The sun reflected off things

For a different mind-blowing angle, a tree is the combined trajectory of its buds.

(From Theodore Stugeon's "The Education of Drusilla Strange", but I think it's fairly sound if you ignore persistent wind, random damage, and some thickening.)

Mind officially blown.

Will file along with "honey is bee barf."

Well, what you see is causally entangled both by how the tree is and what the lighting of the tree is. I mean, you'd see something different if it's night out, so it's really transmitting information about both.

That said, what you notice yourself seeing isn't photons - it's what the visual processing center of your brain thinks is out there. It's why optical illusions work, it's why hallucinations happen, and it's why sleight of hand works.

I think you missed the point of this post. You are invoking definitions, when this post is just a sharing an interesting experience/observation. It's appropriate for a Less Wrong Discussion post because it's noticing (and enjoying) another way that the map is different from the territory --In this case, in a way that pretty much involves most of our daily experience.

Emission theory only seems crazy because you know all the evidence against it. As a hypothesis for the amount of data that someone had 2000 years ago, it wasn't obviously wrong. Moreover, we know now that in fact some other sensory systems work very similarly to the emission theory of eyesight (e.g. bats using echolocation).

People have believed crazier things about vision.

I still alieve that one.

It might make for a good poem.

To elaborate, what was most interesting about the perspective was that I realized that while I wasn't directly interacting with the objects, we were causally entangled (and thus interacting indirectly) via these electromagnetic waves. The perspective paid rent, in some sense, in that now I had a much better understanding of light scattering in general (and different kinds of mirages specifically) and I found it amazing that this kind of interference doesn't happen more often. We are literally in a bath of these EM waves (the ones that I can see) and they are just bouncing around until they hit something. The thing that they hit -- all the things that I see -- catches them and destroys them (collapses the wave), so that what I actually see is a new EM wave that the thing emits a moment later.

I wander who dared to down-vote this. It's a physics fact. Less known, what's the reason I wrote it on this occasion.