Is the Sun Conscious? (2021) [pdf]
sheldrake.org
sheldrake.org
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.
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
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.
I don't think the article or I have made any references to anthropomorphism.
In the article: "Therefore anyone who supposes that the sun is conscious is making a childish error, projecting anthropomorphic illusions onto inanimate nature."
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.
Unfortunately, even the show won't be finishing the show. Every episode kept adding more "mysteries" and ending on increasingly ridiculous cliffhangers until it got cancelled without explaining anything.
It definitely had promise, but I'm disappointed in Ridley Scott for not putting together a coherent, self-contained narrative, and I'm a fan of all his previous works. I guess he (wrongly) gambled that if he left enough unanswered, they wouldn't dare cancel it.
While also getting more and more slow and labored. That's why I stopped, yeah. But I'm also a completionist.
> 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.
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!
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
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Cone_of_Ezelsdorf-Buc...
Obey my divine LLM!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Who knows, probably more philosophical, but I think the lines can get blurry.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Consciousness regularly/usually claims to have omniscient knowledge of all that is, something which is not supported by physics.
Either consciousness is incorrect, or physics is, and I don't think I've ever met a physicist who believes they're incorrect on their omniscient knowledge. Seems like wherever you look in reality there are paradoxes like this that spring up, which makes me wonder what reality is.
My initial reaction to this was "not in my experience", but on reflection, I really have no idea what you are saying here. Conscious entities may have opinions, but consciousness itself, at least as it is usually conceived of, does not.
What are "you" saying here, and how do you know this to be true?
A simple search should be sufficient to establish that the most common usage of 'consciousness' is as being an aspect of perception - and more specifically, the subjective aspect of it.
Furthermore, I am at a loss to figure out how this claim could have any relevance to the sentence of mine that you quoted in your first reply to me.
And if I do not, can you still be interested?
> in my studies of what's written and said about it, I have never come across this view before.
Consider what exists now, compared to what existed at the Big Bang. Then do today vs tomorrow, also taking into consideration whether inactivity or non-exploitation of the realm of possibility plays a role.
> A simple search should be sufficient to establish that the most common usage of 'consciousness' is as being an aspect of perception - and more specifically, the subjective aspect of it.
Consider what common perception (which manifests at runtime as Truth) was of African Americans, or gay people, 30 or so years ago.
> Furthermore, I am at a loss to figure out how this claim could have any relevance to the sentence of mine that you quoted in your first reply to me.
"...but consciousness itself, at least as it is usually conceived of, does not."
It isn't possible for you to know how consciousness is commonly conceived, but your consciousness would have you believe otherwise. Consciousness is shaped by culture, and your culture has taught you to think this way, it is the proper way to think here in 2024.
Maybe an analogy would help:
Consider the aggregate (adjusted to remove affects of population size) quality & power of human cognitive capability before and after the enlightenment, comprehensively, but also with respect to a certain phenomenon: faith based thinking. Then, consider where we may currently sit on an absolute scale, and what the distribution of faith based thinking is (actually, opposed to virtually) throughout the system. How likely does it seem that humans have produced the perfect methodology, even without considering the state of affairs we see all around us?
Basically, I'm kind of asking (teasing may be a better word) that physicists, and science in general, to expand their theories to include explanations for their implicit claims of omniscience, or stop engaging in it, or at least stop taking cheap shots at and claiming (without proof or even substantial evidence) comprehensive objective superiority to other competing frameworks/methodologies/etc.
I could be, but not by this rather idiosyncratic diatribe against intellectual arrogance, a domain which is in any case far from being exclusively populated by physicists.
Could you (are you willing to, and will in fact do it) describe at least one set of conditions where you could be?
> ...but not by this rather idiosyncratic diatribe against intellectual arrogance
Can you explain why you believe this is necessarily (presumably) the case?
Meta:
- Is there a way or tone I could write in such that I could achieve the same level of logical rigour, but somehow bypass the natural, fundamental aversion to this sort of dialogue?
- Do you believe it to be optimal that you can criticize/insult my performance, but my criticism/inquiry into particular details of of yours is ~non-valid/inappropriate/etc (I am assuming something like this is the case, please correct me if I am wrong)?
The current Western approach to science is strictly that subjective measure is fully informative of objective reality, and (equally if not more importantly) that perception is a mechanism operating within objective reality, an object within reality, and that object is subject to natural laws.
The other possibility -- there is really no way to refute or prove either definitively as in all of these dual ontological choices -- is that consciousness is peering into a construct of a universal conscious intellect (something like logos or tao) and the nature of conscious intellect is entirely unlike the nature of the construct, which is an image. This flavor of paradigm offers the possibility for "consciousness" (aka God) to claim omniscient powers, including time dilation (alpha omega) and other matter.
What helps these models to persist are entirely distinct. The former maps well to shared experiences (modulo group psi phenomena) and is reassuringly direct and simple. The latter persists since it maps well to non-rational content of our minds which the former simply must dismiss as garbage collection or (LLM like) ramblings, void of meaning.
Physics can't be incorrect but it can be misinterpreted. Last century witnessed a wonderful case in point where Quantum physics provided analytical tools to "perfectly predict" outcomes of experiments but until eventually settled allowed physicists to have preferences (read: belief systems) regarding which interpretation of the quantum phenomena (Einstein or Bohr) was correct.
That Bohr's interpretation proved to be the correct interpretation has bearing on this discussion in more than one sense.
> The current Western approach to science is strictly that subjective measure is fully informative of objective reality, and (equally if not more importantly) that perception is a mechanism operating within objective reality, an object within reality, and that object is subject to natural laws.
Sometimes, sure. But science/scientists also has knowledge of Indirect Realism, but only sometimes:
- when discussing Indirect Realism from an abstract perspective
- when criticizing the object level quality of ideas other than their own (when it is their ideas the underlying service seems to become disabled, and often even access to memory is blocked)
> The other possibility...
Classic western scientific (as it is manifest at the object level) thinking: framing things as false dichotomies.
>... there is really no way to refute or prove either definitively
Disagree.
Take your perfectly reasonable (by current standards of proper thinking, [highlighting] problematic portions for emphasis): "subjective [measure] [is] [fully] [informative] of [objective] [reality], and ([equally] if not more importantly) that [perception] [is] a mechanism [operating within] [objective] [reality], an [object] [within] [reality], and that object [is] [subject to] [natural] [laws]."
This whole phenomenon takes place within reality, this "is" "true", but the content of reality (comprehensive reality at a given snapshot in time) is also the consequence of it. So while it "is true" that these mechanisms operate within "objective reality", they also produce objective reality (much of which is simultaneously subjective, objectively).
Also: while convenient techniques like "and that object is subject to natural laws" can be useful, they can also be harmful, like when one forgets that "natural laws" (and various other things within the problem space) is virtualized/hallucinated, but appears to not be (there's an easy way to tell: pick someone out of a forum and ask them questions: you will almost always find that they genuinely believe that what seems to be true to them is true; and, they'll often even link to a proof: a claim that it is true, that has no accompanying proof).
> as in all of these dual ontological choices -- is that consciousness is peering into a construct of a universal conscious intellect (something like logos or tao) and the nature of conscious intellect is entirely unlike the nature of the construct, which is an image. This flavor of paradigm offers the possibility for "consciousness" (aka God) to claim omniscient powers, including time dilation (alpha omega) and other matter.
I can see the possibility from an abstract theory perspective, but I cannot see how a complete object level implementation would be possible, even removing science's silly restrictive object level (science as it manifests) restrictions like an absence of evidence is proof of absence. (Are Godel's Incompleteness Theorems relevant here maybe?)
> What helps these models to persist are entirely distinct. The former maps well to shared experiences (modulo group psi phenomena) and is reassuringly direct and simple. The latter persists since it maps well to non-rational content of our minds which the former simply must dismiss as garbage collection or (LLM like) ramblings, void of meaning.
I think training of LLM's is much better analogy, and I also believe that that may be literally the comprehensively correct answer. If you simply pay close attention to how humans (both dumb and the very smartest) talk, if you take them at their literal word, I can't see much flaw: human belief of what is true is a function of what they were trained to believe is true. (Self-referential irony noted....indeed, I think it is possible to think oneself out of the illusion, at least to some degree, sometimes.)
> Physics can't be incorrect but it can be misinterpreted.
This is a perfect example - scientific scripture and even object level scientific work disagrees with this...and yet, one can commonly find highly qualified scientists who make such claims with sincerity and seriousness, if not downright concern for the well being of others who are not able to think in their incorrect yet correct way of thinking. Usually, science would notice anomalies like this and wonder what is the underlying cause...but it seems like there are certain ideas/domains/realms that they have a strong aversion to studying.
I'll even give an example: Whorfism or Linguistic Relativity - this topic is practically guaranteed to trigger predictable cognitive error in a human mind, and the more educated the mind is the larger the effect (more powerful base cognition can produce error of a larger magnitude).
> That Bohr's interpretation proved to be the correct interpretation has bearing on this discussion in more than one sense.
Science also uses very important and very complex words like "correct" colloquially when it serves their purpose, which is contrary to their scriptures, which they regularly use as a proof of the comprehensive superiority of their ideology.
You sound overly confident with your statement about a topic that has eluded thinkers for millennia and (probably) millennia to come
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.
Lao Tzu
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.
> 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.
This isn't how evolution works. Evolution is not purposeful: adaptions don't occur because adaptions are necessary for the survival of a population group's descendents. If a population doesn't change quickly enough to remain well-suited to its environment, it just dies off: extinction.
You seem to like AI, so: evolution is basically a stochastic hill-climbing algorithm. You're describing something closer to intelligent design than evolution.
Made my day
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.
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....
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?)
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.
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.
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
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.
The set that is me and my friend behaves differently than me or my friend alone, we go to different places, act differently, think better at two by talking to each other, etc. I don't know how conscious a 2 men system is but it sure has all the characteristics of a conscious being, by myself I wouldn't usually go to a bar and drink, I wouldn't get the ideas I don't usually get, etc. together we can go grab a drink, I'd say something I believe and he'd argue against it and maybe we reach a conclusion that was outside my reach, etc. But still getting a glimpse at this conscious 2-men system is still as impossible as a neuron getting a glimpse at me.
>Presumably consciousness arises from more than the amount of "stuff" in the system.
Yeah maybe the complexity, like two rocks still behave differently than a single rock if they touch each other but it's still quite simple, maybe the eastern philosophy (maybe Japanese but not sure I forgot its name) that everything has a consciousness isn't wrong.
>Is the earth really more complex than a human mind, in the ways that matter?
The earth as in the planet? like mars or venus? or the earth with its plants and humans and animals? if the latter then obviously being a superset it's more complex, if the rocky planet then I don't know, it sure has lots of subsets that interact with one another (moon, sea, rocks, rivers, etc.) and they're all subject to physical rules like gravity etc. whether its behavior is predictable or not in a way you'd think it's conscious is not evident, is out behavior really unpredictable? we are subject to survival and reproduction aka pleasure and pain, and even altruistic or "higher" acts usually either profit the community which is similar DNA aka reproduction (if I can't replicate then my sacrifice will allow those with similar dna to do it so I do replicate undirectly), maybe for a higher species we do act exactly like the rocky planet in the way that we just react to x or y with u or v, meh who knows...
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...
Psychoactives don't just filter your senses, they change reality (your own subjective reality, of course.)
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.
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.
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
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).
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).
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> In other words, if physicalism is true, then Mary’s complete knowledge of all the physical facts will include knowledge of what it is like to experience color. When she does have the actual experience for the first time, there should be no surprises. If there are, then she didn’t really have all the physical facts.
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 –40°F, pass it on!".
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.
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.
Having magical religious experiences on LSD is practically a meme, so I am not sure what would lead you to suggest otherwise.
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.
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).
It is fairly firmly established that roman mystery religion shaped some of early christianity, in particular the Mithras mysteries.
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?
If you find that so insensitive that you can't continue the conversation that's fine with me.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
But it could also be, it has consciousness, but simply would not care much about and ignore us.
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.
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 ..
It’s the problem of qualia [1]. They can’t really be defined, only pointed at. My experience of seeing the colour red is non-universalizable. Thus the word red can only point at it, it can’t describe or define it.
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.
(I don't think it's impossible that computers are conscious, but I cannot even proof that humans other than me possess a consciousness)
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.
You want arguments supporting that humans dislike seeing animals suffer? To most people that would be obvious, I'm not sure what to say.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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> :-)
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.
But how did you define the rock? Are you saying every set of particles is self aware of being that set of particles?
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.
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...
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"
"In our world," said Eustace, "a star is a huge ball of flaming gas."
"Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is, only what it is made of. And in this world you have already met a star, for I think you have been with Coriakin." [said Ramandu]
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?
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcranial_magnetic_stimul...
1. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fbioe.2021.7206...
Now “is the universe conscious” is a real question.
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.
I went there twice to find it, looking for something on a vertical rock. I found out later that it's actually carved into some rock on the ground.
"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. <<<
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
Do you think they touch on something potentially not 'woo', as others say.
If you want something similar but non-woo read about bacterial chemotaxis.
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...
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.
"I can see flaws in the linked article, in regards to self-organization and emergence"
Can you share what you perceive as flaws?
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'.
... and so it makes sense for dogs to have ESP?
Exactly! I think he is just lining his pockets on this stuff as all the many other pseudoscience and snake oil salesman before him.
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.
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.
Also the extra books helped me understand the whole, which I would have missed if I had only read one, so that makes the otherwise wasted money worth it.
Their flaw was that the guy who wrote them was an honest-to-god cult leader, who didn't mean the books as fantasy tales but as recruiting tools for his New Age cult. Ultimately, he indirectly caused the death of at least one of his closest followers, and possibly three more [1].
The first book was also basically an instance of academic fraud: "The teachings of Don Juan" was first published as a work of real anthropological research into the mystical practices of Yaqui Indians, but it had nothing to do with them and in any case it was not the result of field work as it was presented. In later books Castaneda clearly tries to retcon this by pointing out that Don Juan's tradition is unique and separate from Yaqui shamanic beliefs. One of his followers, Florinda Donner, also published a made-up anthropology book [2], btw.
After finding all this out it would be really hard for me to read the books today and enjoy them.
Maybe that's overreacting. I've been way more relaxed about the lives of other authors I read; like Lovecraft, for example. I was once called a fascist because I said that Starship Troopers is one of my favourite Sci Fi books. I ignored Heinlein's politics and I only read it as fiction and I still think it's clearly just fiction. The guy who called me a fascist, btw, is a Warhammer 40K player with a Grey Wolves army. Hmph.
___________
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taisha_Abelar#Disappearance
[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.
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
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.
Life can be defined as simply as a self-sustaining, localized, organized structure that uses energy and information to reverse the natural flow of increasing in the environment. The sun has ample supply of energy and information bandwidth (physical phase space) so I personally would not be at all surprised if plasma life forms have evolved in it.
Perhaps this is where certain UFOs come from, our own Sun...
See for example 2001 Space Odyssey for a similar take.
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.
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/
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
Edit: remember, we don't live in "The Clockwork Rocket", our GR uses the Lorentzian manifold, not a Riemannian manifold.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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."?
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.
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.
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.
I think that it is almost impossible to determine randomness in an ongoing process.
The idea of knowledge being something to protect is interesting, but I don't see a practical way of accomplishing it.
Having said that, I don't really believe in one moral value to rule them all, I just think knowledge is a big one and useful for cutting through gordian knots.
It tends to return to feelings a lot anyway, since upsetting people isn't good for the growth of knowledge.
But is knowledge such a big one? I suppose that the vast majority of the world population is not really helping to push the boundaries of knowledge forward. Unless you see gossip about celebrities as valuable knowledge as well.
We don't harm humans because we are human, and value our kind. That's about it.
There is also a fairly rigorous bunch of work coming from David Deutsch and Chiara Marletto (his apparent intellectual heir, and seeming more than equal to carrying forward the legacy of thought) about how to talk about the “open ended generation of explanations with sufficient and increasing explanatory power” as more than hand-waiving.
They’re serious people doing serious work.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
I think we can all agree that rocks don’t have subjective aesthesia
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Do you not think that you are conscious? Don't you have subjective experience?
However, what makes some concepts mundane and others profound? Is that up to an individual to decide, based on, for example, taste? Or is there some objective notion?
First off we know the concept lies on a gradient. At the left end we have a rock. Clearly not conscious. At the right end we have a human. Clearly the human is conscious.
You can imagine what are things that categorically exist on that gradient and in between the two extremes mentioned above. You have fish as more "conscious" then rocks and dogs or dolphins as more "conscious" then fish.
The word consciousness puts a hard line on that gradient. Somewhere on that gradient is the line and on the right side of the line you are conscious and on the left side of the line you are not conscious. Debating about consciousness is simply debating the location of that line.
Is it more leaning towards the rock? Is it in the center of the gradient? Is it closer to the human? Who cares? As you move up and down the gradient you get things with more traits associated with being conscious and things with less traits associated with being conscious. A debate about that vocabulary word is simply picking the group of traits that demarcates a transition. Such a demarcation is a completely arbitrary choice. Not profound at all.
In the end you are simply grouping traits together and assigning it as a definition to a word. So a fish is conscious because it moves, and it swims, it feels pain, and it can think, but a rock is not conscious because it lacks those traits. The grouping is arbitrary and thus the concept is arbitrary and arises from the word.
> Consciousness is the constellation of your past experiences transforming reality into your next experience.
Always thought it was interesting, if anything.
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-truth-by-stanislaw-le...
Is a great read, Star based plasma intelligence and the travel to the heat death of the universe.
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.
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.
(Apologies for the Socratic barrage, but this line of inquiry triggered my inner first-year philosophy student.)
because your intellect would grasp the immense heaviness to realize you're mortal, that your ego will end.
> 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
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-...
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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:
I.e., life is insane and bewildering.
As would the possibility that cheese sandwiches are our creators.
No study of the sun ever produced a clue that it was conscious. There is no explanatory power regarding the sun, or us, that comes from assuming the sun is conscious.
That isn't science. Or even rational.
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If consciousness means anything, surely it means self-awareness, encompassing a level of self-awareness of one's own self-awareness.
Self-awareness requires a few things. An ability to sense oneself and one's context, some memory of that sensory information, an ability to develop understanding and application of that information with a learned model of oneself, second level sensory access to some of those internal activities creating self-awareness, and a richness of modeling and self-awareness to allow for clear recognition, consideration, and exploration of the state of being self-aware of one's own self-awareness.
So consciousness at a minimum, is a gradation based on the product of those features.
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Explanations of consciousness as resulting from some level of particles consciousness would be the materialistic constructive explanation.
In contrast, consciousness based on the attributes above is an information organization and flow explanation. Which in the end can be divorced from any particular material substrate.
Self-awareness of self-awareness requires a rich second or third order loop in information flow, reflectively about that information flow and the system doing the information flow.
Just as a recursive function can't be explained by the non-recursive functions that it is composed of. Only by the entire loop organization.
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Also, there needs to be a plausible mechanism of creation or development.
In our case, we see the path evolution took over aeons to develop the components of consciousness listed above. The result are brains whose activity enhances the gathering of energy and resources required to allow those brains time to grow, and the energy budget to operate.
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The only part of consciousness that is "mysterious" is the qualia aspect. The strange and seeming inexplicable experience of being conscious. But that is largely mysterious for the same reason as other mysteries. We are missing information. We can't yet access most of our brains activities, just some of them.
So our consciousness seems to float above other things we sense. There is a self-modeling/awareness gap there.
Which we are closing over time with science and technology.
Being which can access their own behavior at all levels will be more conscious
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!