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Is the Sun Conscious? (2021) [pdf]

sheldrake.org

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

#201

Post by layer8 »

fylham wrote: post #175
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…

The hard problem of consciousness wonders why we seem to have consciousness when we could instead be input/output automata. You could imagine such a ‘zombie’ with our same social, emotional, and intellectual behavior (even pretending to have inner experiences) that doesn’t actually have Qualia. The existence of consciousness is not clearly causal, which is part of the mystery of why we seem to have it.

It doesn't seem plausible for something to have same social, emotional, and intellectual behavior without experiencing "qualia", because much of our behavior is expressing and talking about those experiences. I see "qualia" just as a second-order perception of the sensory-information processing within our brains. A little like a program profiler profiling its own process would observe parts of its own execution and process that information. I see no particular mystery in such an inner self-perception. At the same time, given what influences human behavior, it is an essential part for explaining that behavior. Philosophical zombies are an impossibility.

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

#202

Post by layer8 »

dsego wrote: post #131
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…

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

How would you possibly behave the same without inner experience? There is a direct causal connection between inner experience and how one behaves. Your talking about inner experience just being one particularly obvious example.

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

#203

Post by nebben64 »

woopsn wrote: post #95
namaria wrote: post #92

What we get from the sun is low entropy, since all the energy that gets to Earth has to be irradiated away, else we'd cook quickly. If this low entropy carried by energy flows makes life possible, and life is how I get my consciousness. I'd say in a way my consciousness comes from the sun. The warmth of my skin and the qualia of my thoughts are movement perpetrated on Earth by the sun.

Consider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergodicity Edit -- also, earth due to its internal heat, and perhaps fossilized remains of those organisms that benefited from geothermal heat/vents/etc during its time (nuclear power), will one day do our work on the sun

I discovered this phenomenon on my own - that you can deduce everything about a system from a single transitionary step.

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

#204

Post by layer8 »

nkrisc wrote: post #146
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…

Assuming the sun is conscious, why would that imply it has any awareness of us?

The paper has some handwaving about EM fields. It would have been nice if they did the math.

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

#205

Post by forgotmyinfo »

visarga wrote: post #108
exe34 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been chosen by the sun god, now you all have to obey me.

I one upped you. I rigged a LLaMA to take its random number generation from the EM fluctuations of the sun. When I pray I just send my prayers in the prompt. I have direct line of access to god now. Very efficient, god loves it. He even rewrote the system prompt. Obey my divine LLM!

It's funny, because a few thousand years ago, casting lots (like rolling dice) was considered a totally valid way of divining God's will. I guess this is a more elegant deity for a more... civilized age.

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

#206

Post by lukan »

layer8 wrote: post #198
lukan wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 don't know that. Maybe it is us, or other life in general it wants to sustain and protect. We know very little about consciousness or how life in general came to being. Maybe it is connected to other suns and the black hole in the center of the milky way, to exchange ideas, philosophy,…

"Want" is not a concept of evolution. Evolution is not a teleological mechanism. You'd have to argue how mutation and selection pressure works for stars, and how their traits would be passed from one star generation to the next, so that they would develop a consciousness with "wants". Given that the sun is a third the age of the universe, it seems unlikely that the sun is the evolutionary result of an ancestry of sta…

I am not sure, if our concept of evolution can be applied to the stars, assuming they have consciousness.

Asking why they evolved consciousness, would be the same to me as asking why the big bang happened and what was before that.

No idea, this is way beyond my understanding. But I doubt there is any human who has these insights.

So to clarify, I do not claim anything here, I just state how little we know about the grand picture and the rest is speculation, which I am aware is entering theological realms.

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

#207

Post by Workaccount2 »

cess11 wrote: post #199
edgyquant wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d say most of them have and these substances prove nothing close to what you’re suggesting. Yes they hint that the whole universe, at least our ideas of it, being an illusion made up by your brain. This isn’t consciousness though, your awareness remains the same it is simply your perception that is changed by mind altering drugs and none of these philosophers would argue your perception isn’t a product of the body.…

Aware is germanic, perceive is latin, it's the same concept. Maybe meditation doesn't have the results you think it has? As for what drug experiences can tell us, I didn't claim they say anything about "the whole universe". They can however tell us other things. For one, LSD causes parts of the brain that usually work in a synchronised manner, like a system of cooperating parts, to loosen from each other, which is pr…

Psychedelics are very likely the basis of many religions, including Christianity.

Having magical religious experiences on LSD is practically a meme, so I am not sure what would lead you to suggest otherwise.

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

#208

Post by JadeNB »

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…

> 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.

We can of course imagine whatever we want, but what does "consciousness field" mean? (Or perhaps we imagine consciousness fields in general before we imagine anything about the sun's?)

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

#209

Post by evrimoztamur »

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…

I guess there are invisible fairies dancing on the heads of every pin; or is that your point? Electrons as far as we can tell are pixies zipping around and dancing in a universal ballet.

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

#210

Post by Enginerrrd »

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…

> In the case of the sun, it is too far away and interacts very little with other celestial bodies, there can be no evolution for suns, they don't iterate fast enough and don't transmit their data into the future like DNA.

I'm not sure I agree here.

For starters, for all we know there is a complicated underlying order and evolution of a population of self-replicating eddy currents in the magnetohydrodynamics of plasmas in the sun or something. It's probably unlikely due to the rapid thermalization of things with that much energy in one place, but I'm not sure we can rule it out entirely.

We shouldn't limit ourselves to the typical energy, length, and time scales that are familiar to us when trying to look for consciousness or life. (And certainly not to chemistry alone, let alone carbon chemistry at temperatures and pressures near STP) The universe contains an enormous range of orders of magnitude of interesting interactions that could perhaps have a sufficiently complicated state space to support some sort of self-replicating.

In general however, I do tend to agree that any consciousness is the result of evolving self-replication.

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