Perceiving Light

Light is said to travel at 186,000 miles in one moment, with sound only traveling approximately a fifth of a mile in the same duration.  Although it requires far less time to travel vaster distances than sound, light takes time to travel according to contemporary paradigms, and this is why witnessing any distant cosmological phenomena is really supposed to only show what a certain part of the universe looked like long ago.  One can see how light is visible before sound can be heard from a distance by noticing the illumination of a lightning strike and the delay that ensues before the corresponding sound (thunder) can be heard.

As relatively extreme as the speed of 186,000 miles per second is, the speed of light would still entail a finite traveling distance in a finite amount of time.  If there is even a slight delay between a nearby event and one's visual perception of that event because the light necessary to see had to travel to one's eyes, then what one sees is not actually happening in the present moment despite how it nonetheless could only be experienced in the present.  There could not be any experience outside of whatever moment is "now" for any being that is not atemporal.  If light needs even a very miniscule amount of time to elapse to get from one point to another, though, one is not seeing things right as they occur, however utterly minor the difference at such a small scale as typical everyday experiences.

Only one's thoughts would be happening in a truer real-time despite how visual (and audial) experiences can sometimes seem like they correspond to events taking place right when they are perceived: there is no speed of light necessary to see one's own thoughts because they are within one's nonphysical consciousness, not something received or perceived through the senses from a seeming external source.  More importantly, while a non-rationalist could make assumptions about their own self, one's own consciousness and its contents are some of the only things that can be known directly and with absolute certainty (they too still depend on logical axioms) when one does not make assumptions.

A conscious mind, which is self-evident along with logical axioms (to deny or doubt one's own mind, one must already exist as a consciousness to have the capacity for this) as opposed to scientific matters, is a necessary prerequisite to the experience of light or any other sensory stimuli, whether they really exist outside of the mind or as illusory constructs of perception.  Which of these two possibilities a given visual stimuli really is cannot be proven because they would be experienced identically.  It does not logically follow from having the mental experience of seeing a light or a house or an animal that it is actually there, much less that it is there right when one sees it, but the truths of logic and introspection--true logic, not intuition or persuasion or hearsay or sensory experiences that are far from self-evident--are absolutely certain.

In a culture like that of America that broadly speaking all but worships science to varying extents and erroneously exalts it above pure reason, the epistemological limitations of science and general sensory experience are denied or never stumbled upon by many, and the fact that logical truths are intrinsically necessary and that scientific laws and events depend fully on them, rather than the other way around, is neglected.  Through what does and does not logically follow from having visual sensory perceptions, one can already know with absolute certainty (as well as since it does not contradict axioms) that of course seeing things does not mean the external world is as it appears.  Dominant scientific ideas like the speed of light being extraordinarily fast but still finite, if correct, would entail that this is indeed true.