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Is the Sun Conscious? (2021) [pdf]

sheldrake.org

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

#181

Post by kevindamm »

simonh wrote: post #154
keybored wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One of my issues with panpsychism is the question of causation. The behaviours of particles can be entirely explained in terms of physical dynamics, there is no behaviour left that needs explanation. If they do have experience, it doesn’t seem to be causal in that it doesn’t seem to have any consequences. We’re not quite there yet with galaxies, but there doesn’t seem to be any problem with doing explaining their mot…

> there doesn’t seem to be any problem with doing explaining their motion and gravitational dynamics in principle.

Except we do see multiple inconsistencies at a galactic scale. The hubble tension, the absence of explanation of dark matter, the models which point to 75% of fundamental components of the universe being unobservable? There doesn't seem to be a direct extrapolation from our models to galactic-scale explanations.

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

#182

Post by smokel »

edgyquant wrote: post #172
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…

You do not need consciousness to adapt to your environment. That’s the result of simple decision trees.

Men don't need nipples either.

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

#183

Post by cess11 »

edgyquant wrote: post #177
IshKebab wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

You are making an uneducated assumption here. This is not a thought lost on philosophy or theology, for instance in Dharmic religions it is believed you are attached to a brain and your perception and thoughts arise from the brain: your eternal self is the awareness. Your thoughts, your “post nut clarity,” does not require that awareness (or consciousness) to exist and if anything the two are at odds with one another…

The "Dharmic religions" don't agree on "eternal self", but they do generally agree that the immediate impression that feeling in the hand is consciousness _in the hand_ rather than a brittle illusion produced in a particular part of the central nervous system that can project a perception of the body to conscious areas of the brain.

This can easily be undermined, e.g. with strong psychedelic disassociatives such as salvinorins which can brutally alter this sense of self and bodily consciousness through very localised, very specific central receptor action. Another example could be the use of mirror images to treat phantom limbs in amputees.

To some it might be frightening to realise one has never been outside a very small part of the brain and never directly experienced anything but projections sent there from a collection of slimy mammal parts that aren't conscious at all.

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

#184

Post by VHRanger »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #155
mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If it was in the late '60s and he got into parapsychology and wondering if the sun is conscious, that's a very big hint of what "happened" to him. That generation is probably still pissing off all the drugs it took to roll back that high and beautiful wave [1]. 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…

Seems like your mother bought 12 books too many

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

#185

Post by titzer »

ted_bunny wrote: post #52
VHRanger wrote: post #28

> 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.

Just what exactly is sound about positing "magic fields" that have shoddy experimental evidence[1], predict nothing (or if they do, predict obvious things which we have completely adequate explanations for), and are totally unfalsifiable?

[1] Like his kooky "dogs know when owners are coming home" experiment (https://www.sheldrake.org/books-by-rupert-sheldrake/dogs-tha...). Like somehow dogs getting increasingly agitated the longer their owners are away is fucking mysterious to him. Also, apparently dogs cannot hear or smell, tell time, or remember patterns of behavior...at all. Such a kook.

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

#186

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

VHRanger wrote: post #184
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it was in the late '60s and he got into parapsychology and wondering if the sun is conscious, that's a very big hint of what "happened" to him. That generation is probably still pissing off all the drugs it took to roll back that high and beautiful wave [1]. 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…

Seems like your mother bought 12 books too many

Which ones?

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

#187

Post by echelon »

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…

I love these wild flights of fancy.

Just today I was thinking that perhaps ADHD is noise caused by the reverse time simulation of your brain iterating, trying to get the right details. All of the "normal people" are already reconstituted -- or, if I might boast -- low resolution details relative to the important matters of inquiry. Not that a simulation should feel self-important.

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

#188

Post by bmitc »

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…

> consciousness is a way to adapt to the environment to protect their lives, fulfill their needs and eventually reproduce

That is a very specific and narrow definition, biased by animal consciousness on Earth. While I am not personally aware of a definition of consciousness, I think of it as awareness and potentially some ability to act on that awareness by any method.

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

#189

Post by mannykannot »

kevindamm wrote: post #181
simonh wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of my issues with panpsychism is the question of causation. The behaviours of particles can be entirely explained in terms of physical dynamics, there is no behaviour left that needs explanation. If they do have experience, it doesn’t seem to be causal in that it doesn’t seem to have any consequences. We’re not quite there yet with galaxies, but there doesn’t seem to be any problem with doing explaining their mot…

> there doesn’t seem to be any problem with doing explaining their motion and gravitational dynamics in principle. Except we do see multiple inconsistencies at a galactic scale. The hubble tension, the absence of explanation of dark matter, the models which point to 75% of fundamental components of the universe being unobservable? There doesn't seem to be a direct extrapolation from our models to galactic-scale expla…

It is extremely unlikely that these concerns will undo anything we think we know in the realm of biology, such as how metabolism and reproduction work.

Consciousness is different, as we don't know how it works, but we have no evidence suggesting either that it will require a complete rewrite of fundamental physics to explain, or that a rewrite of fundamental physics to resolve the issues you raise would also provide the missing information needed to explain consciousness.

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

#190

Post by smokel »

amelius wrote: post #149
roenxi wrote: post #34

Earlier 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…

> if it actually exists It seems likely that it exists, because why would we discuss it? (Occam's razor) Also consciousness has an effect on physics for the same reason.

People have discussed various deities for centuries, and most of those don't seem to mind whether they exist or not.

Also, many concepts have wildly varying ways of "existing".

As a random example, a Mandelbrot fractal exists as a simple algorithm, but also as a concept related to (possibly beautiful) images. Which of these two is the proper or fundamental perspective to "understand" fractals better? Would studying the images be helpful to derive the algorithm if you lost its description? It's probably more helpful to study something else entirely to understand fractals better. And fractals are probably child's play compared to consciousness.

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