151–160 of 377 posts
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…
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…
Most of the time humans are talking about the wonders of polywater to each other.
A giant game of telephone telling each other complete nonsense.
"The soviets have found a new form of water that freezes at –40°F, pass it on!".
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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.
We’re not quite there yet with galaxies, but there doesn’t seem to be any problem with doing explaining their motion and gravitational dynamics in principle.
This means any experience these phenomena might have would be purely epiphenomenal, and therefore lacking in consequences, or explanatory power, and be unprovable. It would be pure speculation, maybe so, maybe not, maybe something else, just an exercise in imagination. Thats not a reliable route to knowledge.
With humans we have social, emotional and intellectual behaviour predicated on the existence of personal experience. We talk and write about having interior experiences. That is a causal phenomenon in the world that needs to be explained, aside from our personal first person experience of it.
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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…
This is not just a glib comment btw. I have some history with that kind of thing. When I was just small I discovered my mother's library, that happened to be full of New Age books that were popular with her and her friends as she was growing up, I guess: yoga, reiki, orientalism, astrology, Arthur Koestler, Wilhelm Reich, Aldus Huxley and Carlos Castaneda... I am a voracious reader, and I read them voraciously. I had the luxury of reading them in an age that was too young for the psychedelic drugs praised by some of them (Huxley and Castaneda, mainly, who were also the best writers of the bunch) and so managed to read them critically, I guess, and recognise their deep flaws [2]. I can imagine how hard it would have been to think critically if I had read those books under the influence of the kind of drugs people took in the '60s.
And later. Growing up I had a friend who would regularly smoke hash and sit down and read the bible. He was at least half mad. A dear friend, but half mad. Drugs aren't good for criticial thinking.
I think our man, Sheldrake, he fried his brain on drugs and that's how he can now think that the sun might be conscious, and that people can tell when someone's staring at them. I have another friend who smokes a lot of hash and is at least half mad and he's a big fan of Sheldrake. This friend is convinced that people can hear his thoughts. I think he believes he's telepathic and he is inadvertently projecting his thoughts into peoples' heads.
Sometimes I think of all the people I know who go about their lives with their heads full of beliefs that never need touch reality, and it weirds me out a bit. Think of how many people believe in gods, or in aliens, or in reincarnation. I cross paths with those people everyday, we occupy the same physical space, but they live in a different world that I can't see or feel. That a guy trained in biochemistry (and who probably was a bit too friendly with chemistry for his own good) has made a whole world model out of nothing more than his imagination is not a big surprise.
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[1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1074-strange-memories-on-th...
[2] Take astrology, for instance. My mother had a 13-tome opus, with one tome on each sign, plus one for the general stuff. I read my own sign's tome first and I was inspired: everything in there described me so perfectly! Then I read the tome for another sign; and that, too, described me perfectly. So did the next, and the next. Soon I realised that the "perfect descriptions" of my personality were doing nothing more than flattering me, for having aspects to my personality that basically everyone has. They were just trying to get me hooked by telling me how cool I really am, because I'm an X sign.
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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
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”
Do you think they touch on something potentially not 'woo', as others say.
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> 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…
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.
Its true we have additional brain structures responsible for higher reasoning and linguistic abilities that other animals don’t share, but it seems likely that these features are layered on top of those other capabilities we inherited from our common ancestors with other mammals.
In support of this, there are some behaviours we share with other animals that are not conscious, or at least that are so automatic that we are essentially mere observers of our own behaviour. This includes many instinctive behaviours, and these are often shared with lower order animals that do not display sophisticated awareness of their own existence and that of others. It seems reasonable that we inherited those behaviours from common ancestors with such animals (lizards, frogs, etc) before self consciousness evolved.
Sheldrake 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 scient…
I am open for alternative explanations, but the smell theory, combined with subtle changes with you, as you spot your friend, are the more likely explanation. Dogs can easily pick up scents 100 m away (my sister trained rescue dogs). "I can see flaws in the linked article, in regards to self-organization and emergence" Can you share what you perceive as flaws?
It subsequently turns this question around: "Why must our bodies be so large compared with the atom?"
The point is that a brain (a 'thinking' system) must consist of an enormous number of atoms. Magnitude is only part of the answer; the other essential quality is that of organization.
There was a recent article on HN: "Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the evolving universe?" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39103419)
Stars are chemically relatively simple (for example: Introduction to Astrochemistry: Chemical Evolution from Interstellar Clouds to Star and Planet Formation by Satoshi Yamamoto).
It takes a lot of evolution to arrive at even a simple cell. Early Evolution: From the appearance of the first cell to the first modern organisms by Martino Rizzotti, begins with this sentence: "It is now accepted that the first cells derived from simpler 'objects', and that their descendants became more and more complicated and ordered until their evolutionary transformation into modern cells..."
Brain Evolution by Design: From Neural Origin to Cognitive Architecture edited by Shuichi Shigeno, Yasunori Murakami, and Tadashi Nomura discusses how brains have been shaped by simple evolutionary processes.
Computation in Living Cells: Gene Assembly in Ciliates by Andrzej Ehrenfeucht Tero Harju, Ion Petre David M. Prescott, and Grzegorz Rozenberg, goes further to discuss natural computing, which requires (as per What Is Life?) a certain level of biology.
The key point in these studies is that evolution seems to imply increasing complexity.
John W Campbell summarized it nicely in an editorial in Astounding Science Fiction, December 1955, Necessary Isn't Sufficient:
"A vast mass of gas in interstellar space is perfectly stable as it drifts idly around. Organize it a little, and a chain-reaction of increasing complexities is initiated; organization breeds organization, seemingly. The gas, once it is organized above a certain critical level, begins to fall together by mutual gravitation. If the organization is large enough and the necessary intensity of organization is achieved, the deuterium-deuterium reaction begins, and the gas mass is no longer stable. A star begins to glow.
"The gas-and-dust mass has, meanwhile, been undergoing sub-organization that produces planets circling the star. What happens on the planets, we certainly are not yet competent to define - but we know with absolute certainty that, in some instances, a higher-order organizational complexity called Life arises. And that this organization breeds further and higher-order organization."
Stars lack this essential complexity. So, in my opinion, it's silly to suggest that they may be 'conscious'.