Hi Kim,

You asked about photons. “Do our eyes break down what we look at in pieces and our retinas put them together to make a picture in our brain sort of like television?”

The way the neuroscientists explain it, billions of photons, which are little light particles, bounce off of objects and come through the pupil of the eye. The photons strike the retina at the back of the eye upside down. There, the photons, which are electromagnetic energy, carry the image of what is seen along the optic nerve to the optical cortex at the back of the brain.

Objects are just clouds of atoms. They have no color. Our consciousness gives them color based on the wavelength of the photons that enter the eye. It is the optical cortex that puts together the picture, as the neuroscientists describe it.

However, some neuroscientists state that there is no mechanism for the brain to put together the signals into an image. Others have found no electromagnetism going along the optic nerve. And we know that people have the experience of sight when the brain isn’t functioning.

In other words, sight exists independent of the photons and the brain. The photons and brain are just part of the scenery in the physical realm that gives us the sense that all of this is happening on a physical level.

You asked, “ Is what we feel with our hands just an experience also?”

Yes. The neuroscientist says we actually have only neurotransmitter chemicals that allow neurons to fire across synapses in the brain, giving rise to the experience of touch. We don’t know anything about the world except what our neurons tell us. It’s a pretty strange notion, but the neuroscientists stay with it.

Instead, the experiences happen independent of the brain, and they form the brain to show activity that indicates the mind just had an experience.

Love and peace, Craig