• Michael McMahon
    512
    One could metaphorically interpret perspective to be absent if we consider distant objects to remain the same size when they move even further back. Far away objects block out proportionately less of the background when they blend into it. The size of closer objects would still appear magnified by occulting lots of the background.
  • Michael McMahon
    512
    So we're all descended from fish and pass through a fish phase in the embryo phase! The first life forms were fish and so that would mean we're all descended from creatures that existed well before the dinosaur era. Who knows then if genetic re-engineering will unleash a human T-rex! Fish don't endure much physical and mental stress and so their timelines could represent a planetary blank slate of time. We could almost interpret these fishy ancestors through the Gaia hypothesis of mother nature.

    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."
  • Michael McMahon
    512
    An animal isn't rational but for the sake of argument let's imagine that a deer had the same IQ as a person. We'll ignore the ethical implications of such an act and focus only on the mind-body problem. The temporal experience and proprioception of such a being would be so bizarre that we'd be left to conclude that their mentality is more complex then their physicality. Their mind would be in a hidden realm so to speak. A deer seems like an ordinary creature but a human-like deer might be uber meditative or appear as mystical as a unicorn!


    Shrek - A Flying Talking Donkey
  • Michael McMahon
    512
    It might be tempting to think that because animals are less self-aware than humans that this must mean their experience of time is less complex. Yet when we think about the amazing sensory adaptations of such creatures it's possible to come up with the opposite conclusion. We could view their experience of life as being so extreme that it actually transcends and overwhelms their conscious awareness. For example the many eyes of a spider might produce such extreme psychedelic imagery that it knocks out the development of consciousness and locks them in a passive state.


    BBC Planet Earth - Birds of Paradise mating dance
  • Michael McMahon
    512
    Who said the ghost in the machine had to be white!

    Tomb of Anck Su Namun
  • Michael McMahon
    512
    We know the immediate past exists because it takes time to form coherent thoughts and to retrieve memories. Perhaps one difference between Alzheimer's disease and amnesia is that Alzheimic patients might have an even worse recall of the last few seconds such that they can't always speak logically. By contrast an amnesiac patient can often organise their thoughts even if they're not fully self-aware. So we can trust our long-term memories simply because our thought processes on other present-day matters are rational. The past doesn't have to physically exist for it to mentally exist.
  • Michael McMahon
    512
    I don't sing and so listening to more music won't turn me into a great singer or musician. Perhaps the brain enjoys music because the more we listen to it the better our music interpretation becomes. With so many songs freely available on the internet it's easy to see when we pick two drastically different songs to listen to that their temporal natures are also different. Musical patterns are chaotic and so the brain often interprets a song a bit chaotically. The brain has to make sense of the random neurons being activated by a song. When I listen to the song below I don't feel a smooth transition of mental imagery as if it were a dramatic movie. For me it evokes a concoction of contrasting vibes and memories. The idealised and relaxed nature of the beats almost makes it feel futuristic in how technology and societal progress will make life easier for future generations. One of the last times I listened to the song intensely was when I was in a city and so it subjectively reminds me of metropolitanism in a way that it likely wouldn't for others. The song also feels very outgoing and meditative over and above what I'm accustomed to. The song's contrast with my ordinary mindset can create a slightly sentimental quality. This tension helps me to decide whether I should flow in my own emotions more often or stay a bit aloof and objective!



    Paul Oakenfold - Starry Eyed Surprise
  • Michael McMahon
    512
    I'd a dream not too long ago where I was explaining to an interviewer about my theories. He was asking me about how we'd know if the light we see is different for each conscious being. I replied that if we moved places and I sat where he is sitting then I wouldn't absorb his consciousness. So consciousness wouldn't be just a spatial phenomenon.
  • Michael McMahon
    512
    When we look around are we seeing light or electricity? If what we are seeing is electricity inside the brain then electromagnetic radiation would be colourless in and of itself.

    MGMT - Electric Feel
  • Michael McMahon
    512
    Is it possible to change the genetics of future children? According to natural selection this is impossible and only the periphery of our genetics is capable of being changed. These epigenetic changes are said to occur passively and in response to environmental cues like nutrition and climate. Yet there is another way parents could affect the genetic expression of their future children. In acknowledgement that this is likely to be interpreted demonically I will only use euphemisms. Surely our own body is familiar with what the environmental demands are by way of "romance". For example if there's a food shortage then not only will your metabolism be impacted but your romantic attraction will also be towards thinner people. Can children inherit the traits that previous generations found attractive? Sexuality is the means by which children are created but this activates multiple systems in the body like the brain. The nervous system affects the power and proportions of the rest of the body. Consequently any change in the nervous system of future progeny would affect their epigenetics. Saying that epigenetics can only change passively would imply that people should be more attracted to those from the same environment and ethnicity which doesn't always hold true. I'm just going to leave it at that!


    T-800 CSM 101 Arrival | Terminator 2: Judgment Day

    T-X Arrival | Terminator 3
  • Michael McMahon
    512
    Is science at war with religion? In some sense science is a lot like America. America is a superpower that is limited by their own beliefs in tolerance and freedom. To say you're an American is almost a generic term because it's an individualistic and multiracial society. Likewise science is a metaphysical superpower that has to some extent won a Renaissance-era Cold War against religion when it comes to living in a shared physical world. Nowadays religions argue with science over spiritual interpretations rather than materialistic evidence. However science is limited by their own open-mindedness. Scientists vie with each other about different theories much like the competitive ethos of capitalism. The technology inspired by science is a core part of American capitalism. Yet science doesn't offer its adherents a consistent spiritual outlook and instead lets them make up their own minds from the evidence. Science isn't strictly wedded to materialism when it comes to force fields and quantum physics. Thus science isn't a form of spirituality in and of itself but a multidisciplinary and multi-metaphysical worldview.
  • Michael McMahon
    512
    "Diplopia is the simultaneous perception of two images of a single object that may be displaced horizontally or vertically in relation to each other. Also called double vision, it is a loss of visual focus under regular conditions, and is often voluntary." (wiki)

    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.

    Double Slit Experiment explained! by Jim Al-Khalili
    (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!)
  • Michael McMahon
    512
    Determinism can be claimed to reduce criminal responsibility but this doesn't let dualism off the hook either. For example if the mind is completely separate from the body then murder would appear to be less culpable. Perhaps the mind of the deceased victim would continue on in a dream world or if they're religious then their soul might continue to heaven. Or if you hit someone then their subconscious would apparently be at fault for activating the pain response rather than the injured body part. Needless to say a problem with this style of argument is it is an appeal to animalism to some extent. For example an animal might not feel as much pain as a human. Yet this isn't a fault of us humans because we're condemned to feel pain through evolution. Humans are sacred under both determinism and libertarian dualism. There can be absurdities in taking any metaphysical system to an extreme. So right wing conservatives concerned by criminal justice need not be deterred by embracing the apparent softness of determinism since dualism can also have faults. If deterministic materialism claims that the human mind descends into oblivion at death then if anything the crime of murder might even be more culpable under this worldview. Nothing is black and white.
  • Michael McMahon
    512
    As day becomes night every colour becomes darker and blurrier even though the fundamental colour of each object is said to remain the same. A non-real reinterpretation of this is that the brightness of the Sun is irrelevant and that the colours change nature. In other words a light green object changes form to become a dark green one at night. An object would not have a constant colour. Here we'd have to imagine every object as being a luminous source rather than being reflective.
  • Michael McMahon
    512
    We know that green, red and blue are primary colours where other secondary colours can be made by mixing the primary 3. Yet does this mean that the primary colours are fundamental in a conscious sense or only in a physically constructive sense? Should the starkness of white and black be imbued with equal importance as the primary colours? When we think of maths the smaller numbers can have factors of smaller numbers. This is a criterion used to form prime numbers. But is it really fair to say that smaller numbers are more fundamental than larger numbers? Or perhaps we could say that each number is equally important. Perhaps I'm a maths communist! So when it comes to consciousness we don't necessarily need to say that some colours are more intrinsic to our being than others. Maybe each colour is equally non-real!

    "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/
  • Michael McMahon
    512
    I'd never dispute the honesty of atheists in asserting their disbelief in religion but is there a residual level of transcendence in their materialistic claims? The universe is itself an amoral and near-infinite source of energy that exceeds our comprehension. This orientation towards the possibility of future discovery is itself a mild form of mysticism in the present day. Science asserts we all share a physical world even though this isn't the only logical possibility. I fully accept that many atheists oppose supernatural claims about an afterlife or historical miracles. However there is an unconscious element of God being used in multiple philosophical problems rather than just ethics or life after death. For example if God doesn't exist and the universe openly tolerates the horror of genocides, then why would the universe care about your sense of self, your deterministic brain or your free will? We don't want to be paranoid by visualising an evil demon controlling everyone's faith. Nonetheless we must be capable of analysing such a viewpoint in order to assess science's ability to handle problems in metaphysics. Science must consider not only an amoral universe but also the the threat of an evil universe. Otherwise science would be relying on faith to reject an evil demon(to use the imagery of Descartes). If the universe determined that you should be murderer, what capacity does a conscious being have to rebel against such a faith? Perhaps faith in a spirit of benevolence is a helpful start for some people even if they don't go so far as to believe in God.
  • Michael McMahon
    512
    If we can detect consciousness in the brain through correlations, then what if consciousness itself can work through indirect physical correlations? For example if the brain altered the rate of your heart then your thoughts would be synced to a new rhythym. In other words consciousness might be able to create its own patterns along a repeating rate of time. Each complete biological or neurological "circuit" as it were would create a unique flow of time that could be ignored or listened to. Then the physical system would be self-sufficient without needing conscious energy. This might be thought of as "micro time-travel".

    "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/
  • Michael McMahon
    512
    I was watching a thriller on TV and was almost on edge by the mere visuals and cinematography angles rather than the actual narrative! Sometimes it can be dreamy when the perspectives shift rapidly between first, second and third person camera positions. I found the way the actors' faces can be really close-up to the screen quite amusing when the previous shots were impersonal glances at the carraige! It almost creates a rhythm of time where viewers can be immediately absorbed into the high-octane tone of the film. This dizzy effect is wonderful if you're able to follow the story. Athough it might be mildly disorienting if you fail to understand the intensity of the action sequences.

    '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/

    The Commuter Best Scene - Train Crash

    '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/
  • Michael McMahon
    512
    We're sometimes pressured to limit idealism in order to reconcile it with science and prevent tribal divisions. So an argument of last resort is that the material world is so unreal that it's nearly impossible for an idealist to be even more of an anti-realist. So if we truly viewed matter as being of the mind we'd be forced to concede that it's so mentally complicated as to be physical.
  • Michael McMahon
    512
    Perhaps to fully understand our own mind we'd nearly be so dissociated as to be dead! Maybe the mind could be viewed as existing outside our perception of the physical world rather than just the brain.
  • Michael McMahon
    512
    A trouble with emotional versions of anti-realism is that natural scenery could produce subjective happiness on a wider spectrum than consciously possible. That is to say our subconscious isn't geared to reward scenery like fields of flowers with intense hedonism. We're simply unable to enjoy our own nature spirits to their fullest given the complexity of the natural world.
  • Michael McMahon
    512
    One way to understand the extreme complexity of the brain would be as of each neuron could be quickly pressed twice for a different command. This would be like a video game controller where pressing a button twice can activate a different movement compared to the first push. Then the brain could look multiple times more complex then it already is!
  • Michael McMahon
    512
    My blog isn't exceptional at any single thread but is very good only in how it combines a lot of good threads. Perhaps I'd need to describe one thread in more detail so as to have a thorough thread like anti-realism. What if Michael actually thought the thoughts in his inner mind were sometimes connected to the airflow through his throat and nose? So what I might have to say is simply that air can involuntarily activate the voicebox when you focus on it intensely and impersonally. Then every breath is capable of producing rapid thoughts if you interpret a muffling sound in a way that makes sense to you. Then your thoughts would be faster than natural and dependent on your breathing rate. Every breath would interrupt your thinking and accelerate them afterwards.
  • Michael McMahon
    512
    One way to view lucid dreaming is that the light we see during the day has slowed down considerable. Then our mind moves faster than a slowed down speed of light when we flick past visual scenes during sleep. The speed of light is variable relative to our own dreaming mind but not between people in the physical world. The speed of light is the speed of gravity. Yet we don't feel gravity when we're asleep since we're paralysed. Thus if gravity is reduced then perhaps the speed of light is reduced internally.

    "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
  • Michael McMahon
    512
    An alternative way to view dualism is that our skeletal system is unfeeling and that our sense of body exists only in the muscles. This bodily dualism contrasts with brain dualism in that if we felt the skeleton directly we'd feel much heavier.
  • Michael McMahon
    512
    One way to think of your vision as existing in your brain is like a rainbow. A rainbow refracts white light into the coloured spectrum. However it primarily works through reflection seeing as the Sun is behind us when we look at a rainbow. I remember going to a physics interview in Imperial College London where I made a mistake about the sun being behind the rainbow. I was very quiet with an extroverted professor after failing another university's confrontational interview. These contrasting interviews create hysteria beyond hysteria where to pass you've to be ready for mathematical death stares and light-hearted humour! So when we see coloured objects we could view them as being reflected behind our eyes and into our locus of consciousness.

    "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/
  • Michael McMahon
    512
    If we were anatomists handling a dead person's removed brain then our sense of touch of their neurons on our hands are internal to ourselves. As such if we viewed the redness of their brain as being visually internal to us then we could have the same attitude to their tactile existence. So we'd be left to conclude that their formor sentience existed in a completely different spatio-temporal realm to our own perception of them. If we viewed invisible light as having been their consciousness then the visual neurons in the very back of their brain are looking out on neuronal sensory systems in the front of the brain that don't reflect a unified 3D environment. Then we'd be forced to conclude their sense of time wasn't real for the visual neurons to have reconnected in real time with the other isolated neuronal sensory patterns.

    "Excerebration is an ancient Egyptian mummification procedure of removal of the brain from corpses prior to actual embalming." wiki
  • Michael McMahon
    512
    Asian people don't report perceptual differences to Europeans when it comes to dreaming and perception. Yet it's possible that they're much better able to transcend themselves into a collective group. This might be relative to how much larger their populations are and how they often lack a belief in a traditional monotheistic afterlife. So someone interested in perceptual anti-realism could still learn a lot from the emotional anti-realism of collective moods in Asian countries. I'm often amazed at the uniqueness of Asian-influenced music:

    Galantis & Hook N Sling - Love On Me
  • Michael McMahon
    512
    If we tried to form a purely materialistic version of Christianity we could say that the faith worked through perverted natural evil in terms of overpopulation. In the ancient world there were so few people that everyone could afford to live a life of metaphysical evil. So we could almost say that early Christians opted to increase the population size so as to make the Europe of Ancient Rome almost resemble India. A self-fulfilling prophecy occured over two thousands years seeing as everyone acted relative to their unconscious Christians beliefs even if they weren't fully self-aware. However the Christian ideal of forgiveness ensured an economically diverse world where a lot of people wouldn't be too poor. The huge size of the poor population meant that there'd be so much natural evil that an individual doing good or evil almost became irrelevant relative to the size of the Christian world. A plateau between good, amoral and evil people meant that the only way a pantheistic version of Christianity could be thoroughly benevolent would be through offering a wide diversity of lives in terms of reincarnation. Even evil people would be compelled to be negligibly charitable relative to the sheer amount of natural evil from deprivation. Combining fictional paedophilia and sadism in a masturbation session as a metaphysical experiment was going to send you to absolute hell by forcing you to reconcile materialism with Christianity in an absurd way. The only consolation of mass would be to transcend your existence.
  • Michael McMahon
    512
    "Prosopagnosia, also known as face blindness, means you cannot recognise people's faces. Face blindness often affects people from birth and is usually a problem a person has for most or all of their life." -nhs

    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.
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