[HN Gopher] Is the Sun Conscious? (2021) [pdf]
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Is the Sun Conscious? (2021) [pdf]
Author : bookofjoe
Score : 157 points
Date : 2024-03-28 23:54 UTC (23 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.sheldrake.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.sheldrake.org)
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| I think that's enough hacker news for today.
| mattmaroon wrote:
| Ha!
|
| Now "is the universe conscious" is a real question.
| alex_c wrote:
| "We are the universe experiencing itself"... so technically,
| yes?
| odyssey7 wrote:
| Cogito, ergo sum.
| baxtr wrote:
| Can there be enough HN for a day?
| bobmcnamara wrote:
| Accidentally zoomed in slightly so my phone wouldn't advance
| pages. I thought it ended after "The very question is
| ridiculous"!
| andrewp123 wrote:
| You're definitely onto something. The author starts a sentence
| with the words "In so far as".
| carabiner wrote:
| Absolutely, yes.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| I'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
| sandspar wrote:
| There's a kind of woo for everybody. Dumb people have favored
| woo, smart people have favored woo. Woo cuts across boundaries.
| lukasb wrote:
| actually the paper turns away from IIT - the latter part of
| section 5 decides that "the electrical and magnetic fields
| within and around the sun seem a more promising starting point
| for a discussion of solar consciousness than IIT in its present
| forms"
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Thank You. I didn't get that far. Since they discuss some
| other methods, i'll go back.
|
| Do you think they touch on something potentially not 'woo',
| as others say.
| lukasb wrote:
| No, the whole thing is very woo. It's fun though.
|
| If you want something similar but non-woo read about
| bacterial chemotaxis.
| andsoitis wrote:
| > 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.
| saulpw wrote:
| But at least there's no one else around to bother you.
| lakeshastina wrote:
| 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.
| dumbo-octopus wrote:
| "Other than that indefinable quality that distinguishes us
| from other things, how are we different from other things?"
| trescenzi wrote:
| 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.
| dumbo-octopus wrote:
| Right, but you're supposing away the entire essence of
| the discussion. If you take for granted we have no free
| will, our indistinguishability from anything else in the
| universe is an immediately obvious logical consequence.
| prng2021 wrote:
| You think that human free will is the defining factor of
| whether all things in the universe are the same or not?
| lukan wrote:
| I don't think that was implied, but rather the sun does,
| what the sun does and we do, what we do. If we do not have
| free will, but every action, every thought is a determined
| reaction of the state of things, than we would also be
| "trapped". But we do not (normally) perceive it as such. We
| experience our lives and we live it. We act. Even though
| our actions might come from a deep automatism. For the sun
| it might be the same, just on a whole different level.
| noduerme wrote:
| Does a person completely immobilized but awake lack free
| will? Maybe free will isn't the right measurement of
| consciousness or intelligence.
| TMWNN wrote:
| > 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.
| elevaet wrote:
| That analogy really cracked me up since we have no idea what
| it's like to be a tree either.
| mortenjorck wrote:
| 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.)
| Pompidou wrote:
| Our 75 years long self-declared free-will narrative is maybe
| more terrifying.
| bamboozled wrote:
| I thought the exact same thing. We can feel pain and suffer
| on levels that I doubt the Sun would ever be capable of.
| noduerme wrote:
| FWIW, we humans also have no autonomy w.r.t. our habitable
| orbit path, but we find plenty of internal shit to keep
| ourselves busy.
| pharrington wrote:
| Why would it be terrified? It doesn't have an amygdala.
| keybored wrote:
| Because you perceive the galaxy as being on a railroad? Why?
| Doesn't Stan look railroaded the way he drives to work, eats
| lunch, drives home, mows the lawn? Maybe the galaxy, like
| us,[1] experiences itself as doing things with volition. Which
| might seem weird given the sheer scale and timespan of a
| galaxy. But:
|
| > Assuming that the galactic mind works in and through
| electromagnetic fields, then its thoughts and perceptions must
| be very slow indeed, by our standards. The radius of the Milky
| Way is about 50,000 light years, so it would take at least this
| length of time for the galactic centre to perceive what is
| happening at the periphery, and as long again for it to act on
| star systems at the edge.
|
| Instead of having a consciousness that has to wait 50,000 years
| for some input, it makes more sense for a consciousness to
| experience time on a scale where input happen in (say) 100ms
| consciouss-perceived time or so. So what looks like 500,000
| years for us is a second to a galaxy.
|
| [1] The HN philosophers can argue about free will or not but
| here only the feeling of having it is relevant
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| Obviously, just look at it. How could it not be? That's just how
| things are.
| omoikane wrote:
| I was expecting a reference to "The Truth" by Stanislaw Lem.
|
| https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-truth-by-stanislaw-le...
| louky wrote:
| 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.
| peter_d_sherman wrote:
| Maybe a better question would be something similar to the
| following:
|
| Is a Self-Organizing System -- Conscious?
|
| Or perhaps an even better question (for research) might be
| something as follows:
|
| If _some_ Self-Organizing Systems are conscious and _some_ are
| not -- then which are and why, and which are not -- and why not?
|
| ?
|
| Also:
|
| Is a Self-Organizing System -- the _definition_ of Consciousness,
| or is Consciousness the _definition_ of a Self-Organizing System?
|
| That is, could one term be used to substitute the other with
| equal clarity, or are there differences, and if so, what,
| precisely?
|
| Is a Self-Organizing System a _superset_ of Consciousness, or is
| Consciousness a _superset_ of a Self-Organizing System?
|
| You know, the superset/subset relationship... if A is a
| _superset_ of B, then B is a _subset_ of A...
|
| Or vice-versa, as the case may be...
|
| Anyway, I think it's interesting that the concept of "Self-
| Organizing System" occurs with relatively high frequency and
| adjacency to the concept of "Consciousness".
|
| Perhaps they will ultimately be proven to be the same thing, the
| same underlying phenomena...
|
| And then again, perhaps not...
|
| Whatever the case, I'm sure there will be some interesting and
| lively discussions about the subject in the future! :-) <g> :-)
| VHRanger wrote:
| > Alfred Rupert Sheldrake (born 28 June 1942) is an English
| author and parapsychology researcher. He proposed the concept of
| morphic resonance,[2][3] a conjecture that lacks mainstream
| acceptance and has been widely criticized as pseudoscience.
| ted_bunny wrote:
| He's a trained scientist. His arguments are conjectural but
| sound. He's far from a kook.
| afarviral wrote:
| Being a kook and holding degrees in science are not mutually
| exclusive. His theories are intriguing nonsense in the sense
| that they have little to no evidence to support them. Their
| deeply conjectural nature is what defines them as kooky.
| titzer wrote:
| I've seen him give a talk. He continues to persist with
| pseudo-scientific theories that posit forces for which
| there are no evidence that purport to explain phenomenon
| that we have completely adequate scientific explanations
| for. His theories routinely fail Occam's razor, his
| experimental design is garbage, and he is never skeptical
| of his own conclusions. He's a kook.
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| 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's not supported by any evidence
| other than the evidence he wilfully misinterprets as
| supporting his theory.
|
| Sheldrake is very intelligent. But something happened to him
| in the late 60s that caused him to abandon his biochem
| research and go into increasingly kooky stuff.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| 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 full of New Age
| books that were popular with her and her friends as she was
| growing up, I guess: yoga, reiki, orientalism, astrology,
| Arthur Koestler, Wilhelm Reich, Aldus Huxley and Carlos
| Castaneda... I am a voracious reader, and I read them
| voraciously. I had the luxury of reading them in an age
| that was too young for the psychedelic drugs praised by
| some of them (Huxley and Castaneda, mainly, who were also
| the best writers of the bunch) and so managed to read them
| critically, I guess, and recognise their deep flaws [2]. I
| can imagine how hard it would have been to think critically
| if I had read those books under the influence of the kind
| of drugs people took in the '60s.
|
| And later. Growing up I had a friend who would regularly
| smoke hash and sit down and read the bible. He was at least
| half mad. A dear friend, but half mad. Drugs aren't good
| for criticial thinking.
|
| I think our man, Sheldrake, he fried his brain on drugs and
| that's how he can now think that the sun might be
| conscious, and that people can tell when someone's staring
| at them. I have another friend who smokes a lot of hash and
| is at least half mad and he's a big fan of Sheldrake. This
| friend is convinced that people can hear his thoughts. I
| think he believes he's telepathic and he is inadvertently
| projecting his thoughts into peoples' heads.
|
| Sometimes I think of all the people I know who go about
| their lives with their heads full of beliefs that never
| need touch reality, and it weirds me out a bit. Think of
| how many people believe in gods, or in aliens, or in
| reincarnation. I cross paths with those people everyday, we
| occupy the same physical space, but they live in a
| different world that I can't see or feel. That a guy
| trained in biochemistry (and who probably was a bit too
| friendly with chemistry for his own good) has made a whole
| world model out of nothing more than his imagination is not
| a big surprise.
|
| ________________
|
| [1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1074-strange-memories-
| on-th...
|
| [2] Take astrology, for instance. My mother had a 13-tome
| opus, with one tome on each sign, plus one for the general
| stuff. I read my own sign's tome first and I was inspired:
| everything in there described me so perfectly! Then I read
| the tome for another sign; and that, too, described me
| perfectly. So did the next, and the next. Soon I realised
| that the "perfect descriptions" of my personality were
| doing nothing more than flattering me, for having aspects
| to my personality that basically everyone has. They were
| just trying to get me hooked by telling me how cool I
| really am, because I'm an X sign.
| VHRanger wrote:
| Seems like your mother bought 12 books too many
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| Which ones?
| VHRanger wrote:
| Well, the 12 ones after the first one, since they're all
| one "replace all" away from each other!
| VHRanger wrote:
| Ah yes the "smart in one thing - smart in all the other
| things" fallacy
| titzer wrote:
| 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 agitated the longer their owners are away is
| fucking mysterious to him. Also, apparently dogs cannot hear
| or smell, tell time, or remember patterns of behavior...at
| all. Such a kook.
| fractallyte wrote:
| 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
| mjcohen wrote:
| Made me think of Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon.
| benreesman wrote:
| Apologies if this is a dumb question or a taboo question or both,
| but what the does "conscious" mean?
|
| We know about lots of complex systems, and systems that exhibit
| "emergent" behaviors seeming much more complex and goal-directed
| than the components of the system (the glider gun, that thing
| with the computer-modeled birds with like 3 simple rules but then
| the whole flock does complicated, creative stuff, long list).
|
| Because I don't think I've ever heard someone call a virus
| conscious, or a fire (until this submission I guess) and both of
| those things consume energy in one way or another, reproduce,
| avoid obstacles, adapt to situations to reproduce more.
|
| Ok so maybe it's bacteria, or maybe it's spiders, or maybe it's
| dolphins, or maybe it's primates, and then abruptly it's "yup,
| humans for sure, that's the one thing everyone agrees on, humans
| are conscious".
|
| But is a fertilized human egg conscious, or a fetus at one
| trimester, or two, or three, or birth? That seems pretty
| controversial.
|
| Doesn't this all seem a bit pre-Copernican? It's like the
| "Copenhagen Interpretation" of wave function "collapse" via Born
| amplitudes: if you just give up on trying to force subjective
| human experience onto hard data and sound math, abruptly there's
| nothing really very controversial going on other than some deep,
| personal introspection about subjective experience.
|
| I regard myself as a spiritual person in the sense that I wonder
| about my own subjective experience and the existence of some
| greater plane of reality and the possibility of a creator or
| deity, that seems to be a fairly common if not borderline
| ubiquitous thing people describe, but it's not transferable, and
| it feels like the goalposts on consciousness are just a bunch of
| post-facto efforts to rationalize why this observable trait of
| other people likewise describing some subjective experience into
| science.
|
| If describing a subjective experience in compelling natural
| language is an indicator of consciousness then my MacBook is
| conscious.
|
| I feel like I'm missing something here.
| roywiggins wrote:
| > Because I don't think I've ever heard someone call a virus
| conscious
|
| Panpsychism posits that all matter is conscious, and perhaps
| consciousness is more fundamental than matter.
|
| I don't find it particularly persuasive, but it's a real
| philosophical position:
| https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Panpsychist here, much of the time at least. It sort of
| sneaked up on me.
|
| It was initially a physics inquiry. I was playing with the
| idea that there is not "the" arrow of time, but instead "my"
| arrow of time, something arising from my biochemistry maybe.
|
| Under this lens, the obvious candidates for consciousness are
| the ones whose arrows of time are all pointing in the same
| direction--because I can communicate with them (this is why
| most humans believe that humans are conscious).
|
| The things that seem not to be conscious: lightning strikes,
| rocks, etc. these may just be the machinations of someone
| whose arrow of time is orthogonal to my own. Their future is
| my... left, or whatever (btw if you think this is a fun
| concept, you might enjoy the book "A Clockwork Rocket," which
| is about time and space, not consciousness).
|
| I have no evidence that these things in fact are conscious,
| but I also have no evidence that they are not. But it's not
| just academic, I'll behave differently depending on how I
| chose:
|
| - On the one hand you've got kooky behavior like listening to
| a waterfall and wondering what it's thinking.
|
| - On the other hand you've got this loneliness and the idea
| that it can be solved with rocket ships or telescopes and the
| possibility that you'll overlook life right under your nose
| because you're too busy looking for something that looks like
| yourself.
|
| Me? I'll take the waterfall.
| DEADMINCE wrote:
| > I was playing with the idea that there is not "the" arrow
| of time, but instead "my" arrow of time, something arising
| from my biochemistry maybe.
|
| > Under this lens, the obvious candidates for consciousness
| are the ones whose arrows of time are all pointing in the
| same direction--because I can communicate with them (this
| is why most humans believe that humans are conscious).
|
| None of this follows for me. If a being has its own arrow
| of time surely it would be based on decisions it would
| make, and conscious beings would not all have their time
| arrows pointed in the same direction simply because they
| were conscious.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Sorry, what I mean is that if you and some other being
| happen to have parallel time arrows, then it's possible
| that you'll recognize them as conscious. They might have
| similar thermodynamic properties to yourself, for
| instance. If you prod at them, they squeal afterwards.
| That sort of thing.
|
| If you encounter one with an orthogonal time arrow,
| you're not going to be able to communicate with them.
| You're not going to have evidence that can identify them
| as separate from any other phenomena. This unknowability
| turns it into a choice, not a deduction.
|
| From there you've got to decide whether you'd rather
| assume something is conscious when it's not, or whether
| you'd rather assume something's not when it is. I find
| the latter more troubling.
| Vecr wrote:
| That's not what an arrow of time is, are you sure you're
| not thinking more about counterfactuals?
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| I only took one semester of thermodynamics, but I think
| what I'm after is indeed an arrow of time.
|
| I experience reality in such a way that certain processes
| are irreversible. Eggs do not uncook, they only cook,
| that sort of thing. That's my arrow of time.
|
| Conventional physics calls it "the" arrow of time. Much
| like how we used to call Earth "the" center of the
| universe. It feels like the kind of thing that we've
| gotten wrong before. Like maybe it says more about us
| than it says about eggs.
|
| Could there be a process that is heading the opposite
| direction? A perspective for which eggs uncooking is the
| normal state of affairs? Who am I to shut the door on a
| possibility like that?
|
| It's the kind of thought experiment that leads to theory
| creation: What if all events, and not just the small ones
| of particle physics, are symmetry-preserving? What might
| we have to change about our concept of energy to make
| that fit?
| Vecr wrote:
| I really don't think so, getting the arrow of time to go
| a different way requires more than entropy locally
| decreasing, despite various popular descriptions. In most
| current theories of cosmology it should only go one way.
| Obviously there's general and special relativity, but
| they still have time going in the same direction, just at
| "different speeds", if you want to call it that.
|
| Edit: remember, we don't live in "The Clockwork Rocket",
| our GR uses the Lorentzian manifold, not a Riemannian
| manifold.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| You're right of course. I'm not trying to argue for this
| toy theory of mine to be considered as an alternative to
| the physics we've worked so hard to achieve.
|
| I tried that many years ago, it didn't work out. But
| that's ok, it was more about the journey anyhow.
|
| My point is just that I had to get sufficiently "out
| there" in order to have panpsychism show up organically,
| but now that I have, it's a pretty comfortable
| perspective.
|
| I thought I'd share because most people seem a bit
| repulsed by it, which is a shame because it's fun.
| raattgift wrote:
| Curvature isn't necessary here; all we need is time-
| orientability, so we can even be more general than a
| Lorentzian manifold. We can achieve time-orientability by
| comparing how strictly we must constrain the degrees of
| freedom of, for example, an adiabatically expanding or
| contracting cloud of gas of non-interacting test
| particles below some critical mass-density such that
| expansion will carry on forever, rather than there being
| some eventual recontraction. This is perfectly doable in
| flat spacetime. It's essentially just a problem in
| statistical mechanics, as we can arrange time-
| orientability this way without having anything to do with
| relativity.
|
| We don't really need time-orientability in relativity; it
| is perfectly reasonable to have solutions to the field
| equations which are static or stable periodic (and thus
| there is no clear past/future). Conversely, more
| generally we can get time-orientability in a wide variety
| of dimensions other than 3+1.
|
| Relativity just tells us that where there is some global
| time-orientable feature, every observer will agree what's
| the past and what's the future of that feature. However,
| complex observers may have some internal degrees of
| freedom providing a local notion of time-orientability
| which could be unaligned with the global feature (and
| other observers' local features).
|
| I don't see how any of this can relate to "consciousness"
| though. Also, our universe really doesn't admit backwards
| time travellers as far as we can tell, so whether and how
| the wider universe "corrects" observers who have
| different past/future orientations is really really
| really academic from a physics perspective. Sean
| Carroll's blog had a lot about that a decade or more ago,
| which you can probably dig out of
| preposterousuniverse.com or wherever.
| roenxi wrote:
| You've hit on the root of the debate, but you might have missed
| it. The debate is to define the meaning of consciousness.
|
| We've got a general problem of not knowing what consciousness
| is, if it actually exists, how many people have it, if it is
| exclusive to humans and not really having a good philosophical
| grounding for (assuming multiple separate consciousnesses could
| exist) whether in practice that is the case of if the universe
| only have one big super-contagiousness that happens to be well
| partitioned. Also what is the nature of time as a bonus,
| because that one is quite gnarly and has lots of implications
| for the other questions - there arer lots of things about time
| that could be true but we would be unable to perceive.
|
| Once you have answered all those questions to taste, you are
| now prepared to engage in unending argument with people who
| picked any alternate combination of answers.
| benreesman wrote:
| Is there some particular reason why this debate isn't
| squarely in the spiritual/religious/personal/subjective
| building on campus and zero in the science building?
|
| I mean, these are all fascinating questions in a "let's smoke
| a joint and talk about the meaning of life" sense, I've had
| many such conversations (both with and without the joint) and
| enjoyed all of them that were of that tenor.
|
| And I can see there being a building on campus between the
| other two where the topic is ethics and morality: how
| rigorous can we be about what constitutes acceptable
| behavior, compassionate behavior, empathetic behavior,
| kindness and decency. Those things seem much more amenable to
| some level of rigor: I certainly hope that some version of
| those ideas can be rigorous enough to admit a consensus, but
| that seems like a way more realistic goal than defining
| consciousness. It still poses hard questions: is it ok to eat
| animals? That's controversial but seems at least in principle
| amenable to scientific study of apparent pain or suffering
| and strategies for minimizing or eliminating it entirely.
|
| I have a sinking suspicion that the real definition of
| "conscious" is "seems a lot like me".
| knightoffaith wrote:
| You might be being facetious, but just in case - academic
| philosophers generally aren't in the business of smoking
| joints while talking about the meaning of life, or anything
| like this (even without the joint). They're generally
| focused on making principled arguments for views, including
| views on consciousness.
|
| And the debate is primarily a philosophical debate, not a
| scientific debate, if that's what you're asking.
|
| And I'm not sure that ethics is particularly more
| "scientific" than philosophy of mind. There's a case to be
| made that scientific study of pain is relevant to the
| morality of eating animals, yes, but there's also a case to
| be made that science is relevant to consciousness, e.g. the
| science related to IIT. And in both cases, the science is
| relevant but doesn't even come close to solving the issue.
| roenxi wrote:
| Science generally maintains silence in these sort of
| discussion in my experience, there isn't a lot it has to
| say and I don't think any of the facts are controversial.
| There aren't really any questions here about observable
| phenomenon. But scientists also enjoy philosophy and it is
| an easy topic to have an opinion on. And arguing is fun for
| its own sake, although some people seem to be motivated by
| fear of their perception of reality being challenged.
| GMoromisato wrote:
| I'm not sure if you're dunking on
| "spiritual/religious/personal/subjective" stuff, but the
| hard question of consciousness is, in some ways, the most
| important question of all. Far more important than
| "science" questions like "what is dark matter?"
|
| Literally our entire civilization is built on the idea that
| humans have qualia and therefore causing harm to humans is
| often unethical. If we were to somehow come to believe that
| consciousness is just an illusion--no more than a
| biochemical phenomenon, and no more special than transistor
| switching--then we would usher in a dystopia in which any
| horror inflicted on people is potentially justifiable and
| even necessary.
|
| The rise of LLMs is forcing us to confront this head-on.
| LLMs can't be conscious--they are literally just matrix
| multiplication. But if LLMs can act like humans and not be
| conscious, then maybe humans aren't really conscious
| either.
| knightoffaith wrote:
| > But if LLMs can act like humans and not be conscious,
| then maybe humans aren't really conscious either.
|
| Isn't this like saying "if the man in the Chinese room
| can act like he understands Chinese and not understand
| Chinese, then maybe nobody understands Chinese."?
| j16sdiz wrote:
| Yes. And that is one of the reasons why Chinese room
| thought experiment is interesting.
|
| We know how a Chinese-understanding human would respond
| -- they respond exactly like the room does -- but we
| don't know if he actually understanding anything.
| knightoffaith wrote:
| If you understood Chinese, you probably wouldn't have any
| doubt about whether you understood Chinese or not. And it
| seems incredibly strange to think that only you
| understand Chinese and nobody else does.
| Vecr wrote:
| Why does ethics need to be based on consciousness anyway?
| Can't you just stipulate your baseline requirements and
| then enforce them by any means necessary? Are the
| aesthetics not "cosmopolitan" enough?
| hazbot wrote:
| >>> If we were to somehow come to believe that
| consciousness is just an illusion--no more than a
| biochemical phenomenon, and no more special than
| transistor switching.
|
| I believe this and yet I personally seek to inflict as
| little horror as possible, and am moderately restrained
| in the amount of force I believe the state should use.
| card_zero wrote:
| > 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 each
| one.
|
| Consciousness and qualia don't have to come into it.
| smokel wrote:
| Knowledge is too broad a concept to protect all of it.
| Taking it to the extreme would probably mean that all
| output of /dev/random should be treasured in multiple
| backups, to avoid any bits to die.
| card_zero wrote:
| It's straightforward to reject random noise as having no
| information content.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| 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.
| singularity2001 wrote:
| Consciousness, at its simplest, is awareness of internal and
| external existence. In the past, it was one's "inner life",
| the world of introspection, of private thought, imagination
| and volition. Today, it often includes any kind of cognition,
| experience, feeling or perception. It may be awareness,
| awareness of awareness, or self-awareness either continuously
| changing or not.
| amelius wrote:
| > if it actually exists
|
| It seems likely that it exists, because why would we discuss
| it? (Occam's razor) Also consciousness has an effect on
| physics for the same reason.
| smokel wrote:
| People have discussed various deities for centuries, and
| most of those don't seem to mind whether they exist or not.
|
| Also, many concepts have wildly varying ways of "existing".
|
| As a random example, a Mandelbrot fractal exists as a
| simple algorithm, but also as a concept related to
| (possibly beautiful) images. Which of these two is the
| proper or fundamental perspective to "understand" fractals
| better? Would studying the images be helpful to derive the
| algorithm if you lost its description? It's probably more
| helpful to study something else entirely to understand
| fractals better. And fractals are probably child's play
| compared to consciousness.
| roenxi wrote:
| > Also consciousness has an effect on physics for the same
| reason.
|
| I don't think that is correct. If physicists are alleging
| that physics works differently when we literally turn our
| back then that is something they should spend more time
| publicising.
|
| What I assume you are referring to is that, in practice, to
| observe something experimentally we have to interact with
| it (eg, to record the velocity of an object a laser or
| something has to bounce off it). Ie, it is impossible to do
| an experiment without interacting with the subject of the
| experiment.
|
| The physics doesn't change based on consciousness, it is
| just a comment on the limits of what experiment is capable
| of.
|
| > It seems likely that it exists, because why would we
| discuss it?
|
| We discuss lots of things that don't actually exist. Most
| mathematical objects don't exist as far as we can tell, and
| even if the universe is infinite it is almost certainly not
| big enough to contain the bigger infinities the
| mathematicians can dream up unless there is a lot going on
| that we aren't getting hints of in our observations.
|
| And we won't ever settle the question of whether randomness
| exists. It isn't possible to rule out the theory that the
| universe is all just a simulation and built off a pseudo-
| random function. Theoretical random processes are still a
| foundation of modern society.
|
| Something not existing doesn't stop us from theorising how
| things would work if it did exist. The question really
| comes down to whether it is a quirk of evolution that
| results in a convincing illusion or an actual thing.
| amelius wrote:
| > If physicists are alleging that physics works
| differently when we literally turn our back then that is
| something they should spend more time publicising.
|
| What I'm referring to is that talking is a physical
| activity. And since we talk about consciousness, physics
| must be influenced by consciousness.
|
| (An explanation could be that physics is an emergent
| property of consciousness. Note that people often assume
| that the converse is true, but I think that is wrong for
| the aforementioned reasons.)
| mdavidn wrote:
| Sam Harris likes to say that consciousness is "what it's like
| to be." This has always seemed to me a pointless tautology.
| binary132 wrote:
| Sounds like a super reductive panpsychism
|
| I think we can all agree that rocks don't have subjective
| aesthesia
| DEADMINCE wrote:
| > I feel like I'm missing something here.
|
| Maybe just overcomplicating things.
|
| Being 'conscious' really just means being sentient, having some
| sort of awareness and ability to sense and react to things.
|
| Then there is having a 'consciousness', which is more than just
| being conscious and generally refers to having some degree of
| self-awareness.
|
| Your macbook doesn't fit into either of these categories, and
| certainly isn't conscious. Nor is fire, or a virus.
| ninetyninenine wrote:
| Yeah. The biggest thing most people miss is that the question
| your asking is in No way at all profound. You are asking an
| extremely mundane question that only appears profound as an
| illusion.
|
| What you are dealing with here is in actuality a language
| problem. You are contemplating and asking about the intricacies
| of a specific vocabulary word. It is an arbitrary sounding word
| with a simply arbitrarily vague definition surrounding it. Who
| cares? This is a linguistic problem not a philosophy problem.
|
| You think you're asking about something metaphysical or
| philosophical? No. It is a language quirk that's actually a
| trap. When you debate with someone about what is
| "consciousness" you have fallen into this trap. You believe
| you're discussing something profound, but no. What you are
| doing is debating about some arbitrary definition of some
| arbitrary word. When it goes into the details it's all about
| delineating what group of traits is conscious and what group of
| traits isn't conscious and this is not at all interesting.
|
| I think in reality this concept doesn't exist. We think it
| exists because the word exists. When you read this sentence you
| really need to think deeply about what I'm saying here. A lot
| of people miss it when I say the concept doesn't exist without
| the word. In fact, the word is so ingrained with their psyche
| they can't differentiate the two.
| knightoffaith wrote:
| Daniel Dennett holds a view somewhat along these lines. See
| his famous paper, Quining Qualia: https://web-
| archive.southampton.ac.uk/cogprints.org/254/1/qu...
| paulrudy wrote:
| This point of view could be applied to any word, and the
| extreme result is that you'd negate meaningful or useful
| communication, or that someone would have to be the arbiter
| of what is a legitimate concept or not.
|
| Between vocabulary, commonly understood meaning, possible
| meaning, and actual personal experience, there are many
| detours and jumps. "Dog" as a word, concept/meaning, and
| experience, has these issues. What's not a dog, which dog are
| you thinking about, and does this apply to "dog" or just
| those specific dogs you've experienced? Etc.
|
| Words like "consciousness", for less concrete experiences
| than "dog", tend to have more fog in the gaps between word
| and shared meaning, and between those and individual
| experience.
|
| It seems like you're trying to flatten a person's curiosity
| about the implications of a shared concept or experience into
| a "mundane" phantasm about a word whose referent is either
| nonsensical or nonexistent to you.
|
| I think that the gaps between word, concept, and experience,
| while confusing and difficult, are worthy of more respect and
| wonder than to just flatten them as though their existence
| didn't imply something potentially important and essential is
| happening there. Language arose because we have actual
| experience to share, however tricky it can be to verbalize.
| It doesn't work perfectly, and leads to confusion, but here
| we are, reading and writing.
|
| "Consciousness" may be a word for a slippery
| concept/experience, but that doesn't equate to questions
| about consciousness being inherently semantic.
| ninetyninenine wrote:
| >This point of view could be applied to any word, and the
| extreme result is that you'd negate meaningful or useful
| communication, or that someone would have to be the arbiter
| of what is a legitimate concept or not.
|
| False. <- see? There's a word that doesn't apply. But
| you're not wrong. This POV does apply to MANY words. It
| just goes to show how MANY debates are traps. You think
| you're discussing something profound but it's just
| vocabulary.
|
| >Between vocabulary, commonly understood meaning, possible
| meaning, and actual personal experience, there are many
| detours and jumps. "Dog" as a word, concept/meaning, and
| experience, has these issues. What's not a dog, which dog
| are you thinking about, and does this apply to "dog" or
| just those specific dogs you've experienced? Etc.
|
| Right. So your example illustrates my point. Is it profound
| and meaningful to spend So much time discussing what is a
| dog and what isn't a dog? What is the definition of the
| word dog? No. It's not. Same. With. Consciousness. It's not
| profound to discuss vocabulary.
|
| >It seems like you're trying to flatten a person's
| curiosity about the implications of a shared concept or
| experience into a "mundane" phantasm about a word whose
| referent is either nonsensical or nonexistent to you.
|
| No I'm just stating reality as it is observed. The essence
| of a debate about consciousness is rationally and logically
| speaking entirely a vocabulary problem. This isn't even an
| attempt to "bend" anything to lean my way. The ultimate
| logical interpretation of any situation involving a debate
| on what is consciousness and what is not conscious is a
| vocabulary problem. Literally. Read the last sentence.
|
| >I think that the gaps between word, concept, and
| experience, while confusing and difficult, are worthy of
| more respect and wonder than to just flatten them as though
| their existence didn't imply something potentially
| important and essential is happening there. Language arose
| because we have actual experience to share, however tricky
| it can be to verbalize. It doesn't work perfectly, and
| leads to confusion, but here we are, reading and writing.
|
| Made up concepts also arise from words. Gods, goddesses,
| spirit, monster, hell, dryad, minitour, Cerberus. The
| existence of made up concepts logically speaking means that
| it's possible "consciousness" is a made up concept.
|
| >"Consciousness" may be a word for a slippery
| concept/experience, but that doesn't equate to questions
| about consciousness being inherently semantic.
|
| It does. Each question about consciousness is inherently
| relating the word to another semantic word. This is
| literally what's going on.
| mionhe wrote:
| >You think you're discussing something profound but it's
| just vocabulary.
|
| Alternatively, you think they're discussing something
| mundane, but it's actually profound.
|
| After all, you think you're discussing something
| profound, but it might just be vocabulary.
| ninetyninenine wrote:
| Yes. For example "randomness." Seems mundane, but this
| simple intuitive concept can't actually be formally
| defined. I have yet to see an actual algorithm for a
| truly random number generator.
|
| The profoundness comes from the fact that on the
| intuitive level we are all hyper aware of what random
| means. But on the formal level we have no idea what it
| is.
| tasuki wrote:
| > I think in reality this concept doesn't exist.
|
| Do you not think that you are conscious? Don't you have
| subjective experience?
| smokel wrote:
| This assumes that language is fundamental to all
| understanding. May well be true, and it probably is according
| to Wittgenstein, but it is just one of many perspectives, and
| I'm not convinced.
| ninetyninenine wrote:
| No, I don't assume this. Concepts and understanding can
| exist independent of language. But sometimes concepts and
| understanding arise ONLY because of language. I am saying
| "consciousness" is a specific case of the later.
| baxtr wrote:
| I thought the definition given in a sibling comment was
| interesting:
|
| _> Consciousness is the constellation of your past experiences
| transforming reality into your next experience._
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39860879
| trashtensor wrote:
| > Most researchers agree that consciousness is somehow related to
| the electrical activity of brains. Some go further and propose
| that brains' electromagnetic fields actually are conscious.
|
| I am not knowledgeable at all here so I'm just going to talk out
| of my butt for a second but this seems testable. Does disrupting
| the electromagnetic fields in the brain disrupt consciousness?
| odyssey7 wrote:
| I like the angle and skepticism, but the experiment would still
| need to overcome the challenge that the philosophically
| rigorous way to confirm a consciousness is to be that
| consciousness.
| ComplexSystems wrote:
| Yes - isn't that what anesthesia does?
| strogonoff wrote:
| > Does disrupting the electromagnetic fields in the brain
| disrupt consciousness?
|
| Or, is consciousness A interacting with consciousness B in a
| certain way observed by both as "disrupting electromagnetic
| fields in the brain"?
|
| That is to say: the experiment does not demonstrate causal
| directionality.
| lukan wrote:
| Well, if you disrupt it enough, to produce a current in the
| brain, you surely get an effect.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcranial_magnetic_stimul...
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Electrical shocks have been used for a long time and are still
| used to treat mental illness.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroconvulsive_therapy
| x86x87 wrote:
| Most researchers cannot agree on what consciousness is. If we
| cannot even get a straight, agreed upon answer on what
| consciousness is how can we actually make these sorts of
| claims?
| toast0 wrote:
| And if you only knew / Just how much the sun needs you / to help
| him light the skies / You would be surprised ...
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xPDVdCPGh6M
| ChaitanyaSai wrote:
| Consciousness is the constellation of your past experiences
| transforming reality into your next experience.
|
| Every major consciousness theory out there fails because it does
| not account for how a consciously experiencing self is created.
| You cannot explain away consciousness without explaining the
| self.
|
| And there is a theory that offers a model for both (not my own!).
| Our book Journey of the Mind discusses this. Here's a blog post
| discussing both https://saigaddam.medium.com/conscious-is-simple-
| and-ai-can-...
| ganzuul wrote:
| A constellation is a fitting description for the ego.
| dpq wrote:
| I think the author took Pohl's Starchild
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starchild_Trilogy) books too
| seriously.
| sam_lowry_ wrote:
| Or Solaris by Stanislav Lem.
| fractallyte wrote:
| Or Whipping Star by Frank Herbert
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whipping_Star)
| chrz wrote:
| *Stanislaw :)
| sam_lowry_ wrote:
| OK, Stanislaw ;-)
| thoughtpalette wrote:
| Or The Fifth Element Movie?
| andrewstuart wrote:
| An old friend came to believe this when he was in a state of
| bipolar delusion.
| strogonoff wrote:
| The tragedy (depending on how you look at it) with discussions
| about consciousness is that any possible consciousness we
| envision is inevitably human-like. We wouldn't see it as
| "consciousness" even if it was only somewhat different from ours
| (animals); a consciousness that is _really_ different may look to
| us like any natural process.
|
| A question of "is X conscious?" has no meaning if you remove that
| constraint of "human-like". Like with any question we ask, we
| cannot remove ourselves from this one.
| lukan wrote:
| I am not so sure about it. The question is, whether
| consciousness also leads to changing behavior. Say we try to
| communicate with method X and the sun answers with a flare,
| would probably be proof.
|
| But it could also be, it has consciousness, but simply would
| not care much about and ignore us.
| strogonoff wrote:
| "Answers" is a word that hints that you are still thinking of
| it as human-like consciousness.
|
| A valid point could be that our consciousness is social
| ("answering" is a thing), and by extension any alien
| consciousness we expect would also have to be social as one
| of the constraints that make it sufficiently human-like.
| lukan wrote:
| That is a good point. I need to clarify my consciousness
| about it.
|
| In general I don't think a consciousness needs to be social
| to react to other consciousness. They might pose a threat
| or benefit. Say we want to build a dyson sphere and that
| would disrupt the suns ability to communicate with other
| suns (also social I know). I try to find better examples ..
| colordrops wrote:
| Is there any other definition of consciousness than one of
| a subjective experience that observes and reacts to its
| environment?
| chongli wrote:
| What is a subjective experience? To me, this seems like
| an infinite regress problem.
| MacsHeadroom wrote:
| Subjective experience is the awareness of an internal
| representation.
| strogonoff wrote:
| I would say there is no working definition of
| consciousness at all--and potentially there can't be a
| complete and provably correct one, if we assume Godel's
| incompleteness theorem is true. The reason is that our
| arguments about consciousness originate from
| consciousness itself, we are building a model of the
| system while being inside of it. The only definitive
| statement that can be made, I guess, is that
| consciousness exists.
|
| As far as consciousness that doesn't react, there are
| materialist/behaviourist/illusionist views that hold that
| only observed behaviour matters and anything else may
| well not exist, but I personally am not convinced by
| them.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| Even that wouldn't indicate the sun is conscious. Your
| computer responds when you press a key, is that proof it's
| conscious?
|
| (I don't think it's impossible that computers are conscious,
| but I cannot even proof that humans other than me possess a
| consciousness)
| Jensson wrote:
| > We wouldn't see it as "consciousness" even if it was only
| somewhat different from ours (animals);
|
| Most humans see animals as having a consciousness with feelings
| and dreams like us. Why would you think otherwise? Why else
| would it be illegal to torture animals? That we even call it
| "torture" means we think the animals suffers from it, we don't
| say we torture a rock when we crack it, that means we see them
| as having a consciousness.
| card_zero wrote:
| The human anxiety about animal suffering needs arguments to
| support it. You can't argue _from_ it to support something
| else. It 's already a weak position that we just go along
| with because of feels.
| Jensson wrote:
| > The human anxiety about animal suffering needs arguments
| to support it
|
| You want arguments supporting that humans dislike seeing
| animals suffer? To most people that would be obvious, I'm
| not sure what to say.
| card_zero wrote:
| No, that's not what I meant. I'm saying that reasoning
| from anxiety is not valid.
| Jensson wrote:
| It is valid, we are talking about what humans thinks, not
| what is true. If humans thinks animals are conscious then
| they think animals are conscious, doesn't mean animals
| actually are conscious.
|
| And the fact that I don't get downvoted here is evidence
| people here also think that animals are conscious, which
| supports my argument that people think animals are
| conscious.
| card_zero wrote:
| Oh, OK. I think that the "because animals are conscious"
| part is only retro-fitted to the "don't make animals
| suffer (because I don't like it)" argument. I think it's
| a somewhat disingenuous post-hoc justification, but
| people convince themselves of it. So in a sense, yes,
| they think animals are conscious: most people will
| readily take this argument out, parade it around, and
| sometimes they do science that's supposed to relate to
| it, or refer to that science and think and worry about
| the argument ... but I still think it arises from mere
| justification of a feeling and is essentially hollow and
| _therefore_ (breathe) although people _say_ they see
| animals as conscious, they aren 't really meaningfully
| looking because they already decided in advance, and it's
| not really sincere thought that they put into it. But
| this is just, like, my opinion.
| simonh wrote:
| I think animals having conscious experience seems a
| reasonable opinion. Many animals display a lot of
| behaviours we have in common with them, they have similar
| senses, similar emotional responses, similar social
| behaviours, even similar reasoning abilities in a lot of
| contexts. Tye brain regions with activity associated with
| these behaviours correspond to equivalent regions in our
| brains.
|
| Its true we have additional brain structures responsible
| for higher reasoning and linguistic abilities that other
| animals don't share, but it seems likely that these
| features are layered on top of those other capabilities we
| inherited from our common ancestors with other mammals.
|
| In support of this, there are some behaviours we share with
| other animals that are not conscious, or at least that are
| so automatic that we are essentially mere observers of our
| own behaviour. This includes many instinctive behaviours,
| and these are often shared with lower order animals that do
| not display sophisticated awareness of their own existence
| and that of others. It seems reasonable that we inherited
| those behaviours from common ancestors with such animals
| (lizards, frogs, etc) before self consciousness evolved.
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| (Many, but not all) Animals do in fact have consciousness,
| emotions, and dreams(the kind that happens during sleep that
| is). It's not just human projection.
|
| Most animals don't have self-awareness, though some even have
| that, like great apes, certain cetaceans, elephants, and
| possibly even some birds.
|
| The only things that seem to be uniquely human are complex
| language, cultural evolution and prolonged neuroplasticity
| during childhood and early adulthood.
| qayxc wrote:
| I think the main issue is that far too many people think of
| consciousness in terms of a binary state (i.e.
| consciousness is present or not) instead of a spectrum.
|
| Even in humans the state of being animals that possess
| consciousness varies over the course of time: new-born
| infants are in a different state of consciousness than 4
| year old children, for example. Not to mention our regular
| fading in- and out and transitioning between various states
| of consciousness during our sleep cycle.
|
| The first important step towards a better understanding
| that would allow proper assessment would be to develop a
| sound metric to allow qualifying consciousness. Doesn't
| have to be precise, but a scale from say 0 (non-conscious)
| to 100 (awake neuro-typical sober human adult) would be a
| great step forward IMHO.
| xcode42 wrote:
| > (Many, but not all) Animals do in fact have
| consciousness, emotions, and dreams(the kind that happens
| during sleep that is). It's not just human projection.
|
| Maybe we are defining consciousness differently but how do
| you know? how do you prove that? Don't get me wrong I too
| believe that animals have consciousness, but I think humans
| other than me have consciousness too and I can't prove that
| either. That's a big part of the whole issue particularly
| in regards to whether the current ai of the week is
| conscious or not.
|
| You can demonstrate that animal and human brains achieve
| similar brain states given similar stimuli but how do you
| demonstrate that those brain states are sufficient
| for/require consciousness? for all we know every animal is
| a philosophical zombie and we can't prove otherwise.
| strogonoff wrote:
| Most humans eat animals and indirectly participate in animal
| torture by eating meat of animals who spend their lives from
| birth to death in conditions indistinguishable from torture.
| There may be a stated belief in animal consciousness, but
| revealed preferences show otherwise.
| mannykannot wrote:
| Human consciousness is an important thing that we do not
| understand, and therefore well worth studying in itself.
|
| Anyone who can get some sort of handle on other forms of
| consciousness is encouraged to investigate further, but that
| might not be possible until we have a better understanding of
| human consciousness.
|
| One of the overlooked features of the so-called scientific
| revolution is that it shifted focus from "big" questions to
| questions of a more constrained scope, but that are amenable to
| investigation. This turned out to be much more effective than
| those preoccupied with the "big" questions might have imagined.
| theptip wrote:
| I think you can envision "non-human-like". Eg we already
| imagine animals can be conscious.
|
| Conscious just means an intelligence that is self-aware and has
| subjective experience. If you define that as human-like then
| your point stands tautologically. But I think there is a very
| wide space of conscious possible-minds.
|
| Simple examples would be hive-minds, faster minds, slower
| minds, distributed minds, quantum minds, it's really quite easy
| to imagine conscious non-human minds.
| strogonoff wrote:
| An animal's consciousness is not exactly human-like, but
| close enough. Envision something on completely foreign time &
| space scales and it might be indistinguishable from, say, a
| weather system.
| fractallyte wrote:
| Sheldrake also studied a well-known phenomenon in dogs ['Dogs
| That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home']:
| https://www.sheldrake.org/books-by-rupert-sheldrake/dogs-tha...
|
| I personally witnessed this!
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33295560
|
| It _is_ incredible (in the literal sense), and I don 't expect
| anyone to simply believe me. What is one to do after experiencing
| something (literally) unbelievable?
|
| I'm scientifically qualified (degree in Theoretical Physics). I
| can see flaws in the linked article, in regards to self-
| organization and emergence (which I studied).
|
| But I _know_ there 's more to physics and Science - an entire
| field which lies unexplored, with vast implications...
| aydyn wrote:
| I'm surprised no one offered yet another plausible explanation
| that the dog picked up on something else (bird! squirrel!
| another dog!) that just so happened at the same time as your
| friend leaving the building. Coincidences occur all the time.
| fractallyte wrote:
| It was a car park, near to other stores, and (I think) a
| highway.
|
| The pup was too small to see out of the car windows.
|
| It was more than a coincidence: it was a distinct change in
| behavior.
| lukan wrote:
| I am open for alternative explanations, but the smell theory,
| combined with subtle changes with you, as you spot your friend,
| are the more likely explanation. Dogs can easily pick up scents
| 100 m away (my sister trained rescue dogs).
|
| "I can see flaws in the linked article, in regards to self-
| organization and emergence"
|
| Can you share what you perceive as flaws?
| fractallyte wrote:
| Erwin Schrodinger's famous book, _What Is Life?_ begins with
| a simple question: _" Why are the atoms so small?"_
|
| It subsequently turns this question around: _" Why must our
| bodies be so large compared with the atom?"_
|
| The point is that a brain (a 'thinking' system) must consist
| of an enormous number of atoms. Magnitude is only part of the
| answer; the other essential quality is that of
| _organization_.
|
| There was a recent article on HN: "Is the emergence of life
| an expected phase transition in the evolving universe?"
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39103419)
|
| Stars are chemically relatively simple (for example:
| _Introduction to Astrochemistry: Chemical Evolution from
| Interstellar Clouds to Star and Planet Formation_ by Satoshi
| Yamamoto).
|
| It takes a lot of evolution to arrive at even a simple cell.
| _Early Evolution: From the appearance of the first cell to
| the first modern organisms_ by Martino Rizzotti, begins with
| this sentence: "It is now accepted that the first cells
| derived from simpler 'objects', and that their descendants
| became more and more complicated and ordered until their
| evolutionary transformation into modern cells..."
|
| _Brain Evolution by Design: From Neural Origin to Cognitive
| Architecture_ edited by Shuichi Shigeno, Yasunori Murakami,
| and Tadashi Nomura discusses how brains have been shaped by
| simple evolutionary processes.
|
| _Computation in Living Cells: Gene Assembly in Ciliates_ by
| Andrzej Ehrenfeucht Tero Harju, Ion Petre David M. Prescott,
| and Grzegorz Rozenberg, goes further to discuss natural
| computing, which requires (as per _What Is Life?_ ) a certain
| level of biology.
|
| The key point in these studies is that evolution seems to
| imply increasing complexity.
|
| John W Campbell summarized it nicely in an editorial in
| Astounding Science Fiction, December 1955, _Necessary Isn 't
| Sufficient_:
|
| _" A vast mass of gas in interstellar space is perfectly
| stable as it drifts idly around. Organize it a little, and a
| chain-reaction of increasing complexities is initiated;
| organization breeds organization, seemingly. The gas, once it
| is organized above a certain critical level, begins to fall
| together by mutual gravitation. If the organization is large
| enough and the necessary intensity of organization is
| achieved, the deuterium-deuterium reaction begins, and the
| gas mass is no longer stable. A star begins to glow.
|
| "The gas-and-dust mass has, meanwhile, been undergoing sub-
| organization that produces planets circling the star. What
| happens on the planets, we certainly are not yet competent to
| define - but we know with absolute certainty that, in some
| instances, a higher-order organizational complexity called
| Life arises. And that this organization breeds further and
| higher-order organization."_
|
| Stars lack this essential complexity. So, in my opinion, it's
| silly to suggest that they may be 'conscious'.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| >> But I know there's more to physics and Science - an entire
| field which lies unexplored, with vast implications...
|
| ... and so it makes sense for dogs to have ESP?
| moomoo11 wrote:
| The Sun is the OG sky daddy.
| barfbagginus wrote:
| 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 probably talk to us too, if
| they want to. A form of stellar transcranial magnetic simulation.
|
| Pov: Sun Cults now have a scientific basis, baby! Let's try to
| make mental contact with the sun!
| barfbagginus wrote:
| 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 probably talk to us too, if
| they want to. A form of stellar transcranial magnetic simulation.
|
| Pov: Sun Cults now have a scientific basis, baby! Let's try to
| make mental contact with the sun!
| eql5 wrote:
| If you are interested in what the flood was really about, there
| is an interesting scientific theory about it:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5Et2jvrY7Y
| exe34 wrote:
| It works really well as sci-fi, but don't you think floods
| happen often enough that every culture will have a story of
| one?
| shzhdbi09gv8ioi wrote:
| There's more reasonable and basic ideas in this field than
| the pseudoscientific ideas being put forward in that video.
|
| Yes, I am calling it pseudo science on the basis that the
| author thinks that the biblical figure Noah lived to be more
| than 600 years old, near the time that god created the earth.
|
| A better starting point would be
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_myth
| simonh wrote:
| It's a lovely story, but given the pre-existing myth of
| Utnapishtim, the biblical account is basically Babylonian
| mythology fan fiction.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Why is it brought up as a bad thing that the myths are much
| older than the compilation book the Bible? That makes the
| myths more interesting and impressive.
| edgyquant wrote:
| What exactly is this suppose to change? I don't think it
| really happened, myths are ways of encapsulating truths
| they aren't historical events generally, but assuming it
| was real why would it being older than the Bible disprove
| that?
| barfbagginus wrote:
| I am interested in annoying people who believe in the flood
| by providing intentionally wacky and untestable theories, as
| a joke.
|
| I don't need a YouTube video to make that kind of joke, and
| I'm unkind to people who think those kinds of videos are
| anything more than jokes
|
| Allow this thought into your head, dear chooms: The best
| scientific explanation for the flood, hands down, is the
| process of mythopoesis.
|
| That's what the flood is quite likely all about, and it would
| be good to make peace with that. We have evidence that people
| tend to spread false stories over the generations, more so
| than they spread truth.
| exe34 wrote:
| I've been chosen by the sun god, now you all have to obey me.
| lukan wrote:
| That only works, if you wear something like this:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Cone_of_Ezelsdorf-
| Buc...
| exe34 wrote:
| Aha a dunce cap.
| lukan wrote:
| I see, we have a volunteer for the sacrifice ..
| visarga wrote:
| 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!
| forgotmyinfo wrote:
| 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.
| visarga wrote:
| 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 self-replicator
| evolving to deal with limited resources. 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.
| pxndx wrote:
| It's protecting us from advanced alien invasions, and doing a
| great job. Have you seen any recently?
| exe34 wrote:
| We should throw a virgin into a volcano just to make sure
| though.
| lukan wrote:
| "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, or
| just exitement about being alive. Or preparing something we
| know nothing about. A meeting of galaxies.
|
| Now I surely don't claim I know what consciousness is and I
| certainly do not claim the sun is. I am just hesistant to
| make absolute judgements about systems, where I can only
| catch a glimpse from the outside.
| layer8 wrote:
| "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 stars of any relevant
| length.
| lukan wrote:
| 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.
| haswell wrote:
| > _which I am aware is entering theological realms_
|
| Theological realms are where people tend to go when they
| feel they must have an explanation to something
| unexplainable.
|
| I think it's important to preserve a non-theological
| space that allows one to acknowledge how little we know
| without defaulting to a theological position, and to
| highlight that acknowledging these unknowns does not make
| one a believer in deities.
|
| Not saying this is what you're doing by the way, but it's
| a kind of binary choice that many people seem to force on
| the situation.
| lukan wrote:
| Not every religion works with the concept of absolute
| truth and dogma (see Mysticism, Taoism, various pagan
| ones, ..) and I was speculating above, whether the sun
| cares about and supports us. That is probably in the
| theological realm by common understanding. Or maybe more
| philosophical?
|
| Who knows, probably more philosophical, but I think the
| lines can get blurry.
| kseistrup wrote:
| 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 all they're really doing is dancing, or about to
| kiss?
| simonh wrote:
| 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 other animals very close
| to us in evolutionary terms don't kiss), and completely
| dissociated from anything we know about galaxy formation
| and dynamics.
| keybored wrote:
| The difference is that you're not pustulating teapots on
| moons. You're looking at real phenomena or projected ones
| (galaxies colliding) and asking how it can make sense
| within panpsychism.
| simonh wrote:
| 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 motion and gravitational dynamics in principle.
|
| This means any experience these phenomena might have
| would be purely epiphenomenal, and therefore lacking in
| consequences, or explanatory power, and be unprovable. It
| would be pure speculation, maybe so, maybe not, maybe
| something else, just an exercise in imagination. Thats
| not a reliable route to knowledge.
|
| With humans we have social, emotional and intellectual
| behaviour predicated on the existence of personal
| experience. We talk and write about having interior
| experiences. That is a causal phenomenon in the world
| that needs to be explained, aside from our personal first
| person experience of it.
| fylham wrote:
| 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.
| layer8 wrote:
| 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.
| kevindamm wrote:
| > 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 explanations.
| mannykannot wrote:
| 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 the
| missing information needed to explain consciousness.
| evrimoztamur wrote:
| 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.
| RajT88 wrote:
| I just want to inject the observation somewhere in this
| thread that the human brain is estimated to have a similar
| order of magnitude number of Neurons as the Milky Way has
| stars. (The lower bound of stars is the accepted ballpark
| for neurons)
| vik0 wrote:
| >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.
|
| You sound overly confident with your statement about a topic
| that has eluded thinkers for millennia and (probably)
| millennia to come
| Retric wrote:
| No reason to use the derogatory euphemism "thinkers." How
| about people chasing a dead end to nowhere.
| edgyquant wrote:
| How about: your views on the world aren't objective and
| all of those thinkers have way more credibility than you
| Retric wrote:
| 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.
| hackable_sand wrote:
| " _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
| Retric wrote:
| Reasonable attempt, but not generally accepted as true.
| Just ask yourself which philosophies might disagree with
| that statement, there's quite a long list.
| smokel wrote:
| Evolution does not explain consciousness, but it does
| explain that the article we are discussing is rubbish.
| visarga wrote:
| 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 agents, which further pushes
| consciousness to become more sophisticated. Wait a few
| billion years, and here we are.
|
| Why was self replication necessary? To gradually sculpt
| the consciousness hardware and record what gains it
| makes, copying the code into the future. The mechanisms
| in consciousness are the result of many small changes
| over time, they can't appear suddenly in one single step.
| Without a copying mechanism (self replication of DNA in
| our case) it is impossible.
| smokel wrote:
| This might be an explanation of the _development of_
| consciousness, but it does little to explain what
| consciousness actually is.
|
| > In order to compete, they need to adapt, hence they
| develop consciousness.
|
| The "hence" here is not a necessary implication. Plants
| also compete and adapt, but they don't have
| consciousness. Also, they have not lost the competition
| with animals. As a whole, I suppose they have better
| chances of survival than animals.
| dsego wrote:
| I wonder why we're not just automatons, behaving the same on
| the outside, but without the conscious experience.
| jbeninger wrote:
| Wait, you have a conscious experience?
| layer8 wrote:
| 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.
| nimbleal wrote:
| I'm not sure this makes sense. Lots of phenomena -- including
| those possessed by biological organisms -- exist without
| there being any evolutionary imperative for their existence.
| For your argument to work, would you not have to demonstrate
| that consciousness is necessarily more like, say, animal fur
| than possessing mass or heat.
| asimovfan wrote:
| Can you give a few examples? I was of the impression that
| the idea was that there is an evolutionary explanation to
| everything, be it known or not. With biological organisms i
| mean.
| mannykannot wrote:
| > Lots of phenomena -- including those possessed by
| biological organisms -- exist without there being any
| evolutionary imperative for their existence.
|
| There are certainly many things, such as the specific
| patterning of a moth's camouflage, where a certain amount
| of chance is involved, and there are Gould's "spandrels" -
| features that exist, not for themselves, but because
| constraints on what is possible require them - but anything
| significant that makes no sense in terms of evolution would
| be a matter of the greatest significance in biology.
|
| But this is beside the point here, as there is no
| difficulty (except perhaps self-imposed ones) in seeing the
| utility of consciousness.
| kipchak wrote:
| I have trouble seeing the definite utility of
| consciousness in terms of evolutionary fitness.
|
| Assuming consciousness isn't somehow necessary for
| intelligence or associative learning and that it plays a
| somewhat subserviently role to unconscious mechanisms,
| consciousness seems potentially less efficient than
| unconscious mechanisms. For example when physically
| avoiding a collision while driving conscious thought is
| often too slow.
|
| Intuitively the role of consciousness as a supervisor of
| faster unconscious mechanisms seems to be to review the
| unconscious and perform some sort of steering or review
| of it. But I'm not sure it's obvious consciousness is
| effective at doing this.
|
| For example in ironic process theory trying to
| consciously will away a thought takes resources which
| increases the prevalence of that thought. "Try to pose
| for yourself this task: not to think of a polar bear, and
| you will see that the cursed thing will come to mind
| every minute."
|
| Some of the concerns for consciousness in a evolutionary
| model are better outlined here.
|
| https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/
| 10....
| mannykannot wrote:
| I will start with a quote from the article you link to:
| "But, in what ways do feelings and emotions improve
| fitness? An antelope escaping from a lion needs to run
| quickly and efficiently. Why, from an evolutionary point
| of view, does it also need to feel the terrible feeling
| of fear?"
|
| At that point in its life, consciousness might not be
| much of a help to it, but here's a similar question: when
| an antelope first sees a pride of lions in the distance,
| could it be of evolutionary advantage for it to feel
| anxious? From there, we can step to an even more
| pertinent question: if an early human or close hominin
| ancestor contemplated the possibility of a pride of lions
| moving into their neighborhood, could it have been
| advantageous for them to feel anxious?
|
| One response that does not seem far-fetched is that it
| might prompt the individual to think about how to defend
| against the threat. This would involve considering
| various scenarios and how they would play out. This is
| not just a matter of recalling past events, as these are
| hypothetical scenarios. Istead, it is a matter of
| synthesizing an imagined scenario from memories - but
| there is a phenomenal - 'what it is like' - aspect to
| memories, some combination of recalling the original
| phenomenal experience itself or the phenomenal experience
| of how one felt at the time. Any less direct association
| between what we experience in the world and how we think
| about it seems both unnecessarily complex and at risk of
| our imagination becoming completely detached from the
| world we live in.
|
| I can't prove that this is how it works, but in this
| view, it is quite plausible that phenomenal consciousness
| was a key prerequisite for the route by which we acquired
| our higher mental abilities (including explicit self-
| awareness and a theory of mind about other people), and
| is necessary now. You can claim that all these abilities
| are possible without phenomenal experience, but even if
| that were so, it does not follow that phenomenal
| consciousness is evolutionarily impotent, as evolution
| can only work by small increments, so we do not see, for
| example, macroscopic organisms with wheels. It is not
| clear that there is a path to this allegedly superior
| mind even if it is possible.
|
| Furthermore, if phenomenal consciousness is
| evolutionarily impotent and suboptimal, how did we get
| it, and why does it not atrophy (which is the fate of all
| other biological features once they are no longer
| advantageous)? Panpsychists want to summarily reject an
| incomplete hypothesis and substitute one that redefines
| the whole universe to make consciousness fundamental,
| while saying literally next to nothing about what that
| means, what consciousness is, and how it works.
|
| Thanks for the reference by the way; I keep a small
| collection of these sorts of thing.
| edgyquant wrote:
| You do not need consciousness to adapt to your environment.
| That's the result of simple decision trees.
| smokel wrote:
| Men don't need nipples either.
| PickledHotdog wrote:
| Speak for yourself
| bmitc wrote:
| > consciousness is a way to adapt to the environment to
| protect their lives, fulfill their needs and eventually
| reproduce
|
| That is a very specific and narrow definition, biased by
| animal consciousness on Earth. While I am not personally
| aware of a definition of consciousness, I think of it as
| awareness and potentially some ability to act on that
| awareness by any method.
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| > 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.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| What you're describing isn't consciousness, it's
| intelligence. Consciousness is how the universe decides to
| evolve one way as opposed to another.
| barfbagginus wrote:
| Consciousness is really just useful for guarding gradients of
| entropy. There's some serious gradients of entropy inside the
| Sun and we don't know what kind of self-influencing processes
| might appear.
|
| Let's imagine that there's some kind of competition between
| self-regulating magneto hydrodynamic processes inside the
| sun.
|
| Well, eventually an overarching consciousness arises,
| controlling all of the degrees of freedom that it can and
| evolving into a mind that can perceive the rest of the
| universe.
|
| The original survival context may have been persistently
| recurring structures in solar convection cells, but now the
| being is far beyond worrying about such little matters.
|
| It is free to probe the minds of other beings, and perhaps to
| perceive the rest of the universe. Perhaps it is curious and
| peaceful. Perhaps it is paranoid and violent, ready to fight
| against other star beings, ready to kill us if we ever try to
| do stellar level engineering.
|
| I bet it fears nothing and just exists, since it's so far
| outside of the survival context that it evolved for, and has
| no reason to care if it lives or dies.
| nkrisc wrote:
| Assuming the sun is conscious, why would that imply it has any
| awareness of us?
| layer8 wrote:
| The paper has some handwaving about EM fields. It would have
| been nice if they did the math.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Dark Souls was right, praise the sun!
| qiine wrote:
| And engage in jolly co-operation!
| echelon wrote:
| I love these wild flights of fancy.
|
| Just today I was thinking that perhaps ADHD is noise caused by
| the reverse time simulation of your brain iterating, trying to
| get the right details. All of the "normal people" are already
| reconstituted -- or, if I might boast -- low resolution details
| relative to the important matters of inquiry. Not that a
| simulation should feel self-important.
| JadeNB wrote:
| > 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?)
| haswell wrote:
| Speaking only about human consciousness here, there's a
| perspective that many people don't contemplate. Most of us
| feel like we're inside our heads. We're looking out at the
| world "out there", and our eyes are like windows to that
| outside world.
|
| But it seems that instead everything we see is rooted in
| consciousness. A projection based on the combined raw inputs
| of our sense organs all made into this continuous experience
| by our brains. So when other phenomena "out there" occurs,
| it's not just something we "see", but it's also something we
| are, e.g. a bird flying in the distance isn't just "out
| there", it's rendered fully by our own minds, alongside the
| other processes of our brains and within the same conscious
| space that contains all other aspects of experience, both
| internal and "external".
|
| I'm not saying I believe the sun is conscious, but for sake
| of argument, let's say it is. Whatever it means for the sun
| to be conscious, one could theoretically conclude that to
| whatever degree our thinking minds cause physically
| measurable phenomena, and to whatever extent that phenomena
| is "detectable" by or interacts with other conscious
| entities, some form of "communication" could occur.
|
| But since we don't know what consciousness is, and whether it
| is truly an emergent property or as some on the fringes
| believe, a more fundamental property of the universe, the
| term "consciousness field" seems mostly meaningless outside
| of our own first-hand subjective experience of being
| conscious of the world around us.
| electrosphere wrote:
| 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
| camillomiller wrote:
| Is it inside the (stunning) Barranco de Masca? I loved it
| namaria wrote:
| 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.
| woopsn wrote:
| 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
| nebben64 wrote:
| I discovered this phenomenon on my own - that you can deduce
| everything about a system from a single transitionary step.
| heresie-dabord wrote:
| > I'd say in a way my consciousness comes from the sun.
|
| Our star is the major, "central" (chuckle) factor in our
| Goldilocks existence, but Anthropomorphism is an
| anthropocentric game. [1]
|
| Cyanobacteria [2] , flowering plants and pollinators would also
| be part of our complex Goldilocks consciousness.
|
| Our awareness of this fragile existence should encourage us to
| be the best version of ourselves and enjoy every moment.
|
| [1] _ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle
|
| [2] _ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event
| namaria wrote:
| > Anthropomorphism
|
| I don't think the article or I have made any references to
| anthropomorphism.
| heresie-dabord wrote:
| 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."
| namaria wrote:
| 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.
| mo_42 wrote:
| Tl;dr We shouldn't care.
|
| Is my partner conscious? My dog? Actually, I don't know. I can
| say that I experience myself as conscious.
|
| In our daily interactions we never ask such questions. Last week,
| I hired a new programmer. We checked the CV and the code
| challenge. We invited the candidate to see how they get around
| with the team etc. At no point, we asked if they're conscious.
|
| I think our brains are machines for predicting what happens next.
| Therefore, a large brain makes sense because it can simulate the
| world more precisely and make better predictions. One mistake of
| this simulation is that the brain simulates us as a conscious
| agent who can make their own decisions and act in the world. In
| contrast, we are just machines who operate by the laws of quantum
| mechanics.
|
| Maybe evolution set up this illusion on purpose so that we don't
| get depressed and kill ourselves.
| datascienced wrote:
| The only career where you are concerned about if someone is
| conscious is boxing.
| inatreecrown2 wrote:
| maybe doctors and nurses are too, if they are concerned for
| the live of you?
| datascienced wrote:
| true. maybe stage hypnotists too
| keybored wrote:
| > I think our brains are machines for predicting what happens
| next.
|
| _Technologist thinks that humans are machines (breaking news)_
|
| > Therefore, a large brain makes sense because it can simulate
| the world more precisely and make better predictions.
|
| Whence consciousness?
|
| > One mistake of this simulation is that the brain simulates us
| as a conscious agent who can make their own decisions and act
| in the world.
|
| A mistake? Like a random mutation (consciousness) which just
| persisted because there was no evolutionary pressure to get rid
| of it?
|
| Or did it persist in everyone? Maybe half of humanity is
| conscious while the other half is not? They operate exactly the
| same except the conscious half wastes some kilojoules fretting
| over awareness.
|
| A machine doesn't need to simulate being aware of decision-
| making. That's cruft. Wasted cycles.
|
| Maybe you're reasoning backwards from the human-centric idea
| that "making decisions" requires awareness. But then you
| incoherently assert that humans are machines, and machines
| don't need consciousness to make decisions.
|
| > Maybe evolution set up this illusion on purpose so that we
| don't get depressed and kill ourselves.
|
| So (if I am understanding correctly), consciousness was a
| random mutation of a complex organism. Of course someone can be
| conscious and not feel like they have free will. Like they are
| just along for the ride. But this is "depressing" somehow.[1]
| So now a free will illusion mutation has to occur in order to
| protect the machine from self-killing.
|
| Seems convoluted.
|
| [1] But why? 80% of the HN philosophers seem fine with it.
| bmitc wrote:
| >> I think our brains are machines for predicting what
| happens next.
|
| > Technologist thinks that humans are machines (breaking
| news)
|
| While I also dismiss or at least be careful of the inherent
| biases of technocratic viewpoints, humans and life in general
| are very much made of many types of machines.
|
| Take a look at these videos:
|
| https://youtu.be/wJyUtbn0O5Y
|
| https://youtu.be/7Hk9jct2ozY
|
| I.e., life is insane and bewildering.
| keybored wrote:
| Well actually :nerd_face: technocracy is a completely
| different thing (the belief that the educated specialists
| should rule society)
| binary132 wrote:
| just what a philosophical zombie would say
| baxtr wrote:
| Intuitively, to me at least, it makes much more sense to assert
| that Earth is conscious. Humans are the neurons.
| cess11 wrote:
| Someone ought to trick analytic philosophers into taking some of
| the more popular psychoactive substances, so they finally
| discover how tightly coupled consciousness is to the matter in
| the nervous system and stop their embarrassing search for Holy
| Spirit.
|
| Also, the sun is clearly an anus: "The simplest image of organic
| life united with rotation is the tide. From the movement of the
| sea, uniform coitus of the earth with the moon, comes the
| polymorphous and organic coitus of the earth with the sun."
|
| https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/georges-bataille-the...
| taneq wrote:
| That's what put the final nail in my ability to accept
| Cartesian dualism. (Edit: The way psychoactives deeply affect
| the working of a mind, not the prospect of the sun being a
| butthole, of course.)
|
| Psychoactives don't just filter your senses, they change
| _reality_ (your own subjective reality, of course.)
| cess11 wrote:
| There's still a lot to figure out but we can
| phenomenologically and cognitively grasp the structures of
| consciousness by the use of drugs and modern science, which
| leaves very little room for the remnants of christian
| dualism, whether as 'the hard problem', 'panpsychism' or the
| trans-/consubstantiation of the eucharist.
|
| Maybe there is a demon in my head giving me the illusion of
| reality being perceived as a projection on the cerebral
| cortex, and it's reliable malleability under caffeine, MDMA,
| LSD, cannabis and so on. If so, I find this model of better
| utility than going with vibes and prayer and belief in
| eternity and so on that comes with the descendants of
| christian dualism in liberalism, 'panpsychism', analytic
| philosophy, &c.
|
| Edit: Kierkegaard wrote quite interesting texts about the
| structures of consciousness, I'd recommend The Sickness unto
| Death as a start. It has some of his best jokes.
| fylham wrote:
| You might be interested in this well-written paper on this
| subject: https://academic.oup.com/ijnp/article/24/8/615/627
| 5567?login...
| cess11 wrote:
| Thanks, a skim says it's a pretty good overview of where
| the lab folks are at. I'll read it more closely later.
|
| Science moves very slowly and very fast in this area,
| slowly with regards to psychoactives due to stuff like
| politicians, fast in neuroscience where new technology
| has allowed leaps for decades, since the eighties or so.
| taneq wrote:
| > Maybe there is a demon in my head giving me the illusion
| of reality
|
| Me too! And yeah and if it weren't for that guy I could be
| a perfectly adequate automaton instead of dealing with this
| 'consciousness' nonsense. :P
| knotthebest wrote:
| I'm not sure how this would solve the hard problem. Could
| you please elaborate on that?
| IshKebab wrote:
| Yeah I would think anyone that has got drunk or experienced
| post-wank clarity should realise that consciousness isn't a
| separate thing to the brain's physical processes.
|
| Still, consciousness definitely exists and is definitely weird.
| And I don't think it's futile to try and learn about it. It's
| just not going to be philosophers that give us any answers (as
| usual).
| cess11 wrote:
| 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).
| IshKebab wrote:
| > 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!
| cess11 wrote:
| Are you familiar with the writings of Paul Feyerabend?
| edgyquant wrote:
| You are making an uneducated assumption here. This is not a
| thought lost on philosophy or theology, for instance in
| Dharmic religions it is believed you are attached to a brain
| and your perception and thoughts arise from the brain: your
| eternal self is the awareness. Your thoughts, your "post nut
| clarity," does not require that awareness (or consciousness)
| to exist and if anything the two are at odds with one another
| more often than not.
| cess11 wrote:
| The "Dharmic religions" don't agree on "eternal self", but
| they do generally agree that the immediate impression that
| feeling in the hand is consciousness _in the hand_ rather
| than a brittle illusion produced in a particular part of
| the central nervous system that can project a perception of
| the body to conscious areas of the brain.
|
| This can easily be undermined, e.g. with strong psychedelic
| disassociatives such as salvinorins which can brutally
| alter this sense of self and bodily consciousness through
| very localised, very specific central receptor action.
| Another example could be the use of mirror images to treat
| phantom limbs in amputees.
|
| To some it might be frightening to realise one has never
| been outside a very small part of the brain and never
| directly experienced anything but projections sent there
| from a collection of slimy mammal parts that aren't
| conscious at all.
| edgyquant wrote:
| You are correct about the eternal self but it's easier to
| make my point without getting into the weeds.
| 8338550bff96 wrote:
| Thinking science and philosophy are entirely separate misses
| the big picture. Look at it this way: all the science fields
| we study today, like physics and biology, grew from
| philosophical questions. What we're doing when we dive into
| these subjects is exploring questions about the world, a task
| philosophy started.
|
| Take chemistry and astrology as examples. Why do we consider
| chemistry more valid? It's not because chemistry steps
| outside of physics' boundaries; it's that it gives us useful
| answers based on physics. Anything in chemistry that doesn't
| fit with physics we see as a mistake. But this doesn't mean
| chemistry doesn't have its place. It tackles parts of the
| world physics covers in broad strokes, just as physics uses
| math to detail its findings. Saying physics could exist
| without math, or implying a problem in physics could be
| solved outside of math, goes against the whole idea of what
| physics is.
|
| Saying 'philosophy is dead' ironically shows how successful
| philosophy has been. We don't need to constantly refer back
| to philosophy for everyday scientific questions because those
| frameworks are already well-established. Philosophy comes
| into play when we're faced with truly strange or new
| questions that challenge our current understanding.
|
| I swear that the administrative convenience of treating
| domains of science as distinct subjects rather than subsets
| and supersets and entirely separate from philosophy in K-12
| has caused confusion and dogmatic rigidity on a global scale.
| IshKebab wrote:
| > all the science fields we study today, like physics and
| biology, grew from philosophical questions
|
| No, they grew from experimental evidence. I'm not aware of
| any scientific knowledge that came from pure thought
| experiment without experimental validation. Pretty much the
| only thing you can use that for is maths.
|
| You can say "but lots of discoveries came from medieval
| philosophers", but that's just because they didn't have a
| separate word for scientists. I'm using the modern
| definition of the word, which really makes my argument
| almost tautologically true. By the modern definition if any
| philosopher actually provided and answer to a question then
| people would call it science.
| hackable_sand wrote:
| You might enjoy Three Books of Occult Philosophy and The
| Kybalion.
|
| To name a few, modern physics, chemistry, and psychology
| are rooted in alchemy and astrology.
|
| A major problem is that people accept the literal
| interpretations of those practices to either discount or
| credit them. Ironically, this stems from the self-
| imprisonment in material existence, the bonds of which
| occult studies seek to cut.
| cubefox wrote:
| > consciousness isn't a separate thing to the brain's
| physical processes.
|
| That's ironic, because this is the most popular theory of
| consciousness among analytic philosophers: physicalism. It
| says that consciousness is identical to some physical
| process.
|
| The problem with this theory is the knowledge argument. Mary
| grew up in a room without colors. Inside the room, she did
| learn everything about the brain. For example, she knows
| exactly what physical process is associated with the
| experience of "red". One day, she goes outside for the first
| time, and sees a rose. Does she learn something new?
| Something she didn't already know from knowing everything
| about the physical correlate of having experiences of red?
| xotesos wrote:
| I think it is even beyond this.
|
| Most of the time humans are talking about the wonders of
| polywater to each other.
|
| A giant game of telephone telling each other complete nonsense.
|
| "The soviets have found a new form of water that freezes at
| -40degF, pass it on!".
| edgyquant wrote:
| 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.
|
| Awareness != perception. A lot of people itt are mixing up
| consciousness, experience, with brain activity like trains of
| thought or external perception. Try meditating for a bit and
| you see that these are not what you are, you are not your
| thoughts.
| cess11 wrote:
| 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
| probably why one can experience a loss of coherence in
| perception of self and the immediate surroundings. At the
| very least it tells us that this molecule interacts with the
| biological foundation for experiencing the world as coherent,
| understandable, and when we're under its influence this
| experience is distorted or dissolved.
|
| This tears into the feelings foundational to big religions,
| the perception of the universe as created, ordered, having a
| telos, can easily be temporarily disrupted, and hence we know
| that this 'wisdom' is contingent on us ignoring the
| possibility that it is a product of evolution rather than a
| divine gift or insight gained through spiritual exercise. You
| could of course project magical thinking onto such molecules
| and consider them demonic or whatever, but good luck keeping
| that up under capitalism without being victimised by
| conspiracy theory grifters, marketing specialists and so on.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| 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.
| cess11 wrote:
| Christianity was founded as a monastic, ascetic,
| apocalyptic sect in antique judaism, and got the shape
| recognisable to most of us through roman imperial
| politics. If you think those jews or romans used
| psychedelics I'd like to know why.
|
| There might be traces of cannabis in the hebrew Bible but
| it's not a common theme and pretty much every word this
| idea is usually based on could be a reference to
| something else.
|
| There are religions using psychedelics, some of them
| probably quite old, but none of the big, popular ones do.
| In part this is explained by european (and similar)
| traditions surrounding government, which tends to be very
| suspicious of strong feelings and competition from drug
| use when it comes to the loyalty of their subjects, so
| for a religion to become a societal institution it has to
| get rid of the drugs if there are any.
|
| Edit: As for modern interpretations of e.g. LSD as a
| religious experience says more about cultural poverty and
| millenia of ideological subjugation than the experience
| itself.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| There is a strong case to be made that Jesus was
| basically a rip of Dionysus; ritual cannibal sacrifice
| (eat my body and drink my blood), son of zeus (son of
| god), born to a virgin when visited by an eagle (born to
| virgin mary when visited by a dove), resurrection in the
| spring (Easter), both turned water into wine, and
| Dionysus wore a crown of thorns.
|
| Dionysian festivals, although not proven (it's hard to
| find samples of ancient ritual wine), are strongly
| suspected to mixed something psychedelic (probably ergot)
| into wine as part of their ceremonies. Of course, that
| trance inducing wine was the blood of Dionysus. And how
| could it not be? You drink it and feel the essence of a
| god right after (the trip).
| cess11 wrote:
| 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.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| 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.
| cess11 wrote:
| 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?
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| 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.
| edgyquant wrote:
| Your pedantic preaching about language is irrelevant to
| anything I said, nothing of which was invented by me it's
| simply push back against uninformed things you said about
| others, thus I see no reason to engage with you any
| further.
| cess11 wrote:
| I quipped about etymology as an invite for you to make it
| clearer what difference you were refering to.
|
| If you find that so insensitive that you can't continue
| the conversation that's fine with me.
| grishka wrote:
| > so they finally discover how tightly coupled consciousness is
| to the matter in the nervous system and stop their embarrassing
| search for Holy Spirit
|
| How would that explain out-of-body/near-death experiences? They
| happen to people, it's a fact. Sometimes people gain new
| information during them that they couldn't have possibly
| hallucinated by themselves, like being able to repeat a
| conversation that took place in another room while they were
| clinically dead. Within the framework of the modern science,
| the experience itself can be explained by the dying brain
| hallucinating it; the obtaining of new information from
| physically inaccessible parts of the reality, however, can not.
|
| Then there's also the phenomenon of people suddenly waking up,
| or having dreams about it, when someone close gets into an
| accident while they sleep. This can not be explained by modern
| science at all. It happens too often, to too many people, to be
| a simple coincidence.
|
| Then there's the phenomenon of heart transplant recipients
| receiving the memories of, and sometimes the ability to
| communicate with, their donors. This can be explained by some
| memories being stored in the heart cells, or in its nervous
| tissues.
|
| Now, I'm not really into pseudoscience and conspiracy theories,
| but because of how unexplained and under-researched the subject
| of nature of consciousness is, I try to keep an open mind.
| Those field theories in particular sound appealing. They
| haven't been proven, but they haven't been disproven either.
| amatic wrote:
| I don't think it was ever proven in an experiment that an out
| of body experience or an NDE got some information from the
| real world, as opposed to information originating in the
| person's "brain". I don't know, but before there is
| confirmation in a controlled experiment, I just don't believe
| them. Much more likely is that their information is imagined
| and their certainty is a feeling they should not trust.
| addaon wrote:
| > Then there's also the phenomenon of people suddenly waking
| up, or having dreams about it, when someone close gets into
| an accident while they sleep. This can not be explained by
| modern science at all. It happens too often, to too many
| people, to be a simple coincidence.
|
| I'm curious how you would estimate the number of people it
| should happen to by simple coincidence. Is enough data about
| the rates of the major expected causes (false memory
| formation after the fact, selective memory of dreams
| conditioned by conditions of waking) to provide a reasonable
| baseline? I honestly have no intuition if I would expect this
| number to be 0% or 50%, since I have no self-measurements (by
| definition) of how often I have dreams that I forget, and
| what portion of those dreams can be interpreted to match an
| external event if remembered.
| plokiju wrote:
| you say gaining new information from out of body experiences
| are a fact. what's your evidence to back it up?
|
| I treat those kinds of stories the same way I'd treat an
| alien abduction or bigfoot story. humans are unreliable
| narrators. have there been any successful reproducible
| experiments on it?
| grishka wrote:
| No, there were no scientific experiments to prove it.
| However, in absence of concrete proofs of either theory,
| both are equally probable to be true. The theory that
| consciousness arises from brain activity alone is just an
| _assumption_ based on other research. It has never been
| properly proven or disproven either.
| amatic wrote:
| Well, it is not "brain activity alone", there are always
| light waves, forces, chemicals, and a lot of other
| things, acting on the brain from "outside" of the body,
| through some very strange receptor routs, but the
| "information" somehow travels. And we know 100% that for
| a lot of receptors, the firing rates depend on the
| intensity of the stimulus. So, we can see a direct
| correlation between, say, an applied force and golgi
| tendon organ firing. And at the same time, we discovered
| some types of radiation that we cannot see, and yet they
| can influence distant objects. I think that is pretty
| weird. So, we found a lot of direct correlations between
| brain activity and the outside world. Is there some need
| for an additional invisible field, not covered in current
| physics?
| nprateem wrote:
| I'm pretty open minded about this stuff, but I recall
| reading Robert Monroe (author of several books) tried to
| prove to himself his OBEs were real by having his wife
| place an object in a box downstairs without his knowledge
| and trying to find out what it was.
|
| IIRC he said he invariably got sidetracked between
| leaving his body and going downstairs, or would be
| attacked by entities of some kind. He suggested perhaps
| some kind of subconscious resistance to the experiment.
|
| He listed several times where he claimed to have gained
| knowledge without trying to while OBE but I wasn't
| entirely convinced by any of them, so who knows.
|
| The fact he claims to have had hundreds of OBEs and
| couldn't conclusively prove he could gain knowledge makes
| me sceptical that he wasn't just in a replica of reality
| generated by his mind. Anyway, they sound fun/scary/ real
| to the experiencer.
| cess11 wrote:
| I'm not aware of any firmly documented such cases of OOBE
| gained knowledge. Can you point me to five such cases?
|
| OOBE is a common side effect of dissociation. You can cause
| it through NMDA-antagonism, meditative practices and so on.
| If it was anything but a projection of perspective within the
| experiential system in the brain intelligence services and
| military would use it, and the lack of people in vegetative
| states around embassies tells us they don't.
| nabla9 wrote:
| Rupert Sheldrake is self deceiving pseudoscientist and
| parapsychology researcher. I don't call him fraud, because he
| deceives himself and seems to believe everything he does and
| writes.
| thatjoeoverthr wrote:
| Wow that's fun. Stirs the imagination. Suppose the Sun is
| "alive". It's entirely probably that it isn't aware of us.
| Suppose we found evidence of interstellar communications, and
| attempted to signal the the Sun --- and, like some startled
| scorpion, it reacts at once by hitting us with its hardest CME.
| hardlianotion wrote:
| Too many words chasing too few ideas.
| antihipocrat wrote:
| He offers a few testable hypotheses. The one suggesting that a
| conscious star would direct CMEs in order to remain in orbit
| around the galactic centre (or intercept another star) is
| intriguing and entirely falsifiable.
| dandanua wrote:
| Everything is conscious, according to panpsychism, even a rock.
| You start believing it once you realize that some people are
| actually stupider than a rock.
| exe34 wrote:
| Misread this as "Is the sun couscous?", but to be fair, it's
| probably just as reasonable a question to ask.
| Mikhail_K wrote:
| To save you a long read - there is not a slightest bit of
| evidence to suggest that Sun can possibly be conscious. The
| argument is essentially religious.
| whythre wrote:
| The amount of woo in this comment section is just plain baffling.
| 'How do you know the Sun isn't a self aware super genius? And
| maybe galaxies are people too!'
|
| Yeah, I mean, maybe. If that's what you want to believe, I can't
| stop you- but it all seems pretty silly to speculate about. Seems
| like there is more compelling evidence for consciousness in manta
| rays than in a big prolonged nuclear explosion.
| ncclporterror wrote:
| I believe Newton's flaming laser sword applies, so I would ask:
|
| "What set of observations do you consider would establish the
| truth of your claim?"
|
| From
| https://philosophynow.org/issues/46/Newtons_Flaming_Laser_Sw...
| >>> Newton made his philosophical method quite clear. If Newton
| made a statement, it was always going to be something which could
| be tested, either directly or by examining its logical
| consequences and testing them. If there was no way of deciding on
| the truth of a proposition except by interminable argument and
| then only to the satisfaction of the arguer, then he wasn't going
| to devote any time to it. In order to derive logical consequences
| that could be tested, it was necessary to frame his statements
| with a very high degree of clarity, preferably in algebra, and
| failing that Latin. Nowadays we drop the Latin option.
|
| In choosing to exclude all propositions which could be argued
| about but not decided by a combination of logic and observation,
| Newton changed, quite deliberately, the rules of the game. An
| argument about, for example, whether cats or rocks have rights,
| the same as people do, would not be entered into until some
| clarification has been obtained. <<<
| chimen wrote:
| Is a single cell conscious? What if the sun, planets or galaxies
| are just cells forming another being?
| theptip wrote:
| 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 possible that a physics-based explanation is
| forever out of our reach, and this remains armchair philosophy.
|
| An interesting experiment when we have AGI would be to evolve a
| new mind from sensory data, but carefully omitting any human
| dialog about subjective experience, and observe if such an
| intelligence also makes reference to those things. Not a knock-
| out experiment either way, but could be fun nonetheless.
| chaosbolt wrote:
| 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 that a system
| of humans working with one another and following rules could
| form an emergent system that is conscient? I don't think so,
| and I consider earth as a more advanced system of the sort,
| animals, nature, humans, internet, air, water etc. are all
| forming a conscient being, us being aware of it is as unlikely
| as a neuron being awarz of us... And if such a system could
| exist, then why wouldn't the Sun which is a bigger entity than
| earth (not that bigger is better here, because a 1cubic meter
| rock is bigger than a man but not visibly more conscious) be
| itself conscious, I doubt that because it seemingly lacks sub
| entities (say organs, and cells, etc.) but wtf do I know? if
| the earth is conscious then the solar system can only be more
| conscious no?
|
| I just wrote this to write it, I agree with what you said, and
| I believe it'll always be out of reach unless we study it on a
| smaller scale and just assume it works the same way on the
| bigger scale... mathematically I find it difficult to describe
| complex numbers in the real numbers set (without adding
| dimensions of course), since the real numbers set is a subset
| of the complex numbers set. I use the same argument for God,
| scientifically we can't know, but hey if believing in God makes
| your life easier then you can't say he doesn't exist, you
| really need complew numbers to make certain parts of physics
| easier to model, we wouldn't have impedance (RLC circuits,
| excuse my mistakes it's been ages since my physics classes, and
| it was in french) without complex numbers, sure we could use 2
| dimensions but it'd make it hardzr to understand, so God for me
| is like the imaginary number i (i*i = -1) or even pi so that
| sure who knows but using the concept can make understanding
| certain patterns of nature a lot easier than if you did it
| otherwise... anyways I'm a lot more forgiving to metaphysics
| now than I was when I was younger, maybe it's because we are
| sometimes biologically wired to view patterns where there are
| none, or maybe because we always seem to need an axiom since we
| live in a reality where each thing has a container and we just
| assume we need a container for our reality, etc. so now we stop
| at the big bang, and if we figure that out we'll explain until
| we can't, and when we explain everything we will still have the
| question of what's outside everything we can explain, etc. life
| is just too short lol
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| 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? They have more links, rules,
| states, and everything else that a single person would have.
| permo-w wrote:
| 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?
| lisper wrote:
| TL;DR: No.
|
| > In almost all other societies and civilizations, including
| medieval Europe, the sun and other heavenly bodies were thought
| to be alive and intelligent.
|
| It was also thought that the stars were fixed to a celestial
| sphere. Just because a lot of ancient civilizations adhered to an
| idea doesn't necessarily mean that idea has any merit.
| visarga wrote:
| 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.
| hoosieree wrote:
| High Frequency Theology
| vpribish wrote:
| sun-moon carry trade is an old theorbitrageur trick, nothing
| new here.
| kouru225 wrote:
| 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 way that
| just doesn't make any sense. Things exactly like "it takes 8
| minutes for the sun god to hear you." As the battle between the
| religious forces begins to get worse and worse, they realize
| the obvious conclusion: there used to be scientists that
| discovered all this before, but they all "died out." In fact,
| this cycle has happened many many times over
| iamthepieman wrote:
| A Canticle for Lebowitz has many of the themes you mentioned.
| kouru225 wrote:
| Huh seems kinda interesting
| swader999 wrote:
| Rookie move. My prayers with the sun are entangled.
| cauefcr wrote:
| Entanglement happens at the speed of light though.
| swader999 wrote:
| Thow of little faith. But yeah, relevant discussion:
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/chadorzel/2016/05/04/the-
| real-r...
| taskforcegemini wrote:
| that doesn't sound plausible?
| dexwiz wrote:
| Because the version of entanglement in general knowledge
| is a fantasy popularized by sci-fi.
| shaka-bear-tree wrote:
| Near-death experiencers almost always describe a bright light.
| The sun is a bright light. The math checks out. Sun is God.
| jakupovic wrote:
| 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.
| gorkish wrote:
| 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.
| zaphod420 wrote:
| what if praying uses spooky action at a distance and isn't
| bound by the speed of light?
| flqn wrote:
| 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
| rad_gruchalski wrote:
| He won't see for 8 minutes, he will never hear because the
| sound doesn't travel through vacuum. Even if it did, it would
| take nearly 14 years:
|
| > The speed of sound is 767 miles per hour, and that the
| distance to the Sun is 92,960,000 miles away. Divide
| 121,199.478 by 24 to get the number in days to the Sun. The
| answer is 5,049.98 Days to the Sun.
| winter-day wrote:
| I'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 :)
| visarga wrote:
| I am a strong believer that consciousness has a purpose. It is
| related to self-replication because consciousness necessitates
| evolution to come about, and evolution necessitates
| consciousness to keep the organism alive. They need each other.
| Evolution is the outer process, consciousness the inner
| process.
|
| Celestial bodies lack the reason & means. Not to mention the
| slowness of light at cosmic distance. Any consciousness would
| need to be within a small light cone to operate at normal
| speeds.
|
| https://mindmachina.wixsite.com/ai-blog/post/the-emergence-o...
| zaphod420 wrote:
| I am a strong believer that humans only experience a limited
| amount of the full experience that is available with
| consciousness. We have no idea what perceived sensations a
| start might have. Maybe stars operate on a quantum level that
| we don't understand yet.
| gamepsys wrote:
| I am extremely skeptical about all things regarding
| consciousness, and nothing stated in this thread has done
| anything to reduce my skepticism. We barely know anything
| about human consciousness, I feel we are under qualified to
| speak with conviction about anything else's level of
| consciousness.
| EMM_386 wrote:
| > I feel we are under qualified to speak with conviction
| about anything else's level of consciousness
|
| You don't need to feel that ... that's the truth!
|
| There is not a human being alive on the planet at the
| moment who can explain consciousness.
|
| Not even Chalmers.
|
| "David Chalmers - Is Consciousness Fundamental? - Closer
| To Truth"
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDHN6A8y6qY
| altruios wrote:
| Who says things need to operate on our timeframe?
| Simon_ORourke wrote:
| You missed out the bit about crystals, and how our vibrations
| influence our aura.
| Zambyte wrote:
| What is consciousness to you?
| proc0 wrote:
| 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.
| iwontberude wrote:
| tl;dr: "Obviously not"
| cat_plus_plus wrote:
| 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.
|
| Now, obviously experiences of being a star are totally different
| from experiences of being a human and one can not will
| them/itself into being the other. Things are happening to each
| according to laws of physics and self awareness is just along for
| the ride.
| fragsworth wrote:
| > 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?
| qwertyuiop_ wrote:
| So is the Cow and Monkey, thats why they are worshipped as Gods
| in certain parts of the world.
| ompogUe wrote:
| Remember talking to some "commune hippies" in the '80's, and part
| of their meta-physics was that the souls of the dead are
| reincarnated as sunshine.
|
| Always thought it was interesting, if anything.
| allemagne wrote:
| If there's really a "recent panpsychist turn in philosophy", then
| my first thought wouldn't be that philosophers spent a long time
| thinking about it so maybe the sun really is alive, it's that
| maybe the institution we call "philosophy" is slipping away from
| credibility.
|
| There's value in considering these kinds of things, but maybe
| only a little more than exploring the lore of a fantasy novel.
| Maybe elves really are related to dragons but it feels safe to
| assume the universe where that question is relevant is far away
| from us and I'm not invested at all in the speculation.
| bbor wrote:
| Luckily, "philosophy" is about as monolithic as "the tech
| industry". To briefly defend this discourse, even though I
| don't find it helpful: the point isn't that the sun is like a
| person, the point is that people are objects. AKA this essay is
| about ChatGPT's ability to have rights, ultimately.
| drojas wrote:
| I think panpsychism might be explained as an observation of
| prevalence of goal-oriented behavior [1]. In a nutshell, as M.
| Levine said (paraphrasing) "evolution doesn't create solutions
| but rather it creates problem solving machines", so it is natural
| (to me) that we can expect evolutionary systems that are old
| enough (biological lineages, and star systems) to accumulate
| behaviors that we now see as "goal-oriented" where the goal is
| perceived by us as a problem to be solved or a set of problems to
| be solved, in a particular way that is related and explained by
| the evolutionary trajectory of the system being studied but might
| not be "justified" outside of this particular historical frame.
|
| 1.
| https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fbioe.2021.7206...
| TriNetra wrote:
| This universe is an imagination of the cosmic mind behind which
| there is immutable conscious just like our dreams are imagination
| of our mind. Just like our dream, the universe is simulated
| inside the cosmic mind only.
|
| At the subtlest level, we're one with that cosmic consciousness.
| Realization is experiencing that oneness (aham brahmasmi).
|
| Just like in lucid dreams, we become aware that we're inside a
| dream and not a reality. upon awakening, one realizes the dream-
| like nature of this world. Then only, one becomes free from
| suffering which is caused by identification (attachment) to false
| (imagined) entities.
|
| Only with experience the realization dawns and the mind is freed
| from its ignorance; intellectual understanding can neither brings
| such experience nor can break the ignorance of the mind.
| jrflowers wrote:
| Of course it is. Why would all of those people online be doing
| perineum sunning if it weren't?
| lupire wrote:
| The book (now a major motion picture) Solaris, one of many
| excellent Stanislaw Lem books, explores this idea.
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