Jochen wrote:
A rainbow in the clouds or a movie in the cinema could be confirmed by other observers, but only for a short time and not subsequently in the time that follows.I particularly like this example because in fact in the sense that "one cannot step in the same river twice" no two observers see the same rainbow. The light entering our eyes or the lens of a camera or a spectroradiometer is precisely unique to all the other eyes, cameras, radiometers possible. On careful inspection, any given water droplet spreads the light spectrum entering it (conventionally a distribution of "white" light from the sun) at a given angle through multiple internal reflections before exiting *in all directions within a solid angle defined by the wavelength* with different intensities and different wavelengths. The light entering any given aperture arranged at any location surrounding the water droplet (for best rainbow effect, the sun should be coming from behind your shoulder) the wavelength and intensity of the light will be different for each observer. The collective experience of a circular array of light in a band (or several concentric bands), conventionally clipped by the landscape over which it appears to hover as a "bow" is a physical as well as psychological aggregation effect. And yet the multiple observers (including re-views of a photographic capture) see what feels to be the same rainbow, and in fact each observation is of the same combined effect of uniform droplet sizes and the illumination sources (sun) angle of incidence.
All sensory experiences begin this way, but few are as strikingly ambiguous as a rainbow or a mirage. Both represent energetic interactions between light and matter that a physicist can respect and explain, and in some sense the reflection of light off of the surface of any object or set of objects is the same thing. No two observers see the same image, yet impute the reflecting surface to be of one object. Stereo vision and now advanced complex multi-camera/position structure-from-motion photogrammetry and 3D reconstruction depend on this, and generally have to ignore all incidents of refraction or diffraction and observe only reflection (and emission as in the case of a fire or other light source).
Sound illusions are yet more common but most of us "read past" them and ignore that the sound we thought we heard in front of us was from behind us... we are (more) used to being tricked by sound than vision.
The fact that I can even speak in these terms coherently (to myself anyway) reflects that I believe in the same kind of physical reality Jochen does, even if I argue that such is still entirely contextual (in this case POV, wavelength, etc) and only "real" when "limits" and "statistical aggregation" are applied. The phenomena we call a rainbow is real on one sense and yet not-real in another as Jochen points out. I contend that *all* perception falls in this category, yet some are so acutely ambiguous (rainbow/tesseract-projection, etc) that we are able to notice.
The fact that we seem to be able to communicate a coherent, shared view of "reality" is what I find most fascinating. Ethnographers cultural anthropologists and psychologists can say a LOT about the differing ways we perceive things based on our own internal configurations and those we share with our cultural embedding. My earliest scholarly fascinations were mathematics and physics for their pristine rigor. Linguistics also caught my eye later for similar reasons, but yet more relevant to the experience of being human. The longer I live, the more I become interested in the exceptions rather than the rules, and from where I sit, it is "exceptions all the way down" in some sense. Someone here with better grounding in the branches of philosophy can probably name where I sit in their spectrum/tree with that perspective.
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