Obviously, just look at it. How could it not be? That's just how things are.
Is the Sun Conscious? (2021) [pdf]
11–20 of 377 posts
Re: Is the Sun Conscious? (2021) [pdf]
#12I was expecting a reference to "The Truth" by Stanisław Lem.
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-truth-by-stanislaw-le...
Re: Is the Sun Conscious? (2021) [pdf]
#13> self-organizing systems at all levels of complexity, including stars and galaxies, might have experience, awareness, or consciousness. It must be terrifying if you're a galactic entity and have experience, awareness, and consciousness, but no autonomy w.r.t. movement, trapped in a trillion-year path that you cannot escape.
> It must be terrifying if you're a galactic entity and have experience, awareness, and consciousness, but no autonomy w.r.t. movement, trapped in a trillion-year path that you cannot escape.
Surely such an entity would not see itself being trapped at all, any more than a tree does. It is what it is.
On the contrary, it probably pities humans, asteroids, comets, moons, planets, and everything and anything else that is smaller, younger, with a shorter lifespan, or less energetic.
Re: Is the Sun Conscious? (2021) [pdf]
#14> self-organizing systems at all levels of complexity, including stars and galaxies, might have experience, awareness, or consciousness. It must be terrifying if you're a galactic entity and have experience, awareness, and consciousness, but no autonomy w.r.t. movement, trapped in a trillion-year path that you cannot escape.
Without the concept of free will in humans, which many now accept as a possibility, what would be the fundamental difference between an entity such as the sun, a plant and a human? None, except the lifespan.
"Other than that indefinable quality that distinguishes us from other things, how are we different from other things?"
Re: Is the Sun Conscious? (2021) [pdf]
#15> self-organizing systems at all levels of complexity, including stars and galaxies, might have experience, awareness, or consciousness. It must be terrifying if you're a galactic entity and have experience, awareness, and consciousness, but no autonomy w.r.t. movement, trapped in a trillion-year path that you cannot escape.
You would never have known anything else. If you realized you were self-aware, say, sometime around reaching hydrostatic equilibrium, what would you even compare the experience to? Would the very concept of autonomy have any meaning to you? As a solipsistic consciousness, would you have an ontology into which to place such a concept?
(Apologies for the Socratic barrage, but this line of inquiry triggered my inner first-year philosophy student.)
Re: Is the Sun Conscious? (2021) [pdf]
#16I'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
There's a kind of woo for everybody. Dumb people have favored woo, smart people have favored woo. Woo cuts across boundaries.
Re: Is the Sun Conscious? (2021) [pdf]
#17> self-organizing systems at all levels of complexity, including stars and galaxies, might have experience, awareness, or consciousness. It must be terrifying if you're a galactic entity and have experience, awareness, and consciousness, but no autonomy w.r.t. movement, trapped in a trillion-year path that you cannot escape.
Without the concept of free will in humans, which many now accept as a possibility, what would be the fundamental difference between an entity such as the sun, a plant and a human? None, except the lifespan.
You think that human free will is the defining factor of whether all things in the universe are the same or not?
Re: Is the Sun Conscious? (2021) [pdf]
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
Without the concept of free will in humans, which many now accept as a possibility, what would be the fundamental difference between an entity such as the sun, a plant and a human? None, except the lifespan.
"Other than that indefinable quality that distinguishes us from other things, how are we different from other things?"
I think the point is a bit more interesting than that. If you instead suppose we don't have free will, and there is no indefinable quality, then suddenly it’s not anymore scary to be a conscious galaxy than it is to be a human.
Re: Is the Sun Conscious? (2021) [pdf]
#19I was expecting a reference to "The Truth" by Stanisław Lem. https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-truth-by-stanislaw-le...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_at_the_End_of_Time
Is a great read, Star based plasma intelligence and the travel to the heat death of the universe.
Re: Is the Sun Conscious? (2021) [pdf]
#20> self-organizing systems at all levels of complexity, including stars and galaxies, might have experience, awareness, or consciousness. It must be terrifying if you're a galactic entity and have experience, awareness, and consciousness, but no autonomy w.r.t. movement, trapped in a trillion-year path that you cannot escape.
Without the concept of free will in humans, which many now accept as a possibility, what would be the fundamental difference between an entity such as the sun, a plant and a human? None, except the lifespan.
Does a person completely immobilized but awake lack free will? Maybe free will isn't the right measurement of consciousness or intelligence.