Are we? Like even if you believe in the sliding scale it feels preposterous to assert there isn't some breakpoint (even a fuzzy one) between inorganic thing that doesn't experience and organic thing that does

How do you know, though? 🤔

Photons exist, so there is the perspective of a photon. Most may not be absorbed but that's irrelevant because some are. And when they are, their perspective - like them - ends. Like yours does when you die.

The photon does not experience time, but we do, so from our perspective they can be emitted and absorbed even though from their perspective they are timeless. Again, like us. Before you were born, you didn't experience being not alive. From your own perspective, you've always existed, even though from the perspective of someone older than you, there was a time when you didn't.

Most photons are emitted and never absorbed by anything...

Yet

Eventually all photons will hit something. Even if it's a trillion trillion trillion years in the future when nearly everything in the universe has decayed into irony.

Open loop dispersion vs closed loop absorption, in either case they are a distinction of low energy observer bias. They are functionally equal because the waveform is a projection through a open feature of a manifold bound by a topological inversion that intersects it.

So the photon never really goes anywhere, we just see its shadow cast across a screen that moves from our perspective.

Genuine question, how do we know that photons are being emitted that never get absorbed if observing them requires absorbing them? Is it an energy loss type of thing with the emmiter where we have to assume x many photons had to have been emitted to explain the loss?