Jays and Photons - A Hypothetical Consideration of the Presence of Light
PhilPapers (PhilPapers Foundation) July 22, 2026 preprint DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.21502417 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper |
|---|---|
| Citations | 2 |
| Key points | Argues that light's structure—a conserved magnitude plus a freely turning phase, with only relative phase being physical—resembles the modeled structure of a legible trace, and proposes two unresolved readings: light as the carrier of legible traces between perspectives, and light as an instance of the "jays" themselves. The author explicitly frames this as a consideration, not a conclusion, and cautions that the shared mathematics is a modeling choice rather than an empirical claim that photons carry or constitute consciousness. |
Abstract
This essay asks a deliberately narrow question inside the coherent-existence framework: what is light to the jays? Modeling a legible trace as a conserved intensity and a turning phase, the piece observes that light already divides itself the same way, into a conserved magnitude and a freely turning phase, and that the absolute phase of a single field is unobservable while the relative phase between two fields is physical and does the work of interference. From this resemblance it develops two readings, held apart rather than resolved: light as the carrier of legible traces between perspectives, and light as an instance of the jays themselves. The first stays within established optics and information theory; the second inherits the commitments and unsolved problems of panpsychist and quantum theories of mind, including the decoherence objection. Throughout, the register seam is kept in view: the mathematics shared with optics is a modeling choice, not an empirical claim that photons carry or constitute consciousness. The work is a consideration, not a conclusion.