this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The best ones are thoughts that many people can relate to and they find something funny or interesting in regular stuff.
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…can you not see the present?
Light has a finite speed. So whatever our eyes see happened in the past. If what you're seeing is near you, light will take just a few nanoseconds to bounce off the object and into your eyes (but it's not instantaneous). If you're looking at the stars in the sky, you may be looking as far as millions of years into the past. We never see the "present".
Not only that, but electricity travels through nerves at a finite speed (that is less than light speed), and brain spends non-zero amount of time to piece together the reality you perceive from all of your senses. So yeah, there's always a delay in your perception and IIRC there even are experiments that prove that
This is the more salient point. Light is so much faster than our brains ability to communicate with itself
It's even more strange! According to one paper, our brains are averaging the last 15 seconds of visual information!