Rupert Sheldrake is self deceiving pseudoscientist and parapsychology researcher.
I don't call him fraud, because he deceives himself and seems to believe everything he does and writes.
Is the Sun Conscious? (2021) [pdf]
121–130 of 377 posts
Re: Is the Sun Conscious? (2021) [pdf]
#122Re: Is the Sun Conscious? (2021) [pdf]
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
The human anxiety about animal suffering needs arguments to support it. You can't argue from it to support something else. It's already a weak position that we just go along with because of feels.
> The human anxiety about animal suffering needs arguments to support it You want arguments supporting that humans dislike seeing animals suffer? To most people that would be obvious, I'm not sure what to say.
No, that's not what I meant. I'm saying that reasoning from anxiety is not valid.
Re: Is the Sun Conscious? (2021) [pdf]
#124Consciousness is the constellation of your past experiences transforming reality into your next experience. Every major consciousness theory out there fails because it does not account for how a consciously experiencing self is created. You cannot explain away consciousness without explaining the self. And there is a theory that offers a model for both (not my own!). Our book Journey of the Mind discusses this. Here'…
A constellation is a fitting description for the ego.
Re: Is the Sun Conscious? (2021) [pdf]
#125Wow that's fun. Stirs the imagination. Suppose the Sun is "alive". It's entirely probably that it isn't aware of us. Suppose we found evidence of interstellar communications, and attempted to signal the the Sun --- and, like some startled scorpion, it reacts at once by hitting us with its hardest CME.
Re: Is the Sun Conscious? (2021) [pdf]
#126> 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.
He's a trained biochemist. Doesn't make him an expert on consciousness, psychology, cosmology, or any of the other things his crazy theories are about.
I've engaged with his ideas in depth, mostly because I find crackpot science interesting even if I don't buy it. There's nothing there. Morphic resonance is a non-theory. It's so vague as to easily be morphed to explain any counterargument, it's not falsifiable and it's not supported by any evidence other than the evidence he wilfully misinterprets as supporting his theory.
Sheldrake is very intelligent. But something happened to him in the late 60s that caused him to abandon his biochem research and go into increasingly kooky stuff.
Re: Is the Sun Conscious? (2021) [pdf]
#127If 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…
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Re: Is the Sun Conscious? (2021) [pdf]
#128Someone ought to trick analytic philosophers into taking some of the more popular psychoactive substances, so they finally discover how tightly coupled consciousness is to the matter in the nervous system and stop their embarrassing search for Holy Spirit. Also, the sun is clearly an anus: "The simplest image of organic life united with rotation is the tide. From the movement of the sea, uniform coitus of the earth w…
Yeah I would think anyone that has got drunk or experienced post-wank clarity should realise that consciousness isn't a separate thing to the brain's physical processes.
Still, consciousness definitely exists and is definitely weird. And I don't think it's futile to try and learn about it. It's just not going to be philosophers that give us any answers (as usual).
Re: Is the Sun Conscious? (2021) [pdf]
#129Too many words chasing too few ideas.
Re: Is the Sun Conscious? (2021) [pdf]
#130If 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…
This doesn't make sense. In the case of humans and animals, consciousness is a way to adapt to the environment to protect their lives, fulfill their needs and eventually reproduce. Consciousness is useful for life. But in the case of the sun, what is it adapting to, and what does it have to protect? Nothing. The fact that consciousness appears always in populations might be essential. Consciousness was the result of…
>In the case of humans and animals, consciousness is a way to adapt to the environment to protect their lives, fulfill their needs and eventually reproduce. Consciousness is useful for life. But in the case of the sun, what is it adapting to, and what does it have to protect? Nothing.
You sound overly confident with your statement about a topic that has eluded thinkers for millennia and (probably) millennia to come