Two Gazania (family Asteraceae) flowers living their best lives besides a concrete walkway. I thought they were daisies, but they are not.

In real life, they are an almost fluorescent yellow. Except… in real life, they are not…
….because color doesn’t really exist outside our brain. What exists is a certain electromagnetic wavelength of photons reflected back from the surface of the petals.

Those photons hit the back of our retina stimulating specialised photoreceptor cells that in turn transmit their own electrical impulse (and it is definitely not coloured yellow) to the visual centres of the brain.

Here, something magical happens that even the cleverest neurophysiologists don’t understand, and hey-presto we have an experience of experiencing yellow.

Magic.
When I think about these sorts of things, I think magic gets a bad rap, science wise.

–ooOoo–

I am all in for critical thinking and analytical skepticism….but:

Science is always quick to critique and dismiss experiences and theories from the margins of human experience such as parapsychology, so-called pseudo-science, philosophy, and non-mainstream healing practices.

Moreover, they are often particularly sensitive to have their own theories on Quantum Mechanics (QM) co-opted by these ‘other’ non-scientific tribes in any speculations as to what exactly the heck is going on in our universe.

Physicists often state that these proponents of woo-woo simply do not understand QM. That they are misappropriating the empiric science to give a false legitimacy to the woo. 

The philosopher Bernardo Kastrup offers this defence:

“…wild and often ungrounded speculation isn’t a privilege of non-physicists.
Today, physics itself is indulging in the most farfetched feast of speculations ever concocted by the human mind: multiple different types of parallel universes, each type potentially comprising a multi-dimensional infinity of such universes; 10 spatial dimensions, many of which are supposedly curled up into tight little knots of extraordinary topological complexity; widely conflicting views about the nature of time, such as that time does not actually exist, that time is precisely the only thing that in fact exists (space being illusory), and that time exists but isn’t fundamental, emerging instead from microscopic quantum processes; the accommodation of complete unknowns by mere labeling, such as the notions of dark matter and dark energy; widely differing views regarding the origin and early evolution of the universe; and the list goes on.
Given all these seriously discussed hypotheses, it is difficult for physicists to take the moral high ground and criticize non-physicists based merely on the fact that the latter are engaging in physical speculation. Compared to the conjectures of many professional physicists, allusions to quantum phenomena in health care and parapsychological literature sound rather moderate and conservative.”

–— Bernardo Kastrup

I cannot help but feel that the deeper our sciences penetrate the meaning-nature of our universe, the more we begin to realise that many of the answers have been somehow encoded in our psyches, myths and cultures all along.