I think the author took Pohl's Starchild (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starchild_Trilogy) books too seriously.
Is the Sun Conscious? (2021) [pdf]
51–60 of 377 posts
Re: Is the Sun Conscious? (2021) [pdf]
#52> Alfred Rupert Sheldrake (born 28 June 1942) is an English author and parapsychology researcher. He proposed the concept of morphic resonance,[2][3] a conjecture that lacks mainstream acceptance and has been widely criticized as pseudoscience.
He's a trained scientist. His arguments are conjectural but sound. He's far from a kook.
Re: Is the Sun Conscious? (2021) [pdf]
#53An old friend came to believe this when he was in a state of bipolar delusion.
Re: Is the Sun Conscious? (2021) [pdf]
#54Apologies if this is a dumb question or a taboo question or both, but what the does “conscious” mean? We know about lots of complex systems, and systems that exhibit “emergent” behaviors seeming much more complex and goal-directed than the components of the system (the glider gun, that thing with the computer-modeled birds with like 3 simple rules but then the whole flock does complicated, creative stuff, long list).…
Yeah. The biggest thing most people miss is that the question your asking is in No way at all profound. You are asking an extremely mundane question that only appears profound as an illusion. What you are dealing with here is in actuality a language problem. You are contemplating and asking about the intricacies of a specific vocabulary word. It is an arbitrary sounding word with a simply arbitrarily vague definition…
Daniel Dennett holds a view somewhat along these lines. See his famous paper, Quining Qualia: https://web-archive.southampton.ac.uk/cogprints.org/254/1/qu...
Re: Is the Sun Conscious? (2021) [pdf]
#55The tragedy (depending on how you look at it) with discussions about consciousness is that any possible consciousness we envision is inevitably human-like. We wouldn’t see it as “consciousness” even if it was only somewhat different from ours (animals); a consciousness that is really different may look to us like any natural process.
A question of “is X conscious?” has no meaning if you remove that constraint of “human-like”. Like with any question we ask, we cannot remove ourselves from this one.
Re: Is the Sun Conscious? (2021) [pdf]
#56Sheldrake also studied a well-known phenomenon in dogs ['Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home']: https://www.sheldrake.org/books-by-rupert-sheldrake/dogs-tha...
I personally witnessed this! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33295560
It is incredible (in the literal sense), and I don't expect anyone to simply believe me. What is one to do after experiencing something (literally) unbelievable?
I'm scientifically qualified (degree in Theoretical Physics). I can see flaws in the linked article, in regards to self-organization and emergence (which I studied).
But I know there's more to physics and Science - an entire field which lies unexplored, with vast implications...
Re: Is the Sun Conscious? (2021) [pdf]
#57Apologies if this is a dumb question or a taboo question or both, but what the does “conscious” mean? We know about lots of complex systems, and systems that exhibit “emergent” behaviors seeming much more complex and goal-directed than the components of the system (the glider gun, that thing with the computer-modeled birds with like 3 simple rules but then the whole flock does complicated, creative stuff, long list).…
Yeah. The biggest thing most people miss is that the question your asking is in No way at all profound. You are asking an extremely mundane question that only appears profound as an illusion. What you are dealing with here is in actuality a language problem. You are contemplating and asking about the intricacies of a specific vocabulary word. It is an arbitrary sounding word with a simply arbitrarily vague definition…
This point of view could be applied to any word, and the extreme result is that you'd negate meaningful or useful communication, or that someone would have to be the arbiter of what is a legitimate concept or not.
Between vocabulary, commonly understood meaning, possible meaning, and actual personal experience, there are many detours and jumps. "Dog" as a word, concept/meaning, and experience, has these issues. What's not a dog, which dog are you thinking about, and does this apply to "dog" or just those specific dogs you've experienced? Etc.
Words like "consciousness", for less concrete experiences than "dog", tend to have more fog in the gaps between word and shared meaning, and between those and individual experience.
It seems like you're trying to flatten a person's curiosity about the implications of a shared concept or experience into a "mundane" phantasm about a word whose referent is either nonsensical or nonexistent to you.
I think that the gaps between word, concept, and experience, while confusing and difficult, are worthy of more respect and wonder than to just flatten them as though their existence didn't imply something potentially important and essential is happening there. Language arose because we have actual experience to share, however tricky it can be to verbalize. It doesn't work perfectly, and leads to confusion, but here we are, reading and writing.
"Consciousness" may be a word for a slippery concept/experience, but that doesn't equate to questions about consciousness being inherently semantic.
Re: Is the Sun Conscious? (2021) [pdf]
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
You've hit on the root of the debate, but you might have missed it. The debate is to define the meaning of consciousness. We've got a general problem of not knowing what consciousness is, if it actually exists, how many people have it, if it is exclusive to humans and not really having a good philosophical grounding for (assuming multiple separate consciousnesses could exist) whether in practice that is the case of i…
Is there some particular reason why this debate isn’t squarely in the spiritual/religious/personal/subjective building on campus and zero in the science building? I mean, these are all fascinating questions in a “let’s smoke a joint and talk about the meaning of life” sense, I’ve had many such conversations (both with and without the joint) and enjoyed all of them that were of that tenor. And I can see there being a…
I'm not sure if you're dunking on "spiritual/religious/personal/subjective" stuff, but the hard question of consciousness is, in some ways, the most important question of all. Far more important than "science" questions like "what is dark matter?"
Literally our entire civilization is built on the idea that humans have qualia and therefore causing harm to humans is often unethical. If we were to somehow come to believe that consciousness is just an illusion--no more than a biochemical phenomenon, and no more special than transistor switching--then we would usher in a dystopia in which any horror inflicted on people is potentially justifiable and even necessary.
The rise of LLMs is forcing us to confront this head-on. LLMs can't be conscious--they are literally just matrix multiplication. But if LLMs can act like humans and not be conscious, then maybe humans aren't really conscious either.
Re: Is the Sun Conscious? (2021) [pdf]
#59> Alfred Rupert Sheldrake (born 28 June 1942) is an English author and parapsychology researcher. He proposed the concept of morphic resonance,[2][3] a conjecture that lacks mainstream acceptance and has been widely criticized as pseudoscience.
He's a trained scientist. His arguments are conjectural but sound. He's far from a kook.
Being a kook and holding degrees in science are not mutually exclusive. His theories are intriguing nonsense in the sense that they have little to no evidence to support them. Their deeply conjectural nature is what defines them as kooky.
Re: Is the Sun Conscious? (2021) [pdf]
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there some particular reason why this debate isn’t squarely in the spiritual/religious/personal/subjective building on campus and zero in the science building? I mean, these are all fascinating questions in a “let’s smoke a joint and talk about the meaning of life” sense, I’ve had many such conversations (both with and without the joint) and enjoyed all of them that were of that tenor. And I can see there being a…
I'm not sure if you're dunking on "spiritual/religious/personal/subjective" stuff, but the hard question of consciousness is, in some ways, the most important question of all. Far more important than "science" questions like "what is dark matter?" Literally our entire civilization is built on the idea that humans have qualia and therefore causing harm to humans is often unethical. If we were to somehow come to believ…
> But if LLMs can act like humans and not be conscious, then maybe humans aren't really conscious either.
Isn't this like saying "if the man in the Chinese room can act like he understands Chinese and not understand Chinese, then maybe nobody understands Chinese."?