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Is the Sun Conscious? (2021) [pdf]

sheldrake.org

321–330 of 377 posts

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

#321

When you pray to the sun god it won't hear for 8 minutes, and then you need to wait for another 8 minutes for the response. Just basic physics. If it's an emergency the sun can't help you, better luck praying to the moon.

This makes me think of a concept for a story: It’s the end of a dark age and science is becoming popular again. They’re in a constant battle between the religious forces but at least they have unity and political power of some kind for the first in known human history. However, they keep coming up with solutions to problems that seem to line up perfectly with the strange little details of religious superstition in a…

This is actually similar to the lore in Raised By Wolves — there's a war between the Mithraic (dominant religion on their planet) and the atheist faction, and the Mithraic are actually far more technologically advanced because their scriptures mysteriously contain precise instructions for wildly advanced technology. Of course that only makes the Mithraic more advanced in the few areas their scriptures happen to talk about, and far less advanced in other areas, because they don't understand the principles and so can't apply them elsewhere, and they don't even know how their own tech works really, so it's an interesting conflict. The whole show is extremely interesting — I really should finish it sometime.

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

#322

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…

I haven't read Castaneda since I was in high school. I wonder how different I would feel about those books if I read them now. What would you say the deep flaws of that series were?

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

#323

When you pray to the sun god it won't hear for 8 minutes, and then you need to wait for another 8 minutes for the response. Just basic physics. If it's an emergency the sun can't help you, better luck praying to the moon.

If the particles we are made of came from the sun, perhaps we are quantum entangled with it as well.

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

#324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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

Consciousness regularly/usually claims to have omniscient knowledge of all that is, something which is not supported by physics.

Either consciousness is incorrect, or physics is, and I don't think I've ever met a physicist who believes they're incorrect on their omniscient knowledge. Seems like wherever you look in reality there are paradoxes like this that spring up, which makes me wonder what reality is.

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

#325

People tend to have strong opinions about this sort of thing, but the fact of the matter is there’s no way (currently) to know. (But also, it’s effectively metaphysics as it makes no testable/falsifiable predictions.) We could in principle discover a physical process that causes subjective experience, and a detector for same (say, it’s a particular string vibration in one of the coiled up dimensions). But it’s also p…

probably the most likely and feasible way to detect such consciousness would be if it were to try to contact us. the bandwidth is obviously there. now this of course would be somewhat analogous to the likelihood of us trying to contact microbes on the moon, but you never know. has anyone tried to decode sunlight?

It's on an 11-year cycle so the data rate to us is really really slow.

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

#326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 Consciousness regularly/usually claims to have omniscient knowledge of all that is, something which is not supported by physics. Either consciousness is incorrect, or physics is, and I don't think I've ever met a physicist who believes they're…

> Consciousness regularly/usually claims to have omniscient knowledge of all that is...

My initial reaction to this was "not in my experience", but on reflection, I really have no idea what you are saying here. Conscious entities may have opinions, but consciousness itself, at least as it is usually conceived of, does not.

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

#327
post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what if praying uses spooky action at a distance and isn't bound by the speed of light?

It still can't communicate information faster than light and the sun god can't know your prayers earlier than 8min after you made them

What if it's obvious ahead of time what the prayers will be? I know a thrown ball will return to the ground before it happens. So it can just "answer" them 8 minutes ahead of time.

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

#328

When you pray to the sun god it won't hear for 8 minutes, and then you need to wait for another 8 minutes for the response. Just basic physics. If it's an emergency the sun can't help you, better luck praying to the moon.

This makes me think of a concept for a story: It’s the end of a dark age and science is becoming popular again. They’re in a constant battle between the religious forces but at least they have unity and political power of some kind for the first in known human history. However, they keep coming up with solutions to problems that seem to line up perfectly with the strange little details of religious superstition in a…

In addition to the other comments, "Nightfall" by Isaac Asimov also covers a similar topic, especially in the full-length novel (though I prefer the short story).

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

#329

It would be very odd for large mammals to be the only things in universe exhibiting self awareness. Usually when something exists in nature, it's everywhere - gravity, radiation, nuclear forces. Self awareness is probably just another one of these things. Rock is self aware of being a rock, sun is self aware of being a star, human is self aware of being a human, humanity as a whole is self aware of being humanity. No…

> Rock is self aware of being a rock But how did you define the rock? Are you saying every set of particles is self aware of being that set of particles?

Probably? At small enough scale there might be elementary particles like there are for other things. We should probably solve quantum gravity before worrying about such details.

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

#330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given current understanding of physics, which has evolved over time. My favorite idea is that to travel faster than light one could, theoretically, bring the other side closer and then "step over". Food for thought.

The only problem with the wormhole (Kerr metric) travel thing that scifi seems to ignore is that once you go in, the only theoretical path out is to traverse around the end of time and emerge through a white hole into a completely separate universe. So although you could theoretically enjoin information across vast, perhaps casually disconnected distances in a wormhole, you can't take the result back to your original…

Could you create another wormhole to come back?
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