We know that a single electron doesn't travel down the length of a wire, it's passed from atom to atom.
True. That's why the light speed in a wire is lower than the light speed in a vacuum.
I have not seen any evidence that there are a such thing as photons or that they travel through space.
Light is emitted by sources and exists in the form of electromagnetic waves, or photons. Even though the latter is the name for the quantitzed elements that we measure when absorbed. It doesn't matter. What matters is, light somehow bridges the gap in a vacuum between object A and measurement device B. This exactly coincidences with our definition of travel. Somehow denying this, and coming with some absurd philosophical point of view that this doesn't include traveling is absurd. What you can doubt, which is even part of relativity, is that any time passes from the frame of reference of the 'photon'. Because there doesn't. But that's not the discussion right now, the one thing that is clear is that light travels. How else, could light be bended by a gravitational field?
As far as I can tell, it could just as easily be atoms detecting and imitating one another in an orderly fashion, rather than massless intangible particle-waves transacting in a vacuum.
In a vacuum there are no atoms. And if I follow you in your ridiculous standpoint, what you call "detecting one another" is called light, and this needs to bridge an amount of space, which is what we call travel.
Denying obvious real world results is a serious symptom of crankyness. Not that you will ever admit this, even to yourself.
Does light look like it travels to you or does it look like you are seeing it right where it is?
Measurements show it starts and point A and can detected at point B. We call this phenomenon "movement".
As living members of the cosmos, are we not obligated to consider our own direct experience of phenomena as a factor in explaining that experience?
No. Our experience is a separate phenomenon.
Not to say that everything actually how it seems to us, but I would say that quite a bit can be explained better though first hand observation. It should not be disqualified.
Human observation or experience isn't disqualified. It is a separate phenomenon that is studied in a separate field, called psychology. There is no need whatsoever to connect two totally unrelated phenomena. Our bodily detection and interpretation devices are not fundamentally different from the mechanical ones that we created.
We measure the behavior of the materials which we are using to do the experiment and their interactions with each other. Light doesn't have to physically leave the atom doesn't mean it can't be measured, understood, and predicted as if it did.
Maybe nothing happens or exist at all, and we are connected to some sort of super computer that just make it 'as if' things are happening while physically they are not. Might be true, probably isn't. It's just another unprovable crackpot theory.
Yes. I probably know most of the same things that you know about photons, I'm just interpreting that knowledge a different way.
Yes, in a totally nonsensical way, not related to science nor reality.
I see photons as quantum events within matter
Here you prove you don't know that photons are matter and both are forms of energy.
Blablabla. Wild, senseless speculation, not based on research, nor measurement. Your observations are again scientifically meaningless.
Sorry, yet some more discussion, because I just can't stand your never ending stupidity.
Striping it doesn't make it any less true. Not my problem if you don't like those observations.