Photon emission and absorption are not instantaneous events although people often approximate state to state wavefunction collapse as instantaneous. However, photon emission and absorption both take time and for sufficient lifetimes, photons can connect objects and people for nanoseconds, microseconds, milliseconds, seconds, and so on.
It is photon exchange that bonds two charged objects and biphoton exchange that bonds two gravity objects. Retinal pigments absorb light, but also emit light as well. In fact, there is some definite fraction of photons that simply reflect from the retina and return to the source somewhat shifted in phase.
When we observe an object, each photon represents a transient bond between us and the object just as discrete photon and biphoton exchanges are what binds all of the universe in one way or another.
In other words, the action of thought actually has some affect on the object of discovery due to the bonding time of the photon. The experimental evidence for photon bonding is in the QED of Feynman. The lifetimes of emission and the times for absorption are experimental measurements.
The wonder to me is that this notion of reality has not been put together by some people who are much smarter than I am. Thought is simply the bonding of aware matter, which are the action potentials of neural synapses. Thought is composed of neural synapses but the coding of neural aware matter has not yet been well defined.
However, we know that the sensation of a photon on the retina excites neural matter on the order of 11 Hz, the alpha mode of neural matter's EEG. That means that within a 1/11th of a second, a moment of thought entangles a photon event with neural aware matter and so any photon event longer than that is a two way street.
Thought actually affects the object in an entanglement by quantum logic. This is actually the essence of the uncertainty principle and is why the future is not completely predictable. Before any action, the fact of that action affects that action in a recursion of sensation, feeling, and action as neural aware matter moment. How we feel actually affects what we sense and therefore how we act and that neural matter moment is not completely deterministic.
This should not be much of a surprise. A discrete quantum universe is made up of both discrete particles and discrete actions. We think of time and space as infinitely continuous, but infinities are only approximations that work extremely well for most predictions of action, but there are no infinities in reality.