> The idea is very simply that combining abundant energy with something capable of holding structure in such an environment could in theory produce a persistent

> The idea is very simply that combining abundant energy with something capable of holding structure in such an environment could in theory produce a persistent store of information. A leap, sure, but a fun one. Hardly? We know that structures on the sun are capable of being (somewhat) persistent, and not only that, but even doing something vaguely resembling computation. Solar magnetic fieldlines are long-lived, producing visible sunspots that not only last for potentially several months, but show variations in frequency over a largely stable 11-year clock/cycle (during which the entire solar magnetic field flips/behaves as a binary oscillator). Magnetohydrodynamics is famously complex and capable of metastable configurations, and we don't know exactly what happens under the photosphere, but I don't think anybody could really argue that there isn't enough physical space and raw energy to swallow up every personal and animal on Earth. Really, for all we know, I think the sun itself might be alive/sentient. Or maybe it contains not physically embodied life, but isolated engrams and memes styled after Boltzmann brains, something analogous to crystal structures (which self-proliferate/grow) but with more complexity. The question is whether there's any way to decode/decrypt the information that definitely is there— complex heterogeneous distributions over time in field strength, temperatures, convection patterns, etc.— into any form that isn't just repetition plus random noise. I guess the issue is that you don't really know why you're conscious. If you had never seen a brain before, you would just think it was a useless blob of chaotically arranged fat. And even if you did know why you're conscious, you still wouldn't be able to say that that's the only way your specific form of consciousness can arise, nor that there aren't any other completely alien but equally conscious types of minds. Hell, homomorphic encryption means that it can be mathematically impossible to know whether any given complex system is just random noise, or contains someone's memories, experiences, desires, a soul. So given any system of adequate complexity, without knowing enough about it to put definite constraints on what it can do, I don't see how you could say for sure that it isn't "alive"/sentient. When I hit my early teens, the example I thought of was n-body gravitational perturbations in something like the asteroid belt, and something like crystal grain structures in regular solid matter. …Sucks for the lack of opposable thumbs, I guess, if it is alive. The information which may or may not be encoded in the sun may have unknown complexity and meaning, but I feel much more confident in saying that the amount of precision carried out by the solar wind and solar radiation will never allow it to shape and navigate the world around it like we can ours.