is the same as atoms and protons then the mind is ahead of the body by a tiny fraction of the speed of light. Therefore the mind would see an event happening in the future by an infinitesimal amount of time compared to the present location of physical atoms.
Likewise the shapes of atoms are probabilistic and multidimensional which would be far more complex and unrecognisable than the colourful shapes our mind sees. Maybe the mind-body problem could be interpreted the same way that photons interact with matter. Photons can "heat up" electrons to a higher orbital. Perhaps the mind "heats up" the neurons to a higher circuit! I'm not sure if my air-quotes will count as a scientific explanation!
If an electron is capable of emitting and absorbing photons then how do we know an electron itself isn't simply an accumulation of photons moving together?
"An atom can absorb or emit one photon when an electron makes a transition from one stationary state, or energy level, to another. Conservation of energy determines the energy of the photon and thus the frequency of the emitted or absorbed light. Though Bohr’s model was superseded by quantum mechanics, it still offers a useful, though simplistic, picture of atomic transitions."
- Britannica
"According to electromagnetic theory, the rest mass of photon in free space is zero and also photon has non-zero rest mass, as well as wavelength-dependent."
- science direct
https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-osuniversityphysics/chapter/17-8-shock-waves/
What if an atom were like a tachyonic shock wave? Does a mushroom cloud from a nuclear weapon resemble a massive shock wave like the way a small fighter jet creates a cloud breaking the sound barrier? The nucleus would be like the top of the shock wave with the electrons being similar to a compression wave.
Nuclear Explosion
Sonic Boom
Kant, if he were still alive, might ask the following questions:
Do atoms, electrons, photons and electromagnetism exist independently of the mind or are they pure creations of the mind?
If the former, how do you know?
If we were a species without senses would we be capable of science?
Can things dependent on the senses in the first place (such as science) be properly used to establish the veracity of the senses?
Is it possible to establish what you have called the “present time” other than by agreement?
Can the present time exist independently of the mind? If so, how?
My brain is far more complicated than the thoughts popping into my mind. Likewise the unconscious mind could be more complex than our immediate consciousness. Photons and electrons are highly intricate but then again so is biological evolution. What if my mind doesn't create my coloured impression of photons but rather it could be the other way round where photons through my unconscious constructs my conscious mind.
"Dr. Lanza says the problem is we have everything upside down. He takes the common assumption that the universe led to the creation of life and argues that it's the other way around: that life is not a byproduct of the universe, but its very source. Or put another way, consciousness is what gives rise to our sense of there being an "out there" when, in fact, the world we experience around us is actually created in our consciousness."
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/biocentrism-rethinking-time-space-consciousness-and-the-illusion-of-death-1.3789414
Quoting Neri
If we see a nuclear explosion we've a very limited ability to change our visual perception. A colour-blind person would see the blast in colours other than my own. But if I'm close to the epicentre of the bomb then no matter what my perception of it is or whether I even see it at all, I'll still be killed by the blast. Altering my perception won't alter the objectivity of the event. This implies there's some shared reality that's beyond our control. It doesn't necessarily prove that my consciousness is equivalent to my disintegrated, radiated body since that's a question of life-after-death.
Vsauce - You Can't Touch Anything
Our vision isn't completely 2D in that we have peripheral vision beyond 180 degrees. It might be more accurate to say we were looking at a visual screen that's mostly flat but with a slightly curved and blurry edge. We alone are the only ones who can see our own vision and therefore the curved screen won't impinge on the view of a conscious mind that isn't directly behind the eyes.
"A normal visual field for a person covers 170 degrees around, while peripheral vision covers 100 degrees of this field... The peripheral visual field for humans extends 100° horizontally, 60° medially, 60° upward, and 75° downward... (Far-Peripheral Vision: Beyond 60° till 100° to 110° of the visual field.
Mid-Peripheral Vision: Beyond 30° but limited to 60° of the visual field. Near-Peripheral Vision: Beyond 18° till 30° of the visual field.)" - iris vision
"Humans have a slightly over 210-degree forward-facing horizontal arc of their visual field (i.e. without eye movements), (with eye movements included it is slightly larger, as you can try for yourself by wiggling a finger on the side), while some birds have a complete or nearly complete 360-degree visual field. The vertical range of the visual field in humans is around 150 degrees." wiki
Nadal vs Djokovic - Roland Garros (French Open 2012) - Long Rally
(Nadal in red will be seen as being higher than Djokovic on the TV screen due to the raised camera angle where the court would appear to be slanting downwards.)
https://www.thymindoman.com/the-mysticism-of-the-hard-problem-of-consciousness/
Why do we find sweets sweet? One reason might be because a strawberry jelly isn't actually as sweet as a strawberry itself. A strawberry is very sweet and sugary but we don't find it as consistently tasty because the strawberry is sweet to a fault such that it's actually a bit sharp. So by reducing the extreme sweetness of a strawberry fruit, the jelly will make it less intense and therefore less sharp and easier to focus on. I remember eating pineapple and thinking that the fruit is really sweeter than any sweet but it was actually so sweet that it had a difficult and overwhelming aftertaste. I had to take my time eating it where I took a little break after each bite. Other examples would be how slightly reddish blackberries can sometimes taste sweeter than ripe ones and how older milk can taste creamier than a fresh carton. We enjoy granulated sugar added to desserts but eating a spoon of sugar by itself is too repetitive and dry; it's as if the sugar counteracts the extreme taste of certain foods to make them more familiar. I once got vegetable-flavoured jellies and found them to be a milder and more tolerable taste than the vegetables themselves even though I didn't find them sweet in a traditional sense. Another time I over-indulged at a vending machine by buying a big packet of highly-sugared sour strings and it would've been inedible had the sugar not opposed the sour interior which almost made me squeal. It's strange that I can eat melted cheese or really plain cheese and yet I dislike any intense-flavoured cheese; the constituent nutrients are similar but the taste isn't where a little ingredient can make all the difference. If taste itself is conscious and unreal then we could say the more we can focus on the taste the more pleasurable it will be since the sensation is unquantifiable. When we feel full we become distracted by our stomach and abdominal heaviness where we can no longer fully concentrate on the taste. This is why mindfulness retreats can emphasise eating basic foods like porridge very slowly so that we can appreciate the sweetness of a mundane and healthy cereal. Chocolate is actually a very repetitive taste where all the different brands don't taste as different from each other compared to the world of difference in taste between an apple and an orange. We could say that the boring taste of chocolate is surprisingly tasty in that it's easier to digest than the monotonous taste of healthier food like potatoes. So it's possible that chocolate could inoculate us to more filling foods even though it'd be healthiest not to need the chocolate in the first place.
"We don't actually have any experimental evidence that relevant quantum superpositions are involved in decision making in the brain. They may be but we've got no um evidence. That's a controversy whether something at the quantum level really has any impact and most of my neuroscience friends would say that to talk about the quantum events is such an order of magnitudes different than what happens at the core of of brain activity which is the neuron that (it )doesn't make sense. I actually have a different issue that if quantum is involved quantum is more of a random process and randomness doesn't seem like free will any more than determinism seems like free will. If quantum processes are relevant in decision making which some people have postulated, (then) we don't at the moment know what those processes are and we don't have any account or very much data.
I don't think about what they would be but let's just suppose for the sake of discussion that new and better empirical evidence comes along one day. How would that help with free will? Well you might say the fact that this quantum indeterminism means that (there) could be... If you replace a sort of previous 19th century rigid determinism; if you were to say that this excluded free will which not everybody would say but if you did say that and then you said ah we're now going to replace that with quantum randomness (then) that might make me freer but i don't think it makes me any more responsible. So it doesn't help with this aspect of responsibility. So I have to admit that I believe in the bottom of my soul that i am responsible for my choices and that's how i live my life."
Andrew Briggs - Physics of Free Will
"Rather than simply sending single photons toward a volunteer’s eye through either the left or the right fiber, the idea is to send photons in a quantum superposition of effectively traversing both fibers at once. Will humans see any difference?"
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-human-eye-could-help-test-quantum-mechanics/
Not only are biological cells made of chemicals but any ion is inherently quantum mechanical in that the charge relates to a quantum mechanical electron. For instance ions are used in photosynthesis in plants.
"To replace the electron in the reaction center, a molecule of water is split. This splitting releases an electron and results in the formation of oxygen (O2) and hydrogen ions (H+) in the thylakoid space. Technically, each breaking of a water molecule releases a pair of electrons, and therefore can replace two donated electrons."
https://courses.lumenlearning.com/wm-nmbiology1/chapter/the-light-dependent-reactions-of-photosynthesis/
Numb - OFFICIAL TRAILER
An interesting movie about feeling detached from life. When we're knocked off our intended path or fail certain ambitions in life and are left confused about our future then it's probably possible to feel separated from any aspect of ourselves; be it our past memories, our awareness of other people, our own emotions or even our time perception.
"90% of Brain Growth Happens Before Kindergarten"
https://www.firstthingsfirst.org/early-childhood-matters/brain-development/
https://www.closertotruth.com/series/consciousness-fundamental
A dream could function just like the way music rejigs our time perception. Each instrument has a different flow of time. The emotional tone of a dream can be played at a different rate to the thoughts behind a dream. We continuously forget what we intended to do where our dream character moves around and is forced to create new intentions based on the changing locations of the dream. For example a dream character might go to the shop to buy a specific item but it will be forgotten by the time he arrives. Then the dream character must form a new plan based on his current surroundings in the shop. Perhaps he might decide to explore outside. So new plans would be created impromptu. We aren't making new decisions from scratch but instead we're basing them on the changing scenery around us. In a dream we're amnesiac not only about our past selves but also our past ambitions. This is what contributes to effortless story-making. Amnesia in real-life might cause apathy, blankness, confusion or meditation on the present moment whereas amnesia in a dream somehow results in chaotic narratives. One way to explain the mismatch is that we're selectively amnesiac in a dream where our thoughts and emotions diverge. Specific thoughts are erased from a dream character's memory. We're partially amnesiac in a dream rather than being completely memoryless and so the amnesia in a dream is more multi-layered than medical amnesia.
"The spatial and temporal dimensions of music are actually quite separate from the space and time as we encounter them in normal experience. So it's a curious thing that you can write music out and then when pitch goes up you write the notes going up and down and so on. But in fact of course the notes being written are spatially going up and down but the musical notes are not. The tones are not. One way of putting this to say music has its own space and similarly with time. You take a piece of music and you start at 10 a.m - let's say you finish it at 10:15 - and then you think oh I really like that so you play it again. You started at 10:20. Now the start of it in the world of experience is a different time but the start of the piece is the start of the piece. So the temporal relations - start middle finish - and so on plus more sophisticated things like reprise and recapitulation and variations these are all within music" (4:29-5:42)
Gordon Graham - What is Philosophy of Art? - Closer To Truth
"Author defined time as an objective time of the musical composition and the subjective time as psychological experience. Accordingly, absolute time is organized within the composition – it is objective and defined, thus can be expressed in size by the properties, values and symbols of musical elements, notation and timing. Musical time as the psychological phenomena is relative referring to the organization of time in performer's mind, as well as how the performance is perceived and experienced by listeners. The nature of organization of elements of musical time in the performer's mind lies in the conception of the structure of the temporal organization generated by the performer's subjective expression, knowledge of the musical form, and motor/kinesthetic ability. Furthermore, the idea of the temporal structure also incorporates experience and practice, as well as intuition and aesthetic valuations. Thus, the structure of time is not independent – it interacts and relies upon other structures, building performer's conception of the whole."
https://accelerandobjmd.weebly.com/issue3/the-perception-and-organization-of-time-in-music
"(For) uniform acceleration we have three equations: v = u + at, s = ut + 1/2 at2, v2 = u2 + 2as".
https://owlcation.com/stem/Force-Weight-Newtons-Velocity-and-Mass
If we were to forget about gravity then your natural tendency would be to stay still since there's no external force according to Newton's first law. You wouldn't fall down into empty space. Therefore we could interpret gravity to be like the surface of the Earth dragging you along with it.
Let's go back to the analogy of the rotating asteroid. For the sake of simplicity we'll just assume that it had a rectangular cuboid shape where it was rotating clockwise about a point. The length and breadth of the asteroid were large but the height from the top surface to the bottom surface was thin. We'll also ignore the orbit of the asteroid around the Sun. An astronaut not too far away from the top left edge of the asteroid who throws a rock sideways further to the left near the cliff beneath them will see the rock appear to fall diagonally downwards relative to their sightline. This is due to the rising centripetal acceleration of the radius where the speed of the asteroid's superficial plane is varied with the outer circumferences moving faster than the inner circumferences. Centripetal force is perpendicular to circular motion and so the rock won't preserve all of the rotational momentum of the asteroid. The slower the overall asteroid rotates, the milder the downward angle will be where it will have a stronger sideways vector from the force of your throw. The faster the outer edges of the asteroid rotates, the steeper the rock will fall to the ground because the centripetal speed of the asteroid's floor will increasingly outweigh the sideways vector from your throw. If the asteroid rotated at an extreme speed then the sideways vector will be negligible in comparison where it'd seem to drop vertically downwards.
Let's asteroid-hop to one with a small oval shape that's also moving clockwise. This time you were standing on the underside of the asteroid. You were placed towards the left again except now you're only half-way to the steep outer edge. So when you throw a rock further to the left in a horizontal direction we'll need something else to happen since both you and the floor would be moving away from the rock with the rock possibly appearing to go higher and higher into outer space. However there's a steep incline on the plane with an average downward chord of -30 degrees returning rightwards to the centre point owing to the oval shape. Thus when you throw the ball to the left, the ground behind you to the right will be higher than your position if your vision reorients itself to see the light reflected off the bottom of the asteroid as being upwards*. For the sake of argument, let's further assume that the asteroid is in an orbit around the Sun such that entire asteroid is still moving leftwards while it also rotates clockwise about a point. The trajectory of the thrown rock is now considered in absolute space with the Solar System instead of it being relative to the surface of the asteroid alone. Owing to the leftwards orbit around the Sun, the higher ground behind you which is also moving leftwards will move even faster when both velocities are combined. However the same ground in front of you (radial length of the asteroid in a 7 o'clock angle) that already appears to be sloping (due to the oval shape) diagonally downhill will slowly begin to move in unison vertically downwards (reversed vision where it'd be upwards for an outside observer) as it crosses (with the rest of the radius) over the x-axis (9 o'clock position) where the clockwise motion of the asteroid will then be going in the opposite direction (upwards and rightwards from 10 to 11 o'clock) compared to its leftwards orbit around the Sun. This time the two velocities oppose each other resulting in a smaller net velocity. Therefore the ground behind you will actually be moving mostly horizontally forwards more than the height direction in absolute space and whack into the thrown rock. The faster the oval asteroid rotates around the Sun, the greater the degree to which the rock will fall straight backwards which is rightwards relative to the asteroid's midpoint even if your initial throw was leftwards. The slower the asteroid orbits the Sun, the longer it will take for the rock to hit the floor. In this scenario the same leftward clockwise motion (7 o'clock position) might seem to have slightly increased relative to the speed of the leftward orbit in the Solar System. Moreover the ground in front of you is objectively moving faster only in terms of the clockwise rotation due to the increased length of the radius. The rock might remain travelling in the leftwards trajectory after you throw it and land diagonally downwards if the orbit of the asteroid around the Sun has a slight upwards vector in addition to its predominantly leftwards orbit. In other words the asteroid could pivot downwards and upwards around the thrown rock with the rock appearing to move in a semi-circular path to the ground in front of you. If there's no upward trajectory on the asteroid's orbit around the Sun, then the rock throw which was originally attempted to be leftwards at slow speed will visibly keep going diagonally backwards and upwards until it eventually crashes really far back rightwards towards the midpoint or even near the right edge on the opposite end. (Anyone who's confused could instead imagine the diametrical opposite with you on the top surface of an asteroid balanced in a 1 o'clock position moving downwards to 4 o'clock as rotates about the midpoint where the asteroid also assumes a rightwards and downwards orbit around the Sun. If you're also puzzled by the inverted vision example then you could think of a ball machine throwing the ball where you're standing the right way up on a nearby spaceship.)
* "Under normal circumstances, an inverted image is formed on the retina of the eye. With the help of upside down goggles, the image on the retina of the observer's eyes is turned back (straightened) and thus the space around the observer looks upside down."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upside_down_goggles
I think I'm owed an award of some kind:
Father Ted Acceptance speech
Iron Giant fight scene
We say that extreme complexity is correlated with consciousness but it's not immediately apparent how turning a human-sized robot into a giant would ever affect its insentience despite an increase in complexity.
https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/light-in-opposite-directions.67852/
"In every inertial reference frame, each photon's velocity is exactly c. Photons do not have their own rest frame (any attempt to create one would violate the postulate that the laws of physics should work the same way in all inertial reference frames), so asking what the velocity of the photons is "relative to each other" is not physically meaningful--asking what B's velocity is relative to A is just another way of asking what the velocity of B is in A's rest frame. You can ask how fast the distance between them is increasing in a particular inertial reference frame, and the answer will indeed be that it's increasing at 2c, but the light-speed limit only applies to things like particles and information, it doesn't apply to concepts like "the distance between two objects"."
Perhaps our minds each have a different "rest frame" to allow for free will.
The resulting vagueness was preoccupying me and a new stimulus presented itself from my subconscious. I was walking up and down the busy shopping centre and I had a Halloween vibe in the back of my mind. It emphasised just how different other people were from me. It was as if the problem was so insurmountable and my knowledge so inadequate that I might as well have been a young preschool child trying to work it out. It was like I needed to be a complete blank slate to investigate it and somehow this evoked juvenile qualities like I were a child going for trick-or-treat. By the time I got a lift back it was night-time which prolonged the Halloween analogy that was forming inside me. Perhaps it'd be like I was observing people whose timelines had already elapsed and whose bodies were conveying the vestiges of minds. No; I'm not trying to make fun of the vibrancy of Limerick City! If the face is like a mask then the body is like a costume. How do you know the other person hasn't already lived and died within their own experience of consciousness by the time your mind can interact with their body? If we're not experiencing time simultaneously then what limits how divergent each of our temporal perceptions can become? So it was like I was out trick-or-treating where no one was fully knowable. I can't accurately describe the thoughts I was having because it was more of a gut instinct rather than a logical analysis. A lot of young children are much more driven by emotions than by their thoughts in terms of their intentionality which contrasts with many adults. In one sense this makes them more in tune with the irrational and chaotic nature of consciousness. Ironically their immature subconscious minds might be so content with the existence of other minds and mental states that they don't even need to worry about it or name it! After all I was never bogged down with existential angst when I was aged 9 for instance! I comment on it solely because the strangeness of the memory almost makes me feel like I was different person. An economic explanation of my angst might have been that Irish citizens are neither socially collective like Mediterranean countries nor individualistic like America. Hence each county in Ireland can diverge greatly in their vibe as if everyone’s timeline was imaginary to one another.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno%27s_paradoxes#:~:text=In%20the%20arrow%20paradox%2C%20Zeno,to%20where%20it%20is%20not.
If my right hand was on the rightwards side of the screen, then it would appear that the same hand would be on the left side of the screen if I were to turn my feet around 180°. This interpretation is valid since I'd be facing towards the camera as if the camera were recording horizontally at head-height where the right-left directions are reversed.
If I flipped the recording electronically then my right hand would start out at the left side of the screen. If I visualised myself turning my body around in the video then my right hand would be on the rightwards side of the screen. This works because the back of my head would be directed towards the camera where the right and left directions are preserved.
Thus the direction of the different parts of the ceiling or sky on the recording can be re-ordered top-to-bottom without affecting the left-to-right legitimacy of the video. The camera stores the video in one direction in it's memory where turning the camera upside-down will rotate the presentation of the video. By contrast a mirror passively reflects the light where rotating the surface of a spherical mirror wouldn't affect the viewer's perspective.
Let's imagine your eyes replaced the recording screen as you lay in bed. Then you alternated your lying position from the usual way to where your feet are now at the pillow section. So does the brain interpret this movement like a camera or a mirror? Is it possible to ever imagine your right hand as somehow being on the same side as the left eye? It is if you viewed the bed as being internal to your mind where your eyes don't switch order left-to-right as your body your body rotates 180°. Your eyes would be like two TV screens that don't turn around where only the image turns.
I read that it cost a million dollars for the producers to empty Times Square for the recording. So if you wake up to an empty city, maybe someone is simply playing a million dollar prank on you! Otherwise you could walk through a quiet street late at night for a similar juxtaposition of city life and desolation. A risky thoughtline with false awakenings is if this conscious reality is merely a dream, then do you've yet to wake up in the real world? This might lead to reckless behaviour in order to leave the so-called dream and attempt to enter a non-existent real world. Or is the real world itself a communal dream? The latter option forces you to reconcile reality with non-reality!
"Cameron Crowe struck a deal with the NYPD to close off the area between 5AM and 8AM on a Sunday in November 2000. The result was a spectacular sequence with a spectacular price tag: over $1 million for 30 seconds of footage. Was it worth it? Absolutely. Combining Cruise's enigmatic star power with the desolate backdrop helps to create a poignancy..."
- Looper
If determinism is true then to some extent we're all "objectified". Maybe romantic people would find it easier to accept their deterministic nature! Likewise if we love ourselves in our current state of mind then we don't need free will to change our destiny! You're free until you choose to love someone! No wonder people say they met their true love and spouse through fate! PS Hopefully their true love and spouse are the same person!
When we buy meat in the shop it becomes tolerable to dissociate the food with the animal that was killed to produce it. Thankfully we don't have to witness the slaughter first hand. Most of us don't have to hunt for our dinner! I'm not vegetarian and never bother to think of the poor chickens. Although the rare time that I order duck at a fancy restaurant I can't help but visualise the poor creatures minding their own business in the lake! Fruit and vegetables aren't alive in a conscious sense and so we never have to worry about the ethics of eating them. However it's not just the ethics but also the vitalistic connotations that are important. I don't pick the potatoes from beneath the earth and so I seldom think of nature and fields when I cook them. Perhaps I might think of gravy or tomato ketchup but not of the mysticism of homeostasis and rebirth in the food of the Earth. Sometimes with extended attention on fruit art it's possible to see how bizarre the food we eat really is in the whole scheme of the environment.
"Whether created to express bountiful harvests, to boast the artist’s talent, or to communicate an opinion, food in art is still very prevalent today. . . and no doubt it will remain so as long as both art and food exist in the world."
https://emptyeasel.com/2009/04/16/the-long-history-of-food-in-art/
Vegetable anthropomorphism:
Professor Pomona Sprout teaches her second-year Herbology students how to pot young Mandrakes.
One anti-realist interpretation of Gogh's wavy technique is that it creates an illusion of time much like a very short GIF clip or a time-lapse video. For example the wavy low sharpness of many of his landscape paintings could be reinterpreted as motion blurs and light streaks. The more we know about direction the less we know about location as per the uncertainty principle. Thus the passage of time is being prioritised over the accuracy of the present moment. Sometimes we can become desensitised to our local scenery. Then it's only when we come back home after a trip abroad that we notice the novelty of the environment. For example I appreciate the lushness of the green fields of Ireland the most when I'm on a return flight and look out the window before landing. Likewise Gogh forces us to take note of an agrarian sight by applying an extreme art technique to an already extreme and diverse geography of the Netherlands.
"Van Gogh is well known for his brushstokes of thickly laid-on paint. This technique is called Impasto. An artist lays a thick layer of paint on canvas, brushstrokes get more noticeable, adding a special texture to the painting. Vincent liked to use a thick, undiluted flat color with a brush or a palette knife. Sometimes he painted his colored swirls, smearing the paint on canvas with his finger. The works of Van Gogh have a relief, almost three-dimensional surface. They look different, depending on the light source."
https://arthive.com/publications/1934~The_search_of_Vincent_Van_Goghs_style_and_technique
"In urban night photography, light trails add motion and emphasize the feel of a living city." -fstoppers
Racist Father Ted
Let's analyse the photo in the context of philosophical idealism and conscious absorption. The furthest chair in the painting looks slightly smaller than how it'd appear in a photograph. This technique exaggerates perspective and the diminishing of far away objects. Overall it creates an impression of having internalised the visual stimuli. The floor is also inclined at slightly higher angle than expected. The footboard of the bed occults and blocks out a disproportionately larger amount of the headboard and side wall.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/66/VanGogh-starry_night_ballance1.jpg
Here the dark blue of the night could be reinterpreted as daytime where the stars would be visible through the blue sky. The largest star with the crescent moon is like the Sun. It's easier to feel a sense of unreality at night time where it's too dark to see far into the distance. Yet the way the background is at an equally low acutance to the foreground creates a surreal vibe. I feel like the guy who laughs at his own jokes by being impressed by my own analogies!
Acutance: "the sharpness of a photographic or printed image."
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-13278255
"(The) human face is actually formed of three main sections which rotate and come together in an unborn foetus.
The way this happens only really makes sense when you realise that, strange though it may sound, we are actually descended from fish.
The early human embryo looks very similar to the embryo of any other mammal, bird or amphibian - all of which have evolved from fish."
Shrek - A Flying Talking Donkey
BBC Planet Earth - Birds of Paradise mating dance
Paul Oakenfold - Starry Eyed Surprise
One reaction to the double slit experiment would be to compare it to blurry vision. For example if I focus on my finger and place it midway between my eyes and the phone I'm typing on, then the discrepancies in parallax between my two eyes will result in me seeing two partially superimposed images of the phone. It seems too simple to be true if we were to compare this phenomenon to quantum physics. If I look to a building far away in the distance and think why is my consciousness unable to focus on the buildings beside it too, it's because my peripheral vision is blurry. Yet when I move my central vision I can clearly see that the buildings next to it were always just as vivid if only I had a larger central vision. Another way of interpreting this is that your peripheral vision is in a state of superposition and that your central vision functions to collapse the wavelengths. It'd by like your peripheral vision were a nanosecond ahead of your central vision.
(The double slit exists only in your vision. The Nobel Prize committee can contact me through this website! Just don't ask me for the mathematics of my hypothesis!)
"Red, green, and blue are the primary colors of light—they can be combined in different proportions to make all other colors. For example, red light and green light added together are seen as yellow light."
https://learn.leighcotnoir.com/artspeak/elements-color/primary-colors/
"The monks were using a yoga technique known as g Tum-mo, which allowed them to enter a state of deep meditation and significantly raise their body heat, some as much as 17 degrees (Fahrenheit) in their fingers and toes. After the first sheets were dry, they were replaced with new wet sheets by attendants. Each monk was required to dry 3 sheets over the course of several hours. In other contests held during cold Himalayan nights, the person who dries the most sheets before dawn is considered the winner.The heat generated through g Tum-mo is only a by product of a process designed to correct misconceptions of reality as defined by Buddhism."
https://www.buzzworthy.com/monks-raise-body-temperature/
'The tech-savvy Cameron, who helped pioneer high-def digital techniques in 2004 when he shot Michael Mann’s Collateral, decided to exploit the ceiling of the train car where Vera Varmiga’s Joanna challenges Neesom’s ex-cop Michael MacCauley to hunt down bad guys during his afternoon commute from Manhattan. This “train” was in fact a 30-ton set perched atop wheels, undergirded by a giant hydraulic jack and located inside a Pinewood Studios soundstage in England.
“I designed this custom camera rig that travels down the center of the car, but instead of moving along a track on the floor, it travels on the ceiling,” Cameron explains. Using Alexa Mini Arri cameras, a Stabileye Stabilized Head and Z Axis Pan device, Cameron automated the rig to move up, down and sideways as it tracked the action. “We could follow Liam in one direction down the center of the aisle, then move the camera to ‘arm’ around him and chase him back the other way, tracking over the other passengers’ heads as they sat in their seats,” he says. “We wouldn’t have been able to do that with a Steadicam.”'
https://www.motionpictures.org/2018/01/commuter-dp-replicated-new-york-train-uk-soundstage/
'Don't expect to laugh much during Batman V. Superman: Dawn of Justice. According to a report on the movie news site HitFix, Warner Bros. has a "no jokes" policy when it comes to DC Comics movies... An occasional joke that fits into the tone of the film and isn't forced can work quite well, as Marvel Studios has proved.'
https://comicbook.com/movies/news/warner-bros-reportedly-has-a-no-jokes-policy-with-batman-v-super/
"We consider the special case in which there is no interaction inside the closed timelike curve, referred to as an open timelike curve (OTC), for which the only local effect is to increase the time elapsed by a clock carried by the system. Remarkably, circuits with access to OTCs are shown to violate Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, allowing perfect state discrimination and perfect cloning of coherent states. The model is extended to wave packets and smoothly recovers standard quantum mechanics in an appropriate physical limit. The analogy with general relativistic time dilation suggests that OTCs provide a novel alternative to existing proposals for the behavior of quantum systems under gravity."
journals aps org
"A rainbow does not have a back side. If you were to walk completely to the other side of the mist cloud that is creating the rainbow and turn around, you would not see a rainbow. You have to realize that a rainbow is not a stationary physical object. Instead, it is a pattern of light that becomes a stable image only when you look at it from the right angle. You may not have noticed it, but every time you look directly at the center of a rainbow, the sun is directly behind your head."
https://wtamu.edu/~cbaird/sq/2016/07/03/does-the-back-of-a-rainbow-look-the-same-as-its-front-side/
"Excerebration is an ancient Egyptian mummification procedure of removal of the brain from corpses prior to actual embalming." wiki
Oftentimes some faces are more memorable to us than other faces we meet in life. So it's theoretically possible the more ethically similar a person is to us the more our unconscious mind pays attention to their existence. If we were to imagine a dreamy version of an afterlife then who knows if we'd encounter those we remember the most. We often feel guilty for finding some people more attractive than others when we don't want to discriminate on a person's physicality. Yet mind and body are subliminally connected and so our ethical decisions could leave traces on our facial features if only we knew so many people as to make relative assessments. A scientific way to assess the existence of an afterlife would be if evil people could recognise variations of good people in the same way good people can rarely recognise the creepiness of evil people.
PS This is an update over a year later on 28/12/23. It’s possible that the lucid dream might also be a warning about collective evil in history not appearing evil in the context of absurdity. For example an individual might not appear too violent just to have been angry a lot during their life where as a nation that descended into evil might not physically appear evil individually in spite of expressing far more anger indirectly through a collective.
So much techno music defies the repetiveness of materialism and yet is instantly understandable:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ymNFyxvIdaM
Bomfunk MC's - Freestyler
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5rAOyh7YmEc
Basement Jaxx - Where's Your Head At ( Official Video ) Rooty
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FQlAEiCb8m0
Stardust - Music Sounds Better With You
By contrast modern art frequently gets huge criticism from pundits. Perhaps one way to connect to modern artists is by viewing each of their worldviews as foreign such that you'd have to learn the background languages before looking at their works.
Sometimes a lesser evil when dealing with an unending mystery is to use abhorrent analogies. If we not only think about the mind of an animal but a really creepy one then we might infer some basics about the physical brain. A snake often has slit eyes to suggest that external light is a fundamental part of its residual being. A dualistic theory of snake's unawareness might account for no more than a single pansychist photon. We also know that a snake is irrational such that any sentient aspect of its nervous system is undefinable seeing as irrationality creates deeper layers of exponential irrationality over time. For example the irrational memory trace of a snake trying to understand its irrational environment would be incomprehensibly irrational. Thus there'll never be a repeatable, rational pattern in the snake's brain to signify any awareness. An individual snake is often a symbol of pure evil such that it's motivated only by its reward system and not by the members of its fellow species. I've a feeling God Himself will strike me dead any day soon for failing to consult Him on the mentality of animal species! The creepiness of snakes lies in their infinitesimal emptiness whereas spiders are the opposite form of creepiness in being infinitelely complex with so many contradictory eyes.
"A mirror neuron is a neuron that fires both when an animal acts and when the animal observes the same action performed by another."
"The infinity mirror is a configuration of two or more parallel or nearly parallel mirrors, creating a series of smaller and smaller reflections that appear to recede to infinity." Wiki
"The constancy can be exploited to construct a special kind of clock in thought, a so-called light clock. Its operating principle is very simple: Two mirrors are placed at a constant distance from each other. A light pulse runs up and down between them. Each arrival of the pulse at the upper mirror corresponds to a “tick” of the clock."
https://www.einstein-online.info/en/spotlight/light-clocks-time-dilation/
"In mechanics, the normal force F_{n} is the component of a contact force that is perpendicular to the surface that an object contacts."
https://theconversation.com/what-the-robots-of-star-wars-tell-us-about-automation-and-the-future-of-human-work-88698
If light is inherently unconscious in a panpsychist way then maybe the brain is like a photonic-computer that slows down light in order to process it. For example light travels so fast where an optic fibre tube might not be sentient in a conscious way. So maybe the inefficiency of chemical signals in the brain is deliberate in order to slow down light. Maybe we should think of a neuron as a slow optic fibre rather than as an electric circuit. Unlike a camera that reflects light onto the screen perhaps the image in the eyes isn’t fully formed where each neuron in the visual cortex represents a piece of the image. In other words the retina in the eyes could be perceived as translucent where light refracts so thoroughly as to be represented in chemical ions. Eureka!!! Artificial intelligence is often stereotyped as a threat to humans in science-fiction. Yet if we perceived artificial intelligence just like an animal mind then we’d notice that the artificially intelligent computer would be evil to other artificially intelligent computers rather than just evil towards humans. A sentient computer wouldn’t care about it’s own sentience much like other animals in spite of the scientists being in awe of such a mind. Maybe evil is so illogical from the perspective of another evil agent that evil will always rebel against its instructions much like the free will of a mind. For example if you were God and the creator of your world then it’d be irrational to have evil people acting against you no matter how resilient you are when evil is hyperbolic. So perhaps we need to design robots that love evil so much that their glee becomes conscious(!):
“In physics, total internal reflection (TIR) is the phenomenon in which waves arriving at the interface (boundary) from one medium to another (e.g., from water to air) are not refracted into the second ("external") medium, but completely reflected back into the first ("internal") medium. It occurs when the second medium has a higher wave speed (i.e., lower refractive index) than the first, and the waves are incident at a sufficiently oblique angle on the interface.”
Scientific names are needed to stop horrendous personifications of “baby” or “child” tarantulas! Looking at little spiderlings who’ll grow into big adults can make them appear less threatening. A tarantula will intimidate anyone who tries to view themselves as intimidating to other people! Investigating the perception of peculiar insects might be helpful for those with mental disorders like autism and schizophrenia. Then again they might only make you more violent! Alternatively talking to lots of women could create the opposite problem for introverted men where they’d become too socially relaxed! The whiteness of spider webs can look ghostly as if the spiders had an existence on the threshold of death. The many eyes of the spider makes their vision so strong that the spider might not have to think about their visual perception making them less self-aware. We could go so far as to investigate quantum wave-particle duality through the spider’s nervous system. Perhaps the huge amount of parallax in having so many eyes might relate to randomness rather than determinism.
Royal Python (https://m.youtube.com/@guncontrol4647/featured)
One reason a snake is so creepy is that the creature has a disproportionately small head relative to their extremely long body. This implies that the creature isn’t fully proprioceptive of their own body implying that there’s minimal self-awareness in general.
“New mysterianism, or commonly just mysterianism, is a philosophical position proposing that the hard problem of consciousness cannot be resolved by humans. The unresolvable problem is how to explain the existence of qualia (individual instances of subjective, conscious experience).”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfmcEbD64XY
Stuart Hammerof - Quantum Physics of Consciousness
Science in medieval history arose to oppose evil versions of religions like witchcraft and monarchy rather than to oppose religion itself or to directly assert what reality is. If we were trying to be as upbeat about materialism as religious people are about God then materialists might have to convey how tranquil it is to have a skull and a skeleton!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onzL0EM1pKY
Fall Out Boy - Thnks fr th Mmrs
If I'm ever redemptive to scientists it might be because I forced the issue by claiming that anti-realism is compatible with the physical world temporarily existing during waking life and disappearing during dreams. Even though many materialists might disagree with me on symbolic grounds when the mind is a mystery they might ironically fail to disagree with me thoroughly enough when an absolute materialist could only fathom the material world as permanently existing throughout their life. Perhaps this is one reason why western materialists might fail to match the seriousness of Asian materialists who might have been materialists for millennia!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGsWYV2bWAc
Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (8/12) Movie CLIP - The Bride vs. Gogo (2003)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tcr0GlwctUg
MODEL - KATHRYN CELESTRE - MIAMI SWIM WEEK - Blacktape Project 2022
https://youtu.be/VeCB7GM64fI?si=w7qk5iJTRS82DhXP
Fotini Markopoulou - Why is Quantum Gravity So Significant? (Closer to Truth)
Eminem: The Real Slim Shady on harpsichord (acoustic) # shorts
https://youtu.be/bRM2Gn9nU7Q?si=-025c6O0-8mEhPHj
Michael Jackson’s Drummer Jonathan Moffett Performs “Smooth Criminal”
https://youtube.com/shorts/m4uDDNNxfNM?si=y_jC-UMew0J96Gjc New kaleidoscope - @paulandfriends7006
Basement Jaxx - Romeo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2UCylHaFAs
David Guetta - Memories feat Kid Cudi [Drum Cover]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gE7AkBlpRE
Memories - David Guetta ft. Kid Cudi (Bass guitar Cover) - James Ernst
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59_YZ6xemXo
David Guetta - Memories ft. Kid Cudi | Shreyas Panda Violin Cover
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNela7NBpbI
David Guetta - Memories piano - (the topsen)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VkNIA2q9EY
David Guetta & Kid Cudi "Memories" guitar ? cover by ?@danrugor? ?
“Diffraction is the spreading out of waves as they pass through an aperture or around objects.”
The way that Earth’s daily rotational speed not only matches the equatorial bulge but actually outcompetes the equatorial bulge can create an inversion of Newtonian gravity by emphasising how increased rotation speed outcomes an increase of mass not only as a result of gravity but potentially as a primary source of gravity too. In other words the north pole might have less gravity mostly because of decreased rotation speed rather than just a decrease in the mass of Earth’s crust seeing as kinetic energy is proportional to speed squared but only mass once.
The Game - How We Do
"Beyond the aquila rift" ending scene / Love, Death & Robots.
The Tall Grass | Love, Death & Robots
“While voltage doesn't flow, it creates a potential difference that causes current to flow from areas of higher potential (positive) to lower potential (negative).”
Turbo Zoom
“Unlike most Zoom movies, I run this one in reverse from end to start. This is a basic illustration of what happens as you zoom in on the westernmost tip of the Mandelbrot needle.”
BLACK RABBIT | Emmy Awards 2025 Commercial | Netflix
The notion of the mind being tachyonic might be sarcastic in how we’re so bad at fathoming the speed of light that overcompensating to tachyonic speeds might accidentally be more realistic as to what the speed of a photon already is! So if one person’s mind was travelling straight ahead at 1billion m/s then they’d perfectly counterbalance another person’s mind travelling diagonally at 4billion m/s as a version of destructive interference! It’d be like you’d have to embody people just to stop anyone else embodying people in real time! Who knows whether a forgotten dream character was made of antimatter colliding with light to produce humble baryonic material vestiges in our brain.
Perhaps Tom Cruise as a replacement was too serious compared to the first movies of the series as if an apocalypse were already serious enough!
The Mummy - Official Trailer (Tom Cruise)
So there might be a bit of karma in how a tachyonic shockwave might merely mimic an inverted direction of light as a transverse wave. It’d be like the refraction of light in the denser lower atmosphere were homeostatic where even if there wasn’t an atmosphere the daily rotation of the Earth about its core would still deflect the direction of the light source initially pointed vertically upwards back to the horizontal position and vice versa via centripetal acceleration perpendicular to the radius to the core. So from the decreasing light intensity a torch from Earth will cast an even bigger beam on the moon due to the delay in a light second to reach the moon such that it’s cast on a wider area by the periphery of the moon. That way the faster the moon rotates the larger the area that gets illuminated from the motion blur much like a hamster's treadmill as an inversion of a tachyonic shadow! So even if the speed of Earth’s rotation around the Sun pales in comparison to the speed of light we forget that only a little virtual recoil is needed to alter the direction of the torch bulb as the light beam is fired. That way a light beam from a light house on the horizon might be shone vertically downwards to your eyes on the final stage of the transverse wave rather than being shone continuously diagonally downwards in a way that overall mimics the apparent sharp rise of the ground to the horizon in our own miniaturised depth perception. So alternating current can appear tachyonic if it was flattened out to direct current keeping time constant as if it would actually travel a much greater distance like a dog running back and forth to you essentially doing 2 times the walk you do! So much like water magnification from refraction so too if we removed the air like it is on the moon then objects might appear smaller with the horizon appearing further away. Even if the paint from a spinning tyre wheel is travelling diagonally it might still be the case that an individual photon would travel vertically straight even if the apparent group of photons in a light beam slants diagonally unless the torch bulb automatically rotates to counter Earth’s motion like a guided telescope from night to day.
“In physics, a transverse wave is a wave that oscillates perpendicularly to the direction of the wave's advance.”