Is Our Sun Conscious?
A theory of stellar consciousness
Consciousness: A model of reality updated in real-time via multiple senses organized to predict the future, used to help the physical “body” hosting that consciousness live and thrive.
Don’t you wish everyone who discussed consciousness would start with their definition of consciousness? This is my own definition of consciousness I created based on a general theory of consciousness I am developing. The phrase “multiple senses” includes every sense you could imagine and also those you can’t, including introspection (sensing one’s own thoughts and emotions) and interoception (feeling one’s own body), as well as proprioception (awareness of how one’s body parts are oriented in space), and the usual “five” senses we learn about.
Can you imagine what it’s like to be a bat, using sonar and echolocation to navigate? When Thomas Nagel published his famous paper entitled What Is It Like to Be a Bat? he may not have been aware that some humans can actually learn echolocation. Nevertheless, his point was that consciousness must account for our unique personal conscious experiences, and this may place limits on our ability to fully understand consciousnesses based on radically different modes of sensory input and experience.
Can you imagine what it’s like to be a bee, using a sense of electromagnetic charge to tell whether a flower has been recently visited by another bee? Can you imagine what it’s like to be a bird, able to sense our planet’s gravitational field and use it for navigation? Biohackers are implanting devices into their bodies that can detect electromagnetic fields and potentially translate those signals into perceptible experiences. Will their brains perceive a new sensory mode of experience unavailable to them previously?
Finally, can you imagine what it’s like to be our Sun with a lifespan of 10 billion years? Your planets are an extension of your body, all bathed in your constant stream of solar wind. You’re swimming in the pond of the Milky Way galaxy with other stars for company, feeling your planet’s motions through gravitational waves as you also distantly perceive other stars, the black hole at the center of our galaxy, and the Great Attractor. You perceive your own reflection as your radiation bounces off your planets and is reflected back to you. On some of your planets, you are aware of bacteria-like lifeforms of various species, one of which is known as humans, coexisting with or in some cases infecting your planets.
This story will introduce you to my own highly speculative theory proposing that stars such as our own Sun could be conscious. Take this in the spirit of a fun thought experiment rather than a serious scientific theory, although I will frame this as much as I can in the context of a scientific theory, complete with predictions and falsification. I’ll frame things this way because that’s what all good scientists do, especially with highly speculative ideas like this: we present theories and then immediately go about trying to prove them wrong.
Why a stellar theory of consciousness?
However, before I get to the theory, I want to explain why I would propose such a strange idea. I first started thinking about this possibility when I witnessed the total solar eclipse of 2017. Nothing can prepare you for the experience of a total solar eclipse. It is a jaw-dropping psychedelic event and as such no photograph, video, or mere words can prepare you for what you will feel. I foolishly tried to capture it on film and realized it’s like trying to capture the smell of a rose through a painting.
I researched how to get a good photo of a total eclipse. I got an expensive telephoto lens for my camera and studied how to dial in the right neutral density filter setting so our star wouldn’t destroy my camera. I set up my camera on a tripod and set the video rolling, and I also had a timer going once every two seconds to capture a time-lapse.
However with all the time in the world to prepare, when it got close to totality I completely forgot about my camera, forgot to zoom in on the Sun, and forgot to center the image, and I am so glad I did. Although I got a poor-quality video, if I’d been fussing with my camera I would have gotten a better video but I would have missed the experience. And that would have been tragic.
Transfixed by the ethereal corona of our Sun, I felt a living, conscious being staring back down at me, normally invisible except for this one moment in my entire life when it came out to play. I safely stared straight at our star with no eye protection, enchanted, speechless. I couldn’t form a full sentence for maybe an hour after the event, because I needed time to process what I’d experienced.
So much did our Sun impress me as a conscious being that I eventually wrote him into a science fiction novel as a character named Saul. Yes, our star identifies as male. I lean towards the hard end of sci-fi which means I like to research plausible future science to support the plot, so for this sci-fi novel, I put together a highly speculative theory of stellar consciousness. This story you’re reading is the result of that research. It’s meant to have fun and maybe inspire thought and science fiction more than anything else.
What is the body or hardware powering a stellar brain?
98% of our Sun’s mass is just hydrogen and helium, with oxygen making up almost 1%, followed by carbon, nitrogen, and a quickly diminishing list of other elements. These elements exist in a state of matter called plasma where the electrons that are normally clouded around a nucleus have been ripped from their nuclei and are instead floating around in a soup of charged particles.
The plasma is moving and flowing within and around the sun, following intricate and twisted magnetic structures that are, in turn, created by the moving plasma. These magnetic field lines are in a constant dance with the plasma because the movement of the charged particles within the plasma interacts with and changes those same magnetic structures altering them and thus creating a feedback loop. This feedback loop creates the magical corona that mesmerized me during the total eclipse.
Occasionally the feedback creates an intensely amplified magnetic field that exerts powerful forces on the plasma that create a whip-like explosive release of plasma from the sun we call a coronal mass ejection, or CME. The CME is made up of the plasma of the sun hurtling through space at speeds from half a million to 7 million miles per hour.
If a big CME hits our planet, it would seriously mess us up. A big one we call the Carrington Event hit us back in 1859 before we had all our fancy satellites and computers. Our state-of-the-art wired telegraph infrastructure of the time was taken offline by huge surges of electricity through the telegraph wires. The New York Times reported on September 5th, 1859, that telegraph operator Frederick Royce received a severe shock that stunned him. Frederick was touched by a star.
Today this would cause a massive disaster. A 2013 study from British insurance giant Lloyd’s of London estimated that electrical outages from a Carrington-level event might lead to up to $2.6 trillion in lost revenue for the North American power industry alone. Global blackouts lasting several years could occur. Society could break down bringing the end of civilization as we know it.
In a paper published in Space Weather in 2012, Pete Riley writes that the “probability of a Carrington event occurring over next decade is ~12%.” You would think that the world should be better prepared with odds like that. The problem is that this just isn’t a great enough probability to motivate the world to put the necessary resources into fixing the problem. Such an event is most likely to happen during the solar maximum part of the 11-year solar cycle, which will next occur between November 2024 and March 2026. Wouldn’t that be interesting timing for such an event to occur in the particular world history in which we find ourselves today?
Now imagine that our Sun is conscious and aware of our human activity on its third planet, and like an immune system attacking an invader, it sends a large chunk of plasma towards this planet to cleanse it of this infection called humanity. Wouldn’t it be useful to know if our Sun were conscious in that event? Alternatively, it could be seeking to communicate with us today, perhaps by encoding signals we can’t read in chunks of plasma that stream across our planet and which we observe as the aurora borealis.
No one knows how consciousness connects to reality
We all talk about things like ‘knowing’, ‘consciousness’, and ‘reality’ like we understand what these things are, but we don’t. We need to review these foundational topics to set the stage for a stellar theory of consciousness, starting with the various ways that any consciousness, stellar or human, could be connected to its physical “body”.
The entire discipline of philosophy has one massive, obvious unsolved problem sitting right in the middle of it, laughing at us: how is our consciousness connected to the apparent reality we perceive which includes our body and brain? This hard problem of consciousness is stubborn and will not go away. We have a few basic ways of looking at it: materialism, dualism, panpsychism, and idealism. I’ll review these four models before settling on one I’ll use for my theory of stellar consciousness.
Materialism says that our consciousness is a byproduct of the way our physical brains work. Everything that exists including all our experiences (or “qualia” as philosophers call it) ultimately arises from material processes. There is no immaterial substance such as a soul, spirit, or immaterial mind. All causality is physical. All complex phenomena including consciousness are ultimately reducible to physics.
The problem with materialism is that no one has a clue as to how consciousness emerges from quarks. Some philosophers like Daniel Dennett view consciousness as an emergent property arising from physical processes in the brain. The word “emergent” is doing too much heavy lifting in this sentence, effectively a hand wave to distract us, a sprinkling of magic fairy dust. Dennett tries to explain it away but I am not convinced:
“Consciousness is something your brain does for you. There’s no extra magic ingredient… Consciousness doesn’t need explaining with a mysterious extra. All it needs explaining with is how the brain — which is complicated enough — manages to pull off this amazing self-protective, self-monitoring, self-understanding activity.”
Dualism solves the problem by viewing consciousness as fundamentally separate from our physical world. Dualism posits that consciousness and the physical body interact with each other, but are separate and cannot be reduced to each other. This is different from materialism which either ignores consciousness or asserts that consciousness arises from and can be reduced to the physical processes of the brain and body.
The first problem with dualism is that no one can explain how consciousness and the physical world connect. If they are separate, what mechanism puts my consciousness in the driver’s seat of my physical body? Descartes solved that problem with God, but that’s not a very satisfying answer, especially for an atheist like me.
The second problem with dualism is that no one can explain how our consciousness got there. We have a few very different proposals to solve this problem. Divine creation says that some God or other created our consciousness. Others say that our bodies serve as temporary vessels for our consciousness which always resides in a spiritual plane of existence. Another major problem with dualism is that there is zero scientific support for dualism. At least science is trying to explain consciousness from the perspective of materialism.
Panpsychism proposes that consciousness is a fundamental property of our universe, at the same level as matter, energy, and spacetime. Even individual atoms may possess some rudimentary, minimal level of subjective experience, something like the Planck length but for consciousness.
The main unsolved challenge with panpsychism is known as the Combination Problem: if everything is conscious, how does complex consciousness arise from smaller pieces? How do the tiny bits of consciousness in the universe come together to create what we humans experience?
Idealism says that consciousness is the fundamental building block of reality. Our so-called reality, including our bodies, is an illusion created by our consciousness. Objective idealism emphasizes a cosmic consciousness as the basis of reality, of which our human minds are holographic slivers. This isn’t too different from Nick Bostrom’s Simulation Hypothesis.
As with the other models, Idealism has its unsolved challenge too: how does that seemingly real physical universe get inside our minds? No scientific evidence supports this idea, and it contradicts our everyday experience. How can my thoughts make what appears to be my arm move, causing ripples in a pond that follow apparent laws of physics?
Why am I choosing Materialism?
My theory of consciousness relies on materialism so that I can stay within the realm of science, which is confined to the physical world. This provides the best opportunity for a successful scientific theory that can gather evidence that can be replicated by others, provide new and insightful explanations, make predictions, and most importantly be falsified.
Psychogenesis is to Consciousness as Abiogenesis is to Evolution
The theory of evolution is just behind quantum theory as among the most well-validated of all scientific theories. However, the theory of evolution is silent concerning how this whole genetically powered life thing got going in the first place. That’s where the theory of abiogenesis steps in, explaining how non-living matter could turn into living matter. As a theory, abiogenesis is much more speculative and less well-validated than evolution. I can imagine other explanations, such as panspermia (guaranteed to make 50% of women giggle) which explains that life arrived on some kind of starry messenger, like an interstellar comet that crashed into our planet.
Just as abiogenesis and panspermia explain how living matter first appeared on our planet, I must explain how non-conscious matter first turned into conscious matter. This solves the so-called ‘emergence problem’ of materialism: how does consciousness emerge from non-conscious matter? The word ‘psychogenesis’ has several current uses, but here I will use it to refer to the genesis of consciousness, much as abiogenesis refers to the genesis of biological life.
My theory of psychogenesis asserts that consciousness emerges when matter is arranged in such a way we call a body, containing within it somewhere a model of reality we call a brain, based on multimodal sensory input, updated in real time, used to predict the future, to enable that combined body and consciousness to live and thrive. This arrangement of matter evolved by the process of natural selection over millions of years as explained by the theory of evolution because consciousness enhances the ability of that entity to survive and reproduce. Our experience of consciousness is the real-time updating of our model of reality based on multimodal sensory input, used to predict the future. That is the answer to the hard problem of consciousness.
Even if you’re just sitting there meditating and being “present”, thinking of nothing, or just not thinking, you are still experiencing reality one moment at a time. You expect each moment to be consistent with the next, to logically flow from one to the next because we are living in reality. Objects have persistence. Even if you have no thoughts going through your head and are just “pure awareness”, you exist within your body moving through spacetime and your model of reality is being updated by that experience.
Where do we go from here?
So far I’ve been laying the groundwork to get to the main part of my theory of stellar consciousness. In part 2 of this story, I will describe how consciousness might arise within a star, and why. My challenge is to explain solar behavior previously unexplained, make a testable prediction using this theory, and try to prove this theory wrong.
And then I want to have fun. If our Sun were conscious, how might we communicate with it? What might it tell us? What might a conversation with a conscious star be like? This is where the “science” part ends and the “science fiction” part begins.
