...and here youtu.be/8usFlVB2k1A

If you really want to go down this rabbit hole, I'd direct you to Bernardo Kastrup from the philosophical side and Dean Radin from the scientific side. I did Reader's Digest style pods with both of them here youtu.be/1FImKIbr1MM?...

This is the classic tree falling in the forest question. Rather than asking "does matter exist without perception," I would reframe it to ask "does consciousness, which underlies all phenomena, still hold when no minds (individuated nodes of consciousness) are present to experience it?" I'd say yes.

I think the evidence points to consciousness being fundamental, rather than an emergent property of matter. Hardcore materialists don't like that view at all, but I find it to be the scientifically correct one.

For practical intents and purposes, yes I agree there are facts. They rest on assumptions though. If you follow the thread far enough, which could turn into a totally separate post, you eventually get to the hard problem of consciousness.

By giving it a name though, "atom," we think we understand it. What we take the thing to be and what it actually is are almost always very different things. This is called reification, and we do it with everything in our lives, including people.

It's often depicted in fixed terms, with the electrons given a definitive location relative to the nucleus, but we really can never say where the electron(s) are at any given moment. It can actually only be expressed as a probability distribution. Moreover, the atom is almost entirely empty space.

At some point, somebody looked into a microscope and said "atom." Long before that, going back to the ancient Greeks, the atom's existence was postulated. But what is it really? It's a nucleus surrounded by electron(s).

This thread wasn't meant to inspire debate, but I'd note that "in prescribed areas" is doing a lot of work here. Newtonian physics works great within "prescribed areas" but. beyond that, it doesn't work at all.

Paradox dissolves the boundaries of the mind, and what remains is awareness itself: silent, luminous, free.

And in that still point between knowing and not knowing, between belief and surrender, we discover a different kind of truth—one that can be felt but not proven.

It’s from this space of unknowing that true transformation arises.

When we no longer cling to the need for certainty, we begin to see reality as it is—fluid, living, and infinite. The intellect wants to categorize and define; consciousness simply is.

What remains when the scaffolding of belief falls away? For most of us, this triggers anxiety. For others, it opens the door to wonder.

The paradox is that unknowing itself becomes the highest form of wisdom.

How can we ever truly *know* anything?

At first glance, this is deeply unsettling. Our entire civilization rests on the confidence that we can know—with certainty—what is true. Yet, if we follow Agrippa’s argument to its logical end, the foundation of all knowing collapses.