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Multisense Combustion
I was thinking about combustion engines and mentally following the sequence from the early step of mixing gasoline with air, then how that mix gets ignited in the gap of the ‘charged’ ends of the spark plug, which then changes the mix into CO2 + H2O steam molecules moving in all directions, only much faster…then those fast moving steam molecules begin to gradually move the dense metal pistons, push the metal gears in the transmission and ultimately rotate the drive train and wheels.
I wanted a video that would show a realistic visualization of combustion at the microstate scale, and this was the closest I could find right now. It’s a good video and I think it works for this, even though I was hoping for more of a scientific CGI simulation than a cartoon.
I’m doing this to help explain my understanding of how the Hard Problem of Consciousness can be transcended using sense-centric model of metaphysics.
Some key points to get from the simple explanation of the video to my Multisense Realism view:
Energy is an abstract concept that stands in for what we would call stimulating feelings or sensations. Stimulating meaning that besides the sensation of kinetic movement that would be assumed under physics (but not defined as a sensation), the event would includes another sensation of desire/motivation (call it motive) to act physically to discharge the quality of that initial feeling, because it is in some sense, uncomfortable or stressful. I propose that is all that ‘energy’ is – a felt sensory-aesthetic quality that causes a motive to experience a complementary sensory-aesthetic quality of release/return by turning the motive affect into motor effect – physical motion. The idea of potential energy is replaced by the more familiar experience of stress/strain and the idea of kinetic energy is replaced by the release of that stress through the physical act of acceleration.
The video does a great job of simplifying the conventional thermodynamic theory with a curve on a graph where potential energy of the fuel molecule decreases as it is transformed into the lower energy (more ‘relaxed’) molecules of water and carbon dioxide plus acceleration and light. In reality, there is no curve of potential energy being lost to kinetic energy. That is an abstraction to help us understand a theory of chemistry rather than a description of the event.
I propose that the actual combustion event needs at least two separate sense modalities to be modeled realistically – two modes of perception analogous to what we experience as touch (tactile/haptic/tangibility) and sight (visibility). First, the tangible sense rendering or appearance consists of molecules moving at one speed colliding and rearranging with each other so that they suddenly move very quickly (accelerate) in all directions. That’s the only truly physical, tangible thing that combustion is doing.*
The second aspect of the combustion event has tangible (photoelectric) effects, however, I propose that the only illuminating aspect is in fact visible rather than tangible. This is a radical proposal – that what we know as vision is not a simulation somehow transduced from information sent physically across a vacuum as particle-wave ‘patterns’, but is its own direct ontological medium that exists prior to biology, and perhaps even prior to tangibility. It may be the case that physics is grounded in metaphysical phenomena that are more like visual experiences than tangible experiences.
In the video, we see that part of the combustion of fuel into water and CO2 is the emission of what we conceive as light or photons. As I have proposed in other writings, light may not exist in any tangible sense, although it causes tangible effects (motion of atoms). I’m not denying that photons could exist as standalone particle/waves in a vacuum, but I think given what we observe from QM experiments and from our own experience of sight as a sense of looking and seeing rather than purely a sense of tangible collisions in the back of our eyeballs, I think it makes more sense to understand photons as either intangible sense experience or semi-tangible vehicles of trans-tangible sense experience. Illumination may be a more fundamental sense interaction than touch, so that the sense of objects are more of a collapsed reduction of some aspects of sensory-motive changes that cannot be seen directly.
By trans-tangible I mean that the ability to see brightness, colors, and images made of those contrasting visible qualities is not an ability that objects/particles or waves could generate under our current physical theory. There is an Explanatory Gap between what we think we know about mechanical events of force and what we experience directly as seeing/sight/sights/visibility. That is a How question. There is also a Hard Problem of Consciousness that arises when we ask the question of Why there would be any such thing as visible qualities in the first place when the mechanical consequences of physical events like combustion would produce the identical functions in complete invisibility. As an example, you can unplug the screen of your computer and nothing important is going to change in the circuits of the device. The device could do exactly what it was doing before, even though the main reason you have for making it do anything is to generate some non-computational physical activity in the lcd screen you’re staring at.
As long as the photon moves the electron, (or in some sense IS the motion of the electron) at a distance, then there’s no parsimonious reason to add an additional thing that the universe does to give it an ‘appearance’, much less an appearance that is presented visually rather than haptically. In a purely physical universe, nothing would have an appearance, nor would an appearance change anything physically. In a physical universe-plus-appearance, the appearance would by default be tactile/haptic and not visual. A brain would not see a world of images, it would just process the chemistry of its own fluids as it is, or with a lower resolution miniaturization of what it is.
For example, a grain of salt is an object appearance that approximates billions of molecules, so it is a low res icon that could be weakly emergent if sensed as a single tangible shape colliding with tongue cells, but to suddenly have that shape become an image of colors and brightness, or of flavor requires some strongly emergent non-physical magic. Magic because it’s not parsimonious. It doesn’t follow logically that any such thing would appear in a physical universe.
Most people currently assume that natural selection can and does produce mutations of physical cells that end up conjuring such appearances as sights and flavors, but in all cases that assume is a logical fallacy – a petitio principii or Begging the Question fallacy where the fact of the experience of sight is retrospectively smuggled in to what is supposed to be an explanation for how that experience came to be in the first place.
We can’t really see an electron or a photon, and we can’t really detect one without using our own conscious observation of how a physical instrument changes physically. This means that photons and electrons could be more like sensations that change the movements of atoms rather than free-standing physical entities in a vacuum. Photons in particular may just be how seeing or sensing appears when we look at it with something that we assume does not see (a physical instrument like a photomultiplier).
The whole notion of quantized energy states and electrons moving from inner to outer shells may be more of a story we made up about the behavior of the instruments we are using, and the modalities of sense and sense-making we are using them with than a realistic understanding of the fabric of all of nature. My proposal is that the fabric of nature is appearance itself: aesthetic presentations of multiple sense modalities, including, but not limited to, sights, sounds, feelings, thoughts, haptic/tactile textures and objects, emotions, even people. The presentation of aesthetic appearance on different nested scales of time or significance replaces the assumed anesthetic mechanics of physics or computation, and the presentation of the aesthetics of participation/voluntary will replaces the assumed automaticity of mass-energy or information processing.
Instead of literal light waves traveling as independent entities in the vacuum of space, my hypothesis suggests more of a Wheeler-Feynman Absorber Theory, but replacing anesthetic-automatic events of mere geometric emission and absorption with a Multisense Realism Theory of shared sensory-motive experiences of giving and receiving experiential qualities. Not only is illumination an experience of visible aesthetic qualities, but I am proposing that those aesthetic qualities are isomorphic to, or recapitulate the original experience of the event at the source to some degree.
In the Multisense Realism view of combustion, the idea of a subatomic particle leaving an atom and joining another is replaced by the idea of atomic scale experiences sharing a contagious sense of oscillating excitement-relaxation among existing conscious experiences. We render these experiences as movements of atoms only when we are using tangible instruments to detect their tangible side effects. Otherwise these events can be rendered in any modality – feelings, thoughts, flavors, colors, etc. There is no thing-that-is “light” other than the shared experience of illumination. Further, the experience of illumination is not only the wedding of separated experiences of generic stimulation through the sending and receiving of a sensation, but it is an experience of awareness of some aspect of the nature of that experience as it relates to all other experiences. Illumination is not only an increase in the visible quality of brightness, but within that brightness is a record OF the event that caused it. Light/illumination can be informative but it is not mere information. It is not just generic ‘news’ or signal but it news-OF an aesthetic-participatory event that is recapitulated aesthetically. A presentation that can re-present itself to itself, aka a form of consciousness.
*That’s the only thing that metabolism is doing also – in the stomach, in the blood, even in the brain. There is no standalone thing that is ‘energy’ in the universe. Energy is whatever quality of sensation that stimulates a desire to change or spread that sensation. It’s not a generic thing, but it can be modeled that way, quantified and understood enough to exert control over physical and chemical reactions.
21st century madman’s picture of God
In/out : Electromotive-sensory force ::
Around and around : Gravitoentropic-Magnetic a-motive field
Primacy of Sense: Absorption and Emission
Another clue revealing the primacy of sense in the universe:
The point that I want to make here is that when examining physical phenomena at the largest and smallest sales, the spectrum is reveals itself as a fundamental context. Matter defines itself as specific obstructions or gaps within the complete continuum, or as a specific slices or fragments which can rejoin with other emissions to complete the spectrum.
Our current understanding of radiation, light, energy, and fields assumes a foreground of an emission against a void. Photons are presumed to to exist as object-like presences which are distinct from a background which is a vacuum that is somehow full of ‘energy’. The physicalist view is a bit contradictory, seeing one layer of quantum foam or zero point energy as an ultimate ground to the universe which is ‘always on’ and then an classical level of description of space as a vacuum that is always ‘off’ except when interrupted by forces.
I think that it makes more sense to throw out both the idea of the vacuum full of energy and the objects in empty space and see that entire model of the universe as half of the larger picture…a half which is ultimately an inversion or antithesis of the true trans-physical foundation.
If the conception of the universe as a spacetime void which contains various kinds of mass-energy ‘stuffs’ is turned inside out, what we get is a universe where light is ultimately neither emitted nor absorbed, but instead is a pervasive condition of sensitivity which is blinded or obstructed spatially and temporarily. We use the terms permittivity and permeability to measure the effect that matter has on electric and magnetic fields respectively.
If we turn the electromagnetic model right side up, we lose the idea of electric and magnetic fields entirely and see permittivity and permeability as the localizing constraints on the underlying unity of sense experience. EM fields would not permeate matter or be permitted to propagate across it, but rather matter is actually nothing but the im-permeablity and un-permittivity of the underlying sense condition. When the underlying sense multiplies and divides itself, it makes sense to expect that the result might be persistent material structures in 3d+1 space/time (not relativistic space-time, but classical space ⊥ time).
What is being emitted and absorbed then, in my view, is not light, but the obstruction of light. Matter is a kind of one-sided blindness, like a one way mirror which which inverts the totality of experiences in a fisheye lens way. This converts the non-dual context of Absolute sense to bubbles of dualistic contexts: subject/objects, proto-subjects/proto-object (sensory impulse), and trans-subject, trans-subject/object (synchronicity-archetype)
The whole picture would look something like this:
Sense (timed experience or subjective qualia (placed experience or objectively quantized qualia) signified or re-capitulated sense) Sense.
So Sense (Time/Subject (Object) Distance (Object) Significance)
From the “Distance” view, the universe is a classical place filled with objects, but this is only an appearance which is projected from within subjectivity as it makes sense of its relation to other scales and frames of experience. The external world is actually external-to-the-world, as it is a mirror reflection cast by two or more surfaces of sense impermeability, like this:
Interior>Exterior)(Exterior<Interior
It is the )( relation which gives realism to objects. There are no objects ‘out there’, just different levels of ‘out there’ which are ‘in here as objects’.
*which can also be expressed as a metric tensor…a tension superimposed within sense which allows regulating contexts such as space, time, and causality to persist.
Post-particle Light Model
Diagram of conventional photon model vs MSR qualitative model.
In the MSR model, photons are figurative rather than literal. The two atoms are presented not as literal particles in space but as vectors of sharable experience.
The mode of signaling is not a literal waving of particles (as depicted in the gif) but a state of empathic/emotive stimulation.
The intent here is not to provide a finished model of electrodynamics. The idea is to give more of a general direction of how hypotheses might be developed using particle-free, aesthetic-empathic signaling.
The signal, or text is a shared quality of interiority which is generated by a masking and unmasking of context, which is the cosmological constant – an aesthetic-participatory ground symbolized here by the rainbow stripes. The black ovals symbolize a masking of the ground awareness which is localized. That masking should be understood to be a temporal, temporary localization…of locality. Spacetime is emergent from masking of the aesthetic ground. The masking can be understood to be entropy or insensitivity, the counter-aesthetic which makes it possible to confine and elaborate experience.
Gaede’s EM Ropes
According to Bill Gaede’s hypothesis, light is “a torque signal propagating from one atom to another along a rope”. MSR defines the universe as being the totality of sensory presence, so that atoms are a localizing partial masking of that presence. Electromagnetism is a torque-like effect in which that masking is partially released or made permeable-permissive so that empathic-imitative sharing arises.
Envisioning the General and Local Aesthetic
Aesthetics: late 18th century (in the sense ‘relating to perception by the senses’): from Greek aisthētikos, from aisthēta ‘perceptible things,’ from aisthesthai ‘perceive.’ The sense ‘concerned with beauty’ was coined in German in the mid 18th century and adopted into English in the early 19th century, but its use was controversial until late in the century. (Source: Google)
The term ‘aesthetic’ may put some people off. It’s a pretentious word, has a funny spelling, and contains vague meanings that range from what you might hear in a philosophy class to what someone on TV might say about a fashion designer’s garbage bag frock. My interest in the term comes from a different sensibility – the medical sensibility that defines agents which suspend consciousness as “general anesthetics” and substances which numb sensitivity as “local anesthetics”. This is closer to the original Greek sense of the word. By dropping the an- prefix, we can turn the meaning of the word around so that there is a concept of consciousness as “general aesthetic”, or perhaps even aesthesis, and individual sensations as “local aesthetics”.
The goal here is to make sense of all phenomena as part of a single continuum or spectrum, so that for example, the seer, the seeing, the seen, light, and sight can be understood in relation to each other and as aspects of one common thing. This is also reminiscent of the relation between General Relativity and Special Relativity, especially since the function of relation is arguably one which is synonymous with perception. In order for one thing to relate to another, there has to be a context in which that relation is presented or accessed. Rather than speculating on what such a metaphysical context would be, Einstein used terms such as ‘frame of reference’ and ‘observer’ to map the when and where relations of physical effects, without discussing the what and how of relation or measurement itself. As he labored to find a unified field theory, it probably never occurred to him that qualities such as significance and questions of who and why could enter into it. Even though relativity is conceptually inseparable from the subjective act of perception, the notion of perception itself as a physical phenomenon is neglected entirely, and relegated to a one dimensional concept of detection.
A quick survey of our own senses reveals that the fundamental mechanism seems not to report on actual or absolute properties of the outside world, but rather their relevance to each other, to us, and to our interest in them. We know of many examples in perception where colors or shades look different when they are seen adjacent to each other, or shapes flip depending on how we are relating them to foreground or background. We know that ordinary light looks too bright if we have been sitting in the dark, and that cool water feels warm when our hands are cold. Every sensory palette works this way as far as I know. We say that they are perceptual ‘illusions’ because they reveal that what we perceive is not what our mind expects, however we should understand that our minds too can only make a particular, mental kind of sense. Thought is unlike seeing, tasting, or hearing in that thinking is stripped of tangible aesthetics and reborn as abstract thoughts.
Thoughts have their own aesthetic, to be sure, and language plays both midwife and policeman to those semiotic qualities, but the killer app of thinking is of course, its transparency and reflectivity – the capacity to represent without getting in its own way. Thinking provides us with a way to re-experience our tangible sensations of X as intangible sensations of ‘thinking about X’. Thought is to representation as perceiving is to presence, and the brain is to the body. They are all the ‘same thing’, only nested onto different levels. Part of human cognition is the ability to compare representations and evaluate them. We can decide which thoughts are to be trusted or doubted, but even that thought process is subject to its own evaluations, doubts, and censoring.
We now know a lot about cognitive bias and how preconceptions shape what we believe. From logical fallacies to subliminal advertising, our minds are riddled with blind spots considered to be weaknesses or illusions of human psychology. The project of scientific literacy is to single out only those thoughts which have been tempered through experiment into reliability and offering us the least amount of illusion. By refining relationships of our shared subjective fictions we can infer or deduce another kind of story that we like to think of as ‘fact’ or ‘knowledge’. From this vantage point of distilled purity, the story that our naive sense tells us about the world can be replaced by one which is thought to be universal and reliable. Logical Positivism made a lot of sense. Maybe too much. By assuming a pristine epistemology or noumenal science, the utility of the phenomenal world became hard to justify at all. Existentialists and postmodern philosophers questioned how we could really know to what extent we are fooling ourselves about anything. The challenge of escaping the bias of unscientific beliefs could be seen as even extending to science, and to knowing, and to consciousness itself. The Cartesian Cogito of ‘I think therefore I am’ was seen to be reversible as ‘I may have no choice but to think that I am, but it may not be true’.
At the same time that 20th century philosophy, art, and politics were attacking our sense of reality – physics and mathematics were disproving the reality of the world. Einstein’s 1905 discovery of the special nature of light’s constant speed in defining mass and energy was followed in 1916 by the general theory of relativity that displaced classical, Newtonian models of the entire universe. We had moved from a common sense view of the world as a vast place filled with mechanical objects to an evolving, elastic world-ish-ness which changes with one’s perspective.
Heisenberg and Gödel followed in 1927 and 1931 respectively, introducing uncertainty into quantum physics and incompleteness into formal logic. 1931 was also the year that Salvador Dali painted The Persistence of Memory, and the world slid into the Great Depression. In a few short years, the Western world that had worshiped an aesthetic of certain realities became transfixed by uncertain surreality. Physics had become metaphysical.
Taking the next step in philosophy and science has become something of a problem. As the 20th century marked an explosive shift into a new world, the 21st century seems to be both frozen in a polarized deadlock, and splintering off into esoteric factions. We have become unable to generalize our specialties or specialize in generality, so that there is no longer a coherent aesthetic of progress. This may be an entirely appropriate state of affairs in the wake of so much radical transformation in the last century, but when and if we find our way out of the current confusion, I suggest that we seek to unite physical science with metaphysical philosophy in the same way that space-time and mass-energy were united. The 21st century’s Hard Problem of Consciousness is an invitation to develop a cartography of aesthetics to match our current model of physical reality.
To begin to develop such a mapping technique, we should become familiar with what has been called the Spectrum of Consciousness, which is reflected in many mystical traditions and psychological frameworks. It is not necessary to believe in this spectrum, only to understand that such a spectrum model can be constructed and that it is potentially useful. The theme of a hierarchy of conscious qualities and states is hard to avoid, and its similarity to the electromagnetic spectrum is hard to overlook as well. Both the EM spectrum and the spectrum of consciousness offer a smooth continuum which is vaguely divided into sections related to frequency, intensity and scale. In addition to what has already been covered here and elsewhere, I offer this way of conceptualizing how it is that something like seeing, light, and images can actually be different descriptions of the same thing.
In the diagram above, four figures are shown:
- Sight (Phenomenal Vision)
- Seen (Phenomenal Image)
- Visible (Phenomenal Light)
- Unseen (Optical Physics)
The use of these prism-like figures are to represent the facets of the total phenomenon, so that in the first, top right figure, sight or seeing is represented as one facet of a block. The other facets in this block would be the other sense modalities that we have (touch, smell, sound, etc), as well as the interior facing modalities of awareness (emotion, cognition, intuition, etc). The #1 block is the subjective view of subjectivity, known as phenomenal consciousness or what I would call general aesthetics (GA). In its largest sense, GA would be the container of all qualia and is reflexive, in the sense that as far as I can tell, consciousness it is a quale itself. ‘What it is like’ to be conscious (“I am, I feel”) is itself part of the total spectrum of ‘what experiences are like’. Consciousness is an experience.
It doesn’t seem to work as well the other way, since if we have a container of consciousness which has no quality at all, then we fall into an explanatory gap. If consciousness can exist in the absence of all qualities, then what would qualities add to consciousness? For example, while it is clear that seeing is a container of sight that cannot be seen itself, it is not as clear that just because we personally define ourselves as ‘ourselves’ doesn’t mean that consciousness in general would have any good reason to define itself that way. We feel like we are a seer who is seeing images, but this may be due to the fact that we are a different type of sensation than what we are seeing or seeing itself. It may be all one continuum of ‘phoria’ which waxes and wanes in its subjectivity. Applying this principle to this example above, we have a natural metaphor in light for how the receiver of awareness, the object of awareness, and awareness itself can all ultimately be the same thing, and be accessible within itself as a reflection of that thing.
In the top left figure, the #2 block is flipped horizontally to imply that the #1 view of subjectivity is not available here in this second context. When we look out at the world, even at the reflection of the pupil of our own eye, we do not see our own seeing. The entire world of phenomenal consciousness is hidden and inverted by a kind of theater of appearances. What is seen is still phenomenal because we are seeing images (real or imagined) within a subjective medium of two dimensional shapes. Image is what allows the local aesthetic (LA) of sight to relate to the GA (consciousness) through the mask of physics.
The bottom left figure which is labeled “3. Visible” corresponds not to the experience of being a seer, or the experience of seeing an image, but of the experience of seeing light’s specific qualities. Like a director making a cameo in their own movie, light presents itself not only as the fact of seeing what is visible, but as the presence of the source of visibility as a visible experience. Phenomenal light exists both within the image that we and transcends it, addressing the seer directly. We can take a picture of a sunset and see that it looks like light radiating from the Sun onto the Earth, but we understand that the picture cannot produce light itself.
This is an astonishing feature, really. Light has a look of its own, and its look explains, in visual terms exactly what visual terms are made of. Strange loop. Blown mind. Move on. Suffice it to say that what light looks like is spectacular. It is practically synonymous with grabbing our attention. Glowing, flashing, lighting up a room, putting a spotlight on something. Within our visual field, light shows us what there is to see, and then shows us what to look at in particular. The dynamics of color harmonizing and clashing, the rotational symmetry of the color wheel, etc, are all part of light’s story about itself. The visible qualia of visibility meeting the physical mechanisms of optics.
With these three contexts, we have still not even touched the physics of light. Seeing light can be used like a trail of breadcrumbs to find Classical optics, but to understand the physics of light we must depart from the world of seeing altogether. There’s a couple of equations there in the fourth block representing how to calculate the energy of a photon and spectral radiance. With a nod to Gödel, the fourth block depicts the final category, where the unseen circumscribes the incompleteness of the seen, and wraps around from the LA of the seen to the GA of sight.
Why Light is Sight (not photons)
A case against photons being necessary and sufficient to explain the experience of light:
There are many examples of scientific studies and first hand experience which implicate human visual perception as the result of neurological and phenomenological states, rather than a direct mapping of photons striking the retina of the eye.
1. What we see cannot be explained by the presence of photons alone.
From this paper, On the Neural Correlates of Visual Perception:
“Neurological findings suggest that the human striate cortex (V1) is an indispensable component of a neural substratum subserving static achromatic form perception in its own right and not simply as a central distributor of retinally derived information to extrastriate visual areas.
[…] elemental visual experiences of punctate white or colored lights called ‘phosphenes’ can be evoked in man by direct electrical stimulation of densely hemianopic striate cortex after severance of its connections to and from the LGN.”
The paper goes on to describe many neurological conditions arising from specific damage to the brain which reveal that the visual conditions which we take for granted, such as identification of shapes and motion, have their neural correlates in diverse areas of the brain. There is no video screen equivalent in the brain which which reconstructs an image from the outside world made of photons.
“Crick and Koch also proposed that explicit representations of visual features, coarse-coded neural representations that correlate with percepts or objects, are a necessary but not sufficient condition for visual experience. I find no reason to disagree with this premise.
[…]figure–ground segregation and object recognition cannot progress in a simple bottom-up serial fashion, but have to occur concurrently and interactively within recursive loops”
[…]In summary, the present model is based on the primacy of phenomenal experience (Humphrey, 1992; Nelkin, 1995; Raffman, 1995) and supports views that any possible explanation of phenomenal experience cannot be formulated solely in terms of its reportability (Chalmers, 1995).”
2. Stimulation of the visual cortex in the congenitally blind results in tactile rather than visual perception (Changes in visual cortex excitability in blind subjects as demonstrated by transcranial magnetic stimulation).
“…phosphenes could be induced in only 60% of subjects in Group 2 (blind subjects with a low degree of residual vision) and in only 20% of subjects in Group 3 (blind subjects without residual vision).
[…] Studies of the functional consequences of visual deprivation in humans have disclosed correlates of cross‐modal plasticity, with a role for the visual cortex in tactile processes (Uhlet al., 1991; Sadatoet al., 1996; Cohenet al., 1997; Büchelet al., 1998).”
“In a PET study we demonstrate that congenitally blind subjects show task- specific activation of extrastriate visual areas and parietal association areas during Braille reading, compared with auditory word processing. In contrast, blind subjects who lost their sight after puberty show additional activation in the primary visual cortex with the same tasks. Studies in blind-raised monkeys show that crossmodal responses in extrastriate areas can be elicited by somatosensory stimulation. This is consistent with the crossmodal extrastriate activations elicited by tactile processing in our congenitally blind subjects. ” – Different activation patterns in the visual cortex of late and congenitally blind subjects.
3. Visual experiences can be produced internally, and outside of the primary visual cortex.
“A phosphene is a phenomenon characterized by the experience of seeing light without light actually entering the eye.”
“this phenomenon of “seeing” without seeing in the traditional sense leads one to believe the ability to receive light is not entirely necessary. In addition, this is not a foreign concept, as when most people close the eyes, they are able to visualize images.” – Dreams: Seeing without seeing
“The results by Knauff and colleagues, also with fMRI, do not support the hypothesis that primary visual cortex is involved in visual mental imagery, but rather that a network of spatial subsystems and higher visual areas appears to be involved (Knauff, Kassubek, Mulack, & Greenlee, 2000). The results support the hypothesis that visual imagery is a function of the visual association cortex.” – Visual imagery without visual perception (Bértolo 2005).
4. Congenitally blind people can interpret experience graphically.
[…]In conclusion, the congenitally blind are not only able to describe what may be the visual content of their dreams verbally, but they can provide, through drawing, a graphical representation of such content, and a significant negative correlation between the Visual Content of the dreams and the alpha power was found in both groups.” (Bértolo 2005).
5. Color mappings are not entirely caused either by electromagnetic frequency or stimulation of the retina’s cone cells.
a. Some colors are not part of the visible spectrum
Pink and purple are combinations of red with blue or violet. Brown and beige are low intensity orange, olive is low dim green, grays and black are dark whites. – source
“This means that colours only really exist within the brain – light is indeed traveling from objects to our eyes, and each object may well be transmitting/reflecting a different set of wavelengths of light; but what essentially defines a ‘colour’ as opposed to a ‘wavelength’ is created within the brain. ” – Magenta Ain’t A Colour.
b. Color perception can change independently of the retina.
“…the number of color-sensitive cones in the human retina differs dramatically among people—by up to 40 times—yet people appear to perceive colors the same way. The findings, on the cover of this week’s journal Neuroscience, strongly suggest that our perception of color is controlled much more by our brains than by our eyes.
[… That points to some kind of normalization or auto-calibration mechanism—some kind of circuit in the brain that balances the colors for you no matter what the hardware is.” – Color Perception Is Not in the Eye of the Beholder: It’s in the Brain
6. Blindsight shows that optical information can be communicated subconsciously without a conscious experience of seeing.
A rare, but much studied condition, blindsight, along with synesthesia and anosognosia reveal that the pairing of visual qualities of experience with optical conditions is not automatic. The functions of information processing, physics, and the qualities conscious experience can all be teased out separately.
Blindsight – the ability to respond appropriately to visual inputs while lacking the feeling of having seen them – might be something which only occurs in cases of brain damage, but seems much more likely to be a significant phenomenon of intact brain function as well. Indeed, it seems likely that blindsight (and similar phenomena in other spheres) is an important ingredient of of a variety of activities where one wants to move quickly and appropriately, without “thinking about it”. – Seeing What You Don’t See
7. Photon interaction begins and ends with the isomerization of rhodopsin.
Optical processing a vast chain of mechanical reactions on multiple levels of description of the nervous system; molecular, cellular, organ, and somatic. From the indications of neurology alone, what our visual cortex would ‘see’ should really be nothing more than interruptions in the flows of glutamate from rod cells, not an array of photons. There is something called ‘dark current‘ which refers to “the depolarizing current, carried by Na+ ions, that flows into a photoreceptor cell when unstimulated” and suggests that our access to optical conditions is triggered by a silencing of ‘off’ signals rather than an instantiation of ‘on’. It might be supposed that photons are not what we see, but rather they are a measure of the initial molecular triggers which stop us from not seeing.
8. Photons with frequencies in the infra-red range are felt as heat rather than seen.
A rather obvious example, but one which reveals that photons themselves need not be seen to be detected. Ultraviolet and infrared radiation are referred to as ‘light’, but they are no more or less ‘illuminating’ than radio waves or gamma rays. Generally when we refer to light and lighting we are specifying a capacity to illuminate our visual perception, not thermal conditions. The use of light to refer to invisible phenomena is not entirely untrue, as it can be stepped down into a visible range using photographic equipment, however, unless the target of such a process is ultimately a visual experience, it is hard to justify the connection to the term, and the word ‘light’ should be considered somewhat figurative. If we refer to brain activity associated with conscious experience to be ‘neural correlates’, then we should likewise refer to physical activity associated with perceptual experience to be ‘electrodynamic correlates’ of light rather than light itself.
9. If light is sight and not photons, what is sight?
Philosophers would call it qualia, neuroscientists might call it ‘sense data’, phenomenal visual experience, or ‘static achromatic form perception’. In short, seeing light is irreducibly experiential. All light is only that which is seen, and photons do not necessarily have any visible qualities.
Multisense Realism 
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