Is the Sun Conscious? (2021) [pdf] • Hacker News Board

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

#371

Post by mistermann » Mon, Apr 01, 2024, 4:36 PM UTC

thealig wrote: post #354

mistermann wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

sorry, what do you mean by "Consciousness regularly/usually claims to have omniscient knowledge of all that is, something which is not supported by physics."? i do not follow what you mean by consciousness claiming to know something - consciousness is not an entity that sense? Your usage of consciousness as an entity doesn't seem to make sense to me.

Allegedly, consciousness is what powers these forum discussions, and these forum discussions are filled with numerous implicit supernatural claims, one of them being omniscience. It's an interesting phenomenon in various ways, one of them being that it can be explained away as unimportant in fact, even if that cannot technically be known to be true (demonstrating that facts do not always need to be factual), and it is funny because the conversations occur within a programming forum (the irony of it is funny).

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

#372

Post by Nevermark » Mon, Apr 01, 2024, 8:21 PM UTC

> The possibility that the sun is conscious expands the scope of our thinking.

As would the possibility that cheese sandwiches are our creators.

No study of the sun ever produced a clue that it was conscious. There is no explanatory power regarding the sun, or us, that comes from assuming the sun is conscious.

That isn't science. Or even rational.

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If consciousness means anything, surely it means self-awareness, encompassing a level of self-awareness of one's own self-awareness.

Self-awareness requires a few things. An ability to sense oneself and one's context, some memory of that sensory information, an ability to develop understanding and application of that information with a learned model of oneself, second level sensory access to some of those internal activities creating self-awareness, and a richness of modeling and self-awareness to allow for clear recognition, consideration, and exploration of the state of being self-aware of one's own self-awareness.

So consciousness at a minimum, is a gradation based on the product of those features.

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Explanations of consciousness as resulting from some level of particles consciousness would be the materialistic constructive explanation.

In contrast, consciousness based on the attributes above is an information organization and flow explanation. Which in the end can be divorced from any particular material substrate.

Self-awareness of self-awareness requires a rich second or third order loop in information flow, reflectively about that information flow and the system doing the information flow.

Just as a recursive function can't be explained by the non-recursive functions that it is composed of. Only by the entire loop organization.

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Also, there needs to be a plausible mechanism of creation or development.

In our case, we see the path evolution took over aeons to develop the components of consciousness listed above. The result are brains whose activity enhances the gathering of energy and resources required to allow those brains time to grow, and the energy budget to operate.

--

The only part of consciousness that is "mysterious" is the qualia aspect. The strange and seeming inexplicable experience of being conscious. But that is largely mysterious for the same reason as other mysteries. We are missing information. We can't yet access most of our brains activities, just some of them.

So our consciousness seems to float above other things we sense. There is a self-modeling/awareness gap there.

Which we are closing over time with science and technology.

Being which can access their own behavior at all levels will be more conscious

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

#373

Post by xpl » Tue, Apr 02, 2024, 3:54 AM UTC

visarga wrote: post #256

smokel wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Evolution does not explain consciousness, but it does explain that the article we are discussing is rubbish.

Yes, it does. Let's think step-by-step like LLMs. We have self replicators, the most basic form of life. They start to multiply and conquer the environment. This makes resources scarce and competition ensues. In order to compete, they need to adapt, hence they develop consciousness. Its role is to protect the body, and essentially, itself. And they don't have to adapt just to the physical world but also the other age…

> Let's think step-by-step _like LLMs_

Made my day

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

#374

Post by benreesman » Tue, Apr 02, 2024, 1:23 PM UTC

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #196

card_zero wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Literally our entire civilization is built on the idea that humans have qualia and therefore causing harm to humans is often unethical. Here's an alternative angle that doesn't lead to dystopia: Humans generate knowledge. Causing harm to knowledge is unethical. Broad human rights protect humans as knowledge generators (now or in the future or in potential) without going through the fraught process of arguing about…

Knowledge? That's entirely an anthropomorphic point-of-view issue. E.g. The impact of every drop of rain ever, is 'recorded' in the water table. All that data is lost, quintillions of bits of information, every day. We don't harm humans because we are human, and value our kind. That's about it.

While I’m strongly sympathetic to your argument (or my paraphrase of it) that “I experience pain, so I’m willing to venture other humans do too, and so absent more knowledge than that, I should embrace empathy as far as I’m able”,

There is also a fairly rigorous bunch of work coming from David Deutsch and Chiara Marletto (his apparent intellectual heir, and seeming more than equal to carrying forward the legacy of thought) about how to talk about the “open ended generation of explanations with sufficient and increasing explanatory power” as more than hand-waiving.

They’re serious people doing serious work.

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

#375

Post by electrosphere » Tue, Apr 02, 2024, 7:44 PM UTC

camillomiller wrote: post #105

electrosphere wrote: post #88

This is topical for me since I came back from a two week vacation from Tenerife. While there I tried to find Masca's Solar Station, an artifact created by the indigenous people of the island. They say it was probably to ask the sun god for help in times of drought. https://second.wiki/wiki/estacic3b3n_solar_de_masca

Is it inside the (stunning) Barranco de Masca? I loved it

No it's on a mountain ridge on Pico Yeje, the trail begins from the Mirador de cruz Hilda nearby.

I went there twice to find it, looking for something on a vertical rock. I found out later that it's actually carved into some rock on the ground.

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

#376

Post by pharrington » Wed, Apr 03, 2024, 7:59 AM UTC

andsoitis wrote: post #360

pharrington wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would it be terrified? It doesn't have an amygdala.

> Why would it be terrified? It doesn't have an amygdala. because your intellect would grasp the immense heaviness to realize you're mortal, that your ego will end.

I get that it would understand mortality and all. What I mean is, terror is a very specific, mammalian response to a perceived threat. There are unimaginably more possible responses to that realization than terror. Terror makes sense for immediate, fleeting threats, but I doubt a galactic scale awareness would develop that specific mechanism.

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

#377

Post by chaosbolt » Fri, Apr 05, 2024, 8:26 AM UTC

s1artibartfast wrote: post #283

chaosbolt wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have neurons and other cells doing their jobs and working with each other and the emergent system from this are humans, a different structure creates a different animal. We have circuits and 1s and 0s (which is as dumb as simolifying a human to atoms) and programs and structuring those in a certain way creates an emergent system of a computer with a language model installed on it. Would it be far fetched to say th…

I've thought about emergent consciousness a lot over the years. One area I would question is what the appropriate/relevant measures are for complexity and consciousness. Is the earth really more complex than a human mind, in the ways that matter? Presumably consciousness arises from more than the amount of "stuff" in the system. One person is conscious, but do two people form a collective consciousness? If not, why?…

>One person is conscious, but do two people form a collective consciousness?

The set that is me and my friend behaves differently than me or my friend alone, we go to different places, act differently, think better at two by talking to each other, etc. I don't know how conscious a 2 men system is but it sure has all the characteristics of a conscious being, by myself I wouldn't usually go to a bar and drink, I wouldn't get the ideas I don't usually get, etc. together we can go grab a drink, I'd say something I believe and he'd argue against it and maybe we reach a conclusion that was outside my reach, etc. But still getting a glimpse at this conscious 2-men system is still as impossible as a neuron getting a glimpse at me.

>Presumably consciousness arises from more than the amount of "stuff" in the system.

Yeah maybe the complexity, like two rocks still behave differently than a single rock if they touch each other but it's still quite simple, maybe the eastern philosophy (maybe Japanese but not sure I forgot its name) that everything has a consciousness isn't wrong.

>Is the earth really more complex than a human mind, in the ways that matter?

The earth as in the planet? like mars or venus? or the earth with its plants and humans and animals? if the latter then obviously being a superset it's more complex, if the rocky planet then I don't know, it sure has lots of subsets that interact with one another (moon, sea, rocks, rivers, etc.) and they're all subject to physical rules like gravity etc. whether its behavior is predictable or not in a way you'd think it's conscious is not evident, is out behavior really unpredictable? we are subject to survival and reproduction aka pleasure and pain, and even altruistic or "higher" acts usually either profit the community which is similar DNA aka reproduction (if I can't replicate then my sacrifice will allow those with similar dna to do it so I do replicate undirectly), maybe for a higher species we do act exactly like the rocky planet in the way that we just react to x or y with u or v, meh who knows...