> Most researchers agree that consciousness is somehow related to the electrical activity of brains. Some go further and propose that brains’ electromagnetic fields actually are conscious. I am not knowledgeable at all here so I'm just going to talk out of my butt for a second but this seems testable. Does disrupting the electromagnetic fields in the brain disrupt consciousness?
Well, if you disrupt it enough, to produce a current in the brain, you surely get an effect.
I'm sympathetic to this view. But this paper relies heavily on IIT, and I thought there was some posts on HN recently from Scott Aaronson that had disproven IIT? I checked Aaronson's web site and can't find the paper on discussing why IIT wont work. Edit: Found it https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=1799
actually the paper turns away from IIT - the latter part of section 5 decides that “the electrical and magnetic fields within and around the sun seem a more promising starting point for a discussion of solar consciousness than IIT in its present forms”
I only took one semester of thermodynamics, but I think what I'm after is indeed an arrow of time. I experience reality in such a way that certain processes are irreversible. Eggs do not uncook, they only cook, that sort of thing. That's my arrow of time. Conventional physics calls it "the" arrow of time. Much like how we used to call Earth "the" center of the universe. It feels like the kind of thing that we've gott…
I really don't think so, getting the arrow of time to go a different way requires more than entropy locally decreasing, despite various popular descriptions. In most current theories of cosmology it should only go one way. Obviously there's general and special relativity, but they still have time going in the same direction, just at "different speeds", if you want to call it that. Edit: remember, we don't live in "Th…
You're right of course. I'm not trying to argue for this toy theory of mine to be considered as an alternative to the physics we've worked so hard to achieve.
I tried that many years ago, it didn't work out. But that's ok, it was more about the journey anyhow.
My point is just that I had to get sufficiently "out there" in order to have panpsychism show up organically, but now that I have, it's a pretty comfortable perspective.
I thought I'd share because most people seem a bit repulsed by it, which is a shame because it's fun.
The 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 “hum…
I am not so sure about it. The question is, whether consciousness also leads to changing behavior. Say we try to communicate with method X and the sun answers with a flare, would probably be proof. But it could also be, it has consciousness, but simply would not care much about and ignore us.
“Answers” is a word that hints that you are still thinking of it as human-like consciousness.
A valid point could be that our consciousness is social (“answering” is a thing), and by extension any alien consciousness we expect would also have to be social as one of the constraints that make it sufficiently human-like.
"Other than that indefinable quality that distinguishes us from other things, how are we different from other things?"
I think the point is a bit more interesting than that. If you instead suppose we don't have free will, and there is no indefinable quality, then suddenly it’s not anymore scary to be a conscious galaxy than it is to be a human.
Right, but you're supposing away the entire essence of the discussion. If you take for granted we have no free will, our indistinguishability from anything else in the universe is an immediately obvious logical consequence.
If the sun is conscious, that could explain why humanity believes in a powerful god that can, eg, send floods. Perhaps the flood was caused by a coronal mass ejection that boiled a section of the ocean, causing extreme rains in a valley region. Let's imagine that the consciousness field of the sun encompasses all of our minds.. so thinking about it might let us talk to it. So prayer could be real too. They can probab…
If you are interested in what the flood was really about, there is an interesting scientific theory about it:
Apologies 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).…
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…
Consciousness, at its simplest, is awareness of internal and external existence. In the past, it was one's "inner life", the world of introspection, of private thought, imagination and volition. Today, it often includes any kind of cognition, experience, feeling or perception. It may be awareness, awareness of awareness, or self-awareness either continuously changing or not.
This is topical for me since I came back from a two week vacation from Tenerife.
While there I tried to find Masca's Solar Station, an artifact created by the indigenous people of the island. They say it was probably to ask the sun god for help in times of drought.
I am not so sure about it. The question is, whether consciousness also leads to changing behavior. Say we try to communicate with method X and the sun answers with a flare, would probably be proof. But it could also be, it has consciousness, but simply would not care much about and ignore us.
“Answers” is a word that hints that you are still thinking of it as human-like consciousness. A valid point could be that our consciousness is social (“answering” is a thing), and by extension any alien consciousness we expect would also have to be social as one of the constraints that make it sufficiently human-like.
That is a good point.
I need to clarify my consciousness about it.
In general I don't think a consciousness needs to be social to react to other consciousness. They might pose a threat or benefit. Say we want to build a dyson sphere and that would disrupt the suns ability to communicate with other suns (also social I know). I try to find better examples ..
If the sun is conscious, that could explain why humanity believes in a powerful god that can, eg, send floods. Perhaps the flood was caused by a coronal mass ejection that boiled a section of the ocean, causing extreme rains in a valley region. Let's imagine that the consciousness field of the sun encompasses all of our minds.. so thinking about it might let us talk to it. So prayer could be real too. They can probab…
I've been chosen by the sun god, now you all have to obey me.