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Is the Sun Conscious? (2021) [pdf]

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Re: Is the Sun Conscious? (2021) [pdf]

#131

Post by dsego »

visarga wrote: post #103
barfbagginus wrote: post #79

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…

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…

I wonder why we’re not just automatons, behaving the same on the outside, but without the conscious experience.

Re: Is the Sun Conscious? (2021) [pdf]

#132

Post by simonh »

kseistrup wrote: post #118
visarga wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The lifetime of the Sun is so much larger than that of a human being, that the latter would be unable to fathom the life of the Sun. At least this human doesn't. If a human cell, say, had intelligence comparable to that of a human, would such a cell be able to fathom the life of its “host”? Hardly. According to Earth science, the Andromeda Galaxy is scheduled to collide with the Milky Way in around 4.5 billion years.…

What if there are invisible fairies dancing on the heads of every pin? I’m not against speculation, it’s an essential part of the process of intellectual investigation, but the extent to which it is worth taking seriously needs to be associated with the chances of it having any consequences or chance of meaningful verification.

Imagining galaxies kissing seems utterly rooted in the biases of human experience (even other animals very close to us in evolutionary terms don’t kiss), and completely dissociated from anything we know about galaxy formation and dynamics.

Re: Is the Sun Conscious? (2021) [pdf]

#133

Post by raattgift »

Vecr wrote: post #80
__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Curvature isn't necessary here; all we need is time-orientability, so we can even be more general than a Lorentzian manifold. We can achieve time-orientability by comparing how strictly we must constrain the degrees of freedom of, for example, an adiabatically expanding or contracting cloud of gas of non-interacting test particles below some critical mass-density such that expansion will carry on forever, rather than there being some eventual recontraction. This is perfectly doable in flat spacetime. It's essentially just a problem in statistical mechanics, as we can arrange time-orientability this way without having anything to do with relativity.

We don't really need time-orientability in relativity; it is perfectly reasonable to have solutions to the field equations which are static or stable periodic (and thus there is no clear past/future). Conversely, more generally we can get time-orientability in a wide variety of dimensions other than 3+1.

Relativity just tells us that where there is some global time-orientable feature, every observer will agree what's the past and what's the future of that feature. However, complex observers may have some internal degrees of freedom providing a local notion of time-orientability which could be unaligned with the global feature (and other observers' local features).

I don't see how any of this can relate to "consciousness" though. Also, our universe really doesn't admit backwards time travellers as far as we can tell, so whether and how the wider universe "corrects" observers who have different past/future orientations is really really really academic from a physics perspective. Sean Carroll's blog had a lot about that a decade or more ago, which you can probably dig out of preposterousuniverse.com or wherever.

Re: Is the Sun Conscious? (2021) [pdf]

#134

Post by mannykannot »

strogonoff wrote: post #55

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…

Human consciousness is an important thing that we do not understand, and therefore well worth studying in itself.

Anyone who can get some sort of handle on other forms of consciousness is encouraged to investigate further, but that might not be possible until we have a better understanding of human consciousness.

One of the overlooked features of the so-called scientific revolution is that it shifted focus from "big" questions to questions of a more constrained scope, but that are amenable to investigation. This turned out to be much more effective than those preoccupied with the "big" questions might have imagined.

Re: Is the Sun Conscious? (2021) [pdf]

#135

Post by keybored »

simonh wrote: post #132
kseistrup wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lifetime of the Sun is so much larger than that of a human being, that the latter would be unable to fathom the life of the Sun. At least this human doesn't. If a human cell, say, had intelligence comparable to that of a human, would such a cell be able to fathom the life of its “host”? Hardly. According to Earth science, the Andromeda Galaxy is scheduled to collide with the Milky Way in around 4.5 billion years.…

What if there are invisible fairies dancing on the heads of every pin? I’m not against speculation, it’s an essential part of the process of intellectual investigation, but the extent to which it is worth taking seriously needs to be associated with the chances of it having any consequences or chance of meaningful verification. Imagining galaxies kissing seems utterly rooted in the biases of human experience (even ot…

The difference is that you’re not pustulating teapots on moons. You’re looking at real phenomena or projected ones (galaxies colliding) and asking how it can make sense within panpsychism.

Re: Is the Sun Conscious? (2021) [pdf]

#136

Post by Jensson »

card_zero wrote: post #123
Jensson wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It is valid, we are talking about what humans thinks, not what is true. If humans thinks animals are conscious then they think animals are conscious, doesn't mean animals actually are conscious.

And the fact that I don't get downvoted here is evidence people here also think that animals are conscious, which supports my argument that people think animals are conscious.

Re: Is the Sun Conscious? (2021) [pdf]

#137

Post by qayxc »

mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #117
Jensson wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We wouldn’t see it as “consciousness” even if it was only somewhat different from ours (animals); Most humans see animals as having a consciousness with feelings and dreams like us. Why would you think otherwise? Why else would it be illegal to torture animals? That we even call it "torture" means we think the animals suffers from it, we don't say we torture a rock when we crack it, that means we see them as having…

(Many, but not all) Animals do in fact have consciousness, emotions, and dreams(the kind that happens during sleep that is). It's not just human projection. Most animals don't have self-awareness, though some even have that, like great apes, certain cetaceans, elephants, and possibly even some birds. The only things that seem to be uniquely human are complex language, cultural evolution and prolonged neuroplasticity…

I think the main issue is that far too many people think of consciousness in terms of a binary state (i.e. consciousness is present or not) instead of a spectrum.

Even in humans the state of being animals that possess consciousness varies over the course of time: new-born infants are in a different state of consciousness than 4 year old children, for example. Not to mention our regular fading in- and out and transitioning between various states of consciousness during our sleep cycle.

The first important step towards a better understanding that would allow proper assessment would be to develop a sound metric to allow qualifying consciousness. Doesn't have to be precise, but a scale from say 0 (non-conscious) to 100 (awake neuro-typical sober human adult) would be a great step forward IMHO.

Re: Is the Sun Conscious? (2021) [pdf]

#138

Post by simonh »

eql5 wrote: post #86
barfbagginus wrote: post #79

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: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5Et2jvrY7Y

It’s a lovely story, but given the pre-existing myth of Utnapishtim, the biblical account is basically Babylonian mythology fan fiction.

Re: Is the Sun Conscious? (2021) [pdf]

#140

Post by cess11 »

taneq wrote: post #114
cess11 wrote: post #110

Someone 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…

That's what put the final nail in my ability to accept Cartesian dualism. (Edit: The way psychoactives deeply affect the working of a mind, not the prospect of the sun being a butthole, of course.) Psychoactives don't just filter your senses, they change reality (your own subjective reality, of course.)

There's still a lot to figure out but we can phenomenologically and cognitively grasp the structures of consciousness by the use of drugs and modern science, which leaves very little room for the remnants of christian dualism, whether as 'the hard problem', 'panpsychism' or the trans-/consubstantiation of the eucharist.

Maybe there is a demon in my head giving me the illusion of reality being perceived as a projection on the cerebral cortex, and it's reliable malleability under caffeine, MDMA, LSD, cannabis and so on. If so, I find this model of better utility than going with vibes and prayer and belief in eternity and so on that comes with the descendants of christian dualism in liberalism, 'panpsychism', analytic philosophy, &c.

Edit: Kierkegaard wrote quite interesting texts about the structures of consciousness, I'd recommend The Sickness unto Death as a start. It has some of his best jokes.

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