The book (now a major motion picture) Solaris, one of many excellent Stanislaw Lem books, explores this idea.
Is the Sun Conscious? (2021) [pdf]
301–310 of 377 posts
Re: Is the Sun Conscious? (2021) [pdf]
#302Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds like pretty shallow Holy Blood, Holy Grail stuff to me. It is fairly firmly established that roman mystery religion shaped some of early christianity, in particular the Mithras mysteries.
It's hardly any more conspiratorial than roman influences on Christianity, John the apostle spent a long time in Greece and wrote revelations there. Never mind the Church would actively integrate local cultural iconography into the bible to make it's spread more palpable.
Dionysian mysteries were popular in large portions of the Mediterranean at the time. Very little of what you mentioned was unique to dionysian practices and beliefs, so you'd need to have more than the immediate likeness as evidence.
What do you mean by "the Church would actively integrate local cultural iconography into the bible to make it's spread more palpable", can you give some examples of such iconography?
Re: Is the Sun Conscious? (2021) [pdf]
#303People 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?
Re: Is the Sun Conscious? (2021) [pdf]
#304Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not sure why you'd want answers, that's the domain of religion rather than philosophy. I'd like to suggest comparing observations from Merleu-Ponty and late modern neuroscience, perhaps Bear et al, Neuroscience: Exploring the Brain (pick a previous edition to get it cheap).
> Not sure why you'd want answers, that's the domain of religion Ha perhaps I should have been more specific - I want correct answers! And I want answers because a) I'm interested, and b) answers to scientific questions tend to let us make new cool things!
Are you familiar with the writings of Paul Feyerabend?
Re: Is the Sun Conscious? (2021) [pdf]
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 agi…
I witnessed this phenomenon myself, and I'm decidedly not a kook.
I don't have a satisfactory explanation, despite some rather interesting contributions from HN readers.
My comment in this discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39861066
My original observation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33295560
Re: Is the Sun Conscious? (2021) [pdf]
#306Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Anthropomorphism I don't think the article or I have made any references to anthropomorphism.
Title of the article: Is the Sun Conscious? In the article: "Therefore anyone who supposes that the sun is conscious is making a childish error, projecting anthropomorphic illusions onto inanimate nature."
Fair, the article made a reference to it. In the first paragraph where the author is clearly making a representation of a contrary argument.
A paragraph that starts "s the sun conscious? Obviously not, from the point of view of mechanistic materialism or physicalism".
So I see now why you'd raise that point. Still, it is a minor throwaway figure of speech that doesn't really encapsulate what the author is discussing further in the article.
Re: Is the Sun Conscious? (2021) [pdf]
#307Earlier quoted context omitted.
How about: your views on the world aren’t objective and all of those thinkers have way more credibility than you
What credibility? As you yourself pointed out they accomplished nothing. Some are quite famous, but that’s irrelevant in the face of thousands of years of utter failure to be more than pure entertainment. Try and find any philosophical statement from all that navel gazing which both means something and is generally accepted as true.
"The reason why heaven and earth are able to endure and continue thus long is because they do not live of, or for, themselves."
Lao Tzu
Re: Is the Sun Conscious? (2021) [pdf]
#308Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's hardly any more conspiratorial than roman influences on Christianity, John the apostle spent a long time in Greece and wrote revelations there. Never mind the Church would actively integrate local cultural iconography into the bible to make it's spread more palpable.
Dionysian mysteries were popular in large portions of the Mediterranean at the time. Very little of what you mentioned was unique to dionysian practices and beliefs, so you'd need to have more than the immediate likeness as evidence. What do you mean by "the Church would actively integrate local cultural iconography into the bible to make it's spread more palpable", can you give some examples of such iconography?
My goal here isn't construct some theory I cooked up, my goal is to make you aware of scholarly research that links what is assumed to be old psychedelic driven religion with providing many of the inputs to what became christian lore.
Re: Is the Sun Conscious? (2021) [pdf]
#309I'm an extremely strong believer that the sun has consciousness. I think there exists quantum processes that causes consciousness and that suns, gravitons, etc. all have it. I likely won't be alive to ever find out, but if someone does discover it, I hope a historian finds this thread :)
Pan-psychism does not work because so far everything we know that for sure has C also has some form of information processing. We know the brain is doing information processing, and living beings with brains that do this complex computations are the ones with C. While it might still not be a definitive proof or cause, it is a strong correlation, and there is no reason to think anything that is not doing complex computation is conscious.
Re: Is the Sun Conscious? (2021) [pdf]
#310When 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.
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 origin. You became causally disconnected from your original universe as soon as you crossed the event horizon of the wormhole.