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This doesn't make sense. In the case of humans and animals, consciousness is a way to adapt to the environment to protect their lives, fulfill their needs and e

• pxndx 3y ago
  It's protecting us from advanced alien invasions, and doing a great job. Have you seen any recently?
  • exe34 3y ago
    We should throw a virgin into a volcano just to make sure though.
• lukan 3y ago
  "Consciousness is useful for life. But in the case of the sun, what is it adapting to, and what does it have to protect? Nothing" You don't know that. Maybe it is us, or other life in general it wants to sustain and protect. We know very little about consciousness or how life in general came to being. Maybe it is connected to other suns and the black hole in the center of the milky way, to exchange ideas, philosophy, or just exitement about being alive. Or preparing something we know nothing about. A meeting of galaxies. Now I surely don't claim I know what consciousness is and I certainly do not claim the sun is. I am just hesistant to make absolute judgements about systems, where I can only catch a glimpse from the outside.
  • layer8 3y ago
    "Want" is not a concept of evolution. Evolution is not a teleological mechanism. You'd have to argue how mutation and selection pressure works for stars, and how their traits would be passed from one star generation to the next, so that they would develop a consciousness with "wants". Given that the sun is a third the age of the universe, it seems unlikely that the sun is the evolutionary result of an ancestry of stars of any relevant length.
    • lukan 3y ago
      I am not sure, if our concept of evolution can be applied to the stars, assuming they have consciousness. Asking why they evolved consciousness, would be the same to me as asking why the big bang happened and what was before that. No idea, this is way beyond my understanding. But I doubt there is any human who has these insights. So to clarify, I do not claim anything here, I just state how little we know about the grand picture and the rest is speculation, which I am aware is entering theological realms.
      • haswell 3y ago
        > which I am aware is entering theological realms Theological realms are where people tend to go when they feel they must have an explanation to something unexplainable. I think it’s important to preserve a non-theological space that allows one to acknowledge how little we know without defaulting to a theological position, and to highlight that acknowledging these unknowns does not make one a believer in deities. Not saying this is what you’re doing by the way, but it’s a kind of binary choice that many people seem to force on the situation.
        • lukan 3y ago
          Not every religion works with the concept of absolute truth and dogma (see Mysticism, Taoism, various pagan ones, ..) and I was speculating above, whether the sun cares about and supports us. That is probably in the theological realm by common understanding. Or maybe more philosophical? Who knows, probably more philosophical, but I think the lines can get blurry.
• kseistrup 3y ago
  The lifetime of the Sun is so much larger than that of a human being, that the latter would be unable to fathom the life of the Sun. At least this human doesn't. If a human cell, say, had intelligence comparable to that of a human, would such a cell be able to fathom the life of its “host”? Hardly. According to Earth science, the Andromeda Galaxy is scheduled to collide with the Milky Way in around 4.5 billion years. What if all they're really doing is dancing, or about to kiss?
  • simonh 3y ago
    What if there are invisible fairies dancing on the heads of every pin? I’m not against speculation, it’s an essential part of the process of intellectual investigation, but the extent to which it is worth taking seriously needs to be associated with the chances of it having any consequences or chance of meaningful verification. Imagining galaxies kissing seems utterly rooted in the biases of human experience (even other animals very close to us in evolutionary terms don’t kiss), and completely dissociated from anything we know about galaxy formation and dynamics.
    • keybored 3y ago
      The difference is that you’re not pustulating teapots on moons. You’re looking at real phenomena or projected ones (galaxies colliding) and asking how it can make sense within panpsychism.
      • simonh 3y ago
        One of my issues with panpsychism is the question of causation. The behaviours of particles can be entirely explained in terms of physical dynamics, there is no behaviour left that needs explanation. If they do have experience, it doesn’t seem to be causal in that it doesn’t seem to have any consequences. We’re not quite there yet with galaxies, but there doesn’t seem to be any problem with doing explaining their motion and gravitational dynamics in principle. This means any experience these phenomena might have would be purely epiphenomenal, and therefore lacking in consequences, or explanatory power, and be unprovable. It would be pure speculation, maybe so, maybe not, maybe something else, just an exercise in imagination. Thats not a reliable route to knowledge. With humans we have social, emotional and intellectual behaviour predicated on the existence of personal experience. We talk and write about having interior experiences. That is a causal phenomenon in the world that needs to be explained, aside from our personal first person experience of it.
• vik0 3y ago
  >In the case of humans and animals, consciousness is a way to adapt to the environment to protect their lives, fulfill their needs and eventually reproduce. Consciousness is useful for life. But in the case of the sun, what is it adapting to, and what does it have to protect? Nothing. You sound overly confident with your statement about a topic that has eluded thinkers for millennia and (probably) millennia to come
  • Retric 3y ago
    No reason to use the derogatory euphemism "thinkers." How about people chasing a dead end to nowhere.
    • edgyquant 3y ago
      How about: your views on the world aren’t objective and all of those thinkers have way more credibility than you
      • Retric 3y ago
        What credibility? As you yourself pointed out they accomplished nothing. Some are quite famous, but that’s irrelevant in the face of thousands of years of utter failure to be more than pure entertainment. Try and find any philosophical statement from all that navel gazing which both means something and is generally accepted as true.
        • hackable_sand 3y ago
          "The reason why heaven and earth are able to endure and continue thus long is because they do not live of, or for, themselves." Lao Tzu
          • Retric 3y ago
            Reasonable attempt, but not generally accepted as true. Just ask yourself which philosophies might disagree with that statement, there's quite a long list.
• dsego 3y ago
  I wonder why we’re not just automatons, behaving the same on the outside, but without the conscious experience.
  • jbeninger 3y ago
    Wait, you have a conscious experience?
    • kaashif 3y ago
      I'm with you. Not sure what they're taking about, I'm not conscious and I've never seen any evidence others are conscious.
  • layer8 3y ago
    How would you possibly behave the same without inner experience? There is a direct causal connection between inner experience and how one behaves. Your talking about inner experience just being one particularly obvious example.
    • dsego 3y ago
      Not the same, but I can imagine a complex behavior patterns evolving, but without the living thing experiencing the same inner sensations. For example, psychopaths navigate the world and exhibit behaviors similar to typical people, but don't experience empathy or anxiety maybe. There are people who don't experience the same colors, or don't have an internal monologue. So maybe we can chip away at all other human experiences until behaviors are there, but void of any significant inner awareness, maybe just an internal model of the world, but without the qualitative sensation. Sort of like AI, a system of levers and pulleys that produces results, but isn't aware of it, like instincts on steroids.
    • grumpopotamus 3y ago
      You could in theory behave in exactly the same way without inner subjective experience. The argument goes like your brain gets exactly the same signals and processes them in exactly the same way, and initiates exactly the same actions, except you are not experiencing anything. Imagine a robot that gets sensory inputs from the world and processes them in some giant neural network brain and behaves very similarly to a human, and even claims that it is feeling things. Is it really feeling anything? So far we have absolutely no way of answering that question.
• nimbleal 3y ago
  I’m not sure this makes sense. Lots of phenomena — including those possessed by biological organisms — exist without there being any evolutionary imperative for their existence. For your argument to work, would you not have to demonstrate that consciousness is necessarily more like, say, animal fur than possessing mass or heat.
  • asimovfan 3y ago
    Can you give a few examples? I was of the impression that the idea was that there is an evolutionary explanation to everything, be it known or not. With biological organisms i mean.
  • mannykannot 3y ago
    > Lots of phenomena — including those possessed by biological organisms — exist without there being any evolutionary imperative for their existence. There are certainly many things, such as the specific patterning of a moth's camouflage, where a certain amount of chance is involved, and there are Gould's "spandrels" - features that exist, not for themselves, but because constraints on what is possible require them - but anything significant that makes no sense in terms of evolution would be a matter of the greatest significance in biology. But this is beside the point here, as there is no difficulty (except perhaps self-imposed ones) in seeing the utility of consciousness.
    • kipchak 3y ago
      I have trouble seeing the definite utility of consciousness in terms of evolutionary fitness. Assuming consciousness isn't somehow necessary for intelligence or associative learning and that it plays a somewhat subserviently role to unconscious mechanisms, consciousness seems potentially less efficient than unconscious mechanisms. For example when physically avoiding a collision while driving conscious thought is often too slow. Intuitively the role of consciousness as a supervisor of faster unconscious mechanisms seems to be to review the unconscious and perform some sort of steering or review of it. But I'm not sure it's obvious consciousness is effective at doing this. For example in ironic process theory trying to consciously will away a thought takes resources which increases the prevalence of that thought. "Try to pose for yourself this task: not to think of a polar bear, and you will see that the cursed thing will come to mind every minute." Some of the concerns for consciousness in a evolutionary model are better outlined here. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01537/full https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10....
• edgyquant 3y ago
  You do not need consciousness to adapt to your environment. That’s the result of simple decision trees.
  • smokel 3y ago
    Men don't need nipples either.
    • PickledHotdog 3y ago
      Speak for yourself
• bmitc 3y ago
  > consciousness is a way to adapt to the environment to protect their lives, fulfill their needs and eventually reproduce That is a very specific and narrow definition, biased by animal consciousness on Earth. While I am not personally aware of a definition of consciousness, I think of it as awareness and potentially some ability to act on that awareness by any method.
• Enginerrrd 3y ago
  > In the case of the sun, it is too far away and interacts very little with other celestial bodies, there can be no evolution for suns, they don't iterate fast enough and don't transmit their data into the future like DNA. I'm not sure I agree here. For starters, for all we know there is a complicated underlying order and evolution of a population of self-replicating eddy currents in the magnetohydrodynamics of plasmas in the sun or something. It's probably unlikely due to the rapid thermalization of things with that much energy in one place, but I'm not sure we can rule it out entirely. We shouldn't limit ourselves to the typical energy, length, and time scales that are familiar to us when trying to look for consciousness or life. (And certainly not to chemistry alone, let alone carbon chemistry at temperatures and pressures near STP) The universe contains an enormous range of orders of magnitude of interesting interactions that could perhaps have a sufficiently complicated state space to support some sort of self-replicating. In general however, I do tend to agree that any consciousness is the result of evolving self-replication.
• CuriouslyC 3y ago
  What you're describing isn't consciousness, it's intelligence. Consciousness is how the universe decides to evolve one way as opposed to another.
• barfbagginus 3y ago
  Consciousness is really just useful for guarding gradients of entropy. There's some serious gradients of entropy inside the Sun and we don't know what kind of self-influencing processes might appear. Let's imagine that there's some kind of competition between self-regulating magneto hydrodynamic processes inside the sun. Well, eventually an overarching consciousness arises, controlling all of the degrees of freedom that it can and evolving into a mind that can perceive the rest of the universe. The original survival context may have been persistently recurring structures in solar convection cells, but now the being is far beyond worrying about such little matters. It is free to probe the minds of other beings, and perhaps to perceive the rest of the universe. Perhaps it is curious and peaceful. Perhaps it is paranoid and violent, ready to fight against other star beings, ready to kill us if we ever try to do stellar level engineering. I bet it fears nothing and just exists, since it's so far outside of the survival context that it evolved for, and has no reason to care if it lives or dies.