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Mitchell_Porter comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (July 2012) - Less Wrong
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It took me a few hours to find this thread like a kid rummaging through a closet not knowing what he is looking for.
As my handle indicates, I am Lloyd. Not much I think is worth saying about myself but I would like to ask a few questions to see what interests readers here, if anyone reads this, and present a sample of where my thinking may come from.
Considering the psychological model of five senses we are taught since grade school is there a categorical difference in our ability to logically perceive that 2+2=4 vs perceiving the temperature is decreasing? The deeper question being is the realness of logic (and possibly other mental faculties not being considered here) the same as the realness of sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch? There are questions which unfold from considering logic as a 'sense', but I wish to clarify this question first.
I have not found any proponent of a physical view of the universe as fundamentally alive rather than dead. Is there someone who has proposed, for example, that the stars are living and thus self-directing and the observations of galaxies may be that stars are purposefully forming these structures under their own will much like we form cities? Or maybe the idea that stars induce gravity and feed off of a source of energy from the subatomic regime? Or that different star systems may be fundamentally different on a quantum level like blood types? I mean the language is filled with terms like birth, death, and life, but it sounds like they are disconnected from their biologically meaning altogether.
Does anyone ever discuss the post-industrial society, no, not right question. Why is it that the discussion of post-industrial society is what it is? For example, in mainstream storytelling post-industrial=post-apocalyptic for much of what I have seen. There is Gene Roddenberry who cast post-industrial society as being rescued by aliens. There are Orwell and Huxley who left the world to be forever locked in an industrial nightmare. Zombies. Am I to understand that the culture's mind has settled on imaging the industrial society as its death?
Since life is considered a solved problem by science, any remaining problem of "aliveness" is treated as just a perspective on or metaphor for the problem of consciousness. But talking about aliveness has one virtue; it militates against the tendency among intellectuals to identify consciousness with intellectualizing, as if all that is to be explained in consciousness is "thinking" and passive "experiencing".
The usual corrective to this is to talk about "embodiment". And it's certainly a good corrective; being reminded of the body reintroduces the holism of experience, as well as activity, the will, and the nonverbal as elements of experience. Still, I wouldn't want to say that talking about bodies as well as about consciousness is enough to make up for the move from aliveness to consciousness as the discursively central concept. There's an inner "life" which is also obscured by the easily available ways of talking about "states of mind"; and at the other extreme, being alive is also suggestive of the world that you're alive in, the greater reality which is the context to all the acting and willing and living. This "world" is also a part of cognition and phenomenology that is easily overlooked if one sticks to the conventional tropes of consciousness.
So when we talk about a living universe, we might want to keep all of that in mind, as well as more strictly biological or psychological ideas, such as whether it's like something to be a star, or whether the states and actions of stars are expressive of a stellar intentionality, or whether the stars are intelligences that plan, process information, make choices, and control their physical environment.
People do exist who have explored these ways of thought, but they tend to be found in marginal places like science fiction, crackpot science, and weird speculation. Then, beyond a specific idea like living stars, there are whole genres of what might be called philosophical animism and spiritual animism.
I think pondering whether the stars are intelligences isn't a bad hobby to have, it's the sort of obscure reaching for the unknown which over time can turn into something real and totally new. But know and study your predecessors, especially their mistakes. If you're going to be a crackpot, try at least to be a new type of crackpot, so that humanity can learn from your example. :-)
That is an impressive collection of links you put together. You have provided what I was looking for in a greater scope than I expected. The Star Larvae Hypothesis and Guy Murchie express the eccentricity in thought I was hoping someone would have knowledge of. I like to see the margins, you see. How did you come to all those tidbits? It took me a single question on this forum for me to get that scope and for that I owe you some thanks. I really do not have much of a hobby in pondering the intentions of stellar beings, but in coming up with queries that help me find the edges, margins, or whatever of this evolved social consciousness I am part of.
I do find it interesting that someone would be able to compile those links. Was this a personal interest of yours at some time or part of a program of study you came across? Or do you have some skill at compiling links that is inexplicable?
It's a bit of both.