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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

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.
    - fylham 3y ago
      The hard problem of consciousness wonders why we seem to have consciousness when we could instead be input/output automata. You could imagine such a ‘zombie’ with our same social, emotional, and intellectual behavior (even pretending to have inner experiences) that doesn’t actually have Qualia. The existence of consciousness is not clearly causal, which is part of the mystery of why we seem to have it.
      - layer8 3y ago
        It doesn't seem plausible for something to have same social, emotional, and intellectual behavior without experiencing "qualia", because much of our behavior is expressing and talking about those experiences. I see "qualia" just as a second-order perception of the sensory-information processing within our brains. A little like a program profiler profiling its own process would observe parts of its own execution and process that information. I see no particular mystery in such an inner self-perception. At the same time, given what influences human behavior, it is an essential part for explaining that behavior. Philosophical zombies are an impossibility.
    - kevindamm 3y ago
      > there doesn’t seem to be any problem with doing explaining their motion and gravitational dynamics in principle. Except we do see multiple inconsistencies at a galactic scale. The hubble tension, the absence of explanation of dark matter, the models which point to 75% of fundamental components of the universe being unobservable? There doesn't seem to be a direct extrapolation from our models to galactic-scale explanations.
      - mannykannot 3y ago
        It is extremely unlikely that these concerns will undo anything we think we know in the realm of biology, such as how metabolism and reproduction work. Consciousness is different, as we don't know how it works, but we have no evidence suggesting either that it will require a complete rewrite of fundamental physics to explain, or that a rewrite of fundamental physics to resolve the issues you raise would also provide the missing information needed to explain consciousness.
- evrimoztamur 3y ago
  I guess there are invisible fairies dancing on the heads of every pin; or is that your point? Electrons as far as we can tell are pixies zipping around and dancing in a universal ballet.
RajT88 3y ago
I just want to inject the observation somewhere in this thread that the human brain is estimated to have a similar order of magnitude number of Neurons as the Milky Way has stars. (The lower bound of stars is the accepted ballpark for neurons)

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.
  - fylham 3y ago
    The hard problem of consciousness wonders why we seem to have consciousness when we could instead be input/output automata. You could imagine such a ‘zombie’ with our same social, emotional, and intellectual behavior (even pretending to have inner experiences) that doesn’t actually have Qualia. The existence of consciousness is not clearly causal, which is part of the mystery of why we seem to have it.
    - layer8 3y ago
      It doesn't seem plausible for something to have same social, emotional, and intellectual behavior without experiencing "qualia", because much of our behavior is expressing and talking about those experiences. I see "qualia" just as a second-order perception of the sensory-information processing within our brains. A little like a program profiler profiling its own process would observe parts of its own execution and process that information. I see no particular mystery in such an inner self-perception. At the same time, given what influences human behavior, it is an essential part for explaining that behavior. Philosophical zombies are an impossibility.
  - kevindamm 3y ago
    > there doesn’t seem to be any problem with doing explaining their motion and gravitational dynamics in principle. Except we do see multiple inconsistencies at a galactic scale. The hubble tension, the absence of explanation of dark matter, the models which point to 75% of fundamental components of the universe being unobservable? There doesn't seem to be a direct extrapolation from our models to galactic-scale explanations.
    - mannykannot 3y ago
      It is extremely unlikely that these concerns will undo anything we think we know in the realm of biology, such as how metabolism and reproduction work. Consciousness is different, as we don't know how it works, but we have no evidence suggesting either that it will require a complete rewrite of fundamental physics to explain, or that a rewrite of fundamental physics to resolve the issues you raise would also provide the missing information needed to explain consciousness.
evrimoztamur 3y ago
I guess there are invisible fairies dancing on the heads of every pin; or is that your point? Electrons as far as we can tell are pixies zipping around and dancing in a universal ballet.

RajT88 3y ago

I just want to inject the observation somewhere in this thread that the human brain is estimated to have a similar order of magnitude number of Neurons as the Milky Way has stars. (The lower bound of stars is the accepted ballpark for neurons)