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Conscious Stars?

Centauri Dreams has a fascinating guest post by Dr. Gregory Matloff, co-author of The Starflight Handbook and Solar Sails: A Novel Approach to Interplanetary Travel. Last year Matloff delivered a paper in London at the British Interplanetary Society’s conference on the work of Olaf Stapledon, the author of Star Maker. As one of the ideas that Stapledon explored was the hypothesis that stars might have a form of consciousness, Matloff presented a paper speculating on anomalous stellar velocities, notably the possibility that this problem might be solved by positing stellar consciousness. You can read the full paper, “Star Consciousness: An Alternative to Dark Matter“, over at Centauri Dreams. Here’s the abstract:

The Dark Matter hypothesis has been invoked as an explanation for the fact that stars revolve around the centers of their galaxies faster than can be accounted for by observable matter. After decades of failed experimental searches, dark matter has remained elusive. As an alternative to the Dark Matter hypothesis, a idea first presented by author Olaf Stapledon is developed in this paper. Stars are considered to be conscious entities maintaining their galactic position by their volition. It is shown that directed stellar radiation pressure and stellar winds are insufficient to account for this anomalous stellar velocity. Previous research rules out magnetism. A published theory of psychokinetic action that does not violate quantum mechanics is discussed, as is the suggestion that stellar consciousness could be produced by a Casimir effect operating on molecules in the stellar atmosphere. It is shown that a discontinuity in stellar velocities as a function of spectral class exists. Cooler red stars in the solar neighborhood move faster than hotter, blue stars, as would be expected if the presence of molecules in stars was a causative factor. Further research in experimentally validating the psychokinetic effect and demonstrating the role of the Casimir effect in consciousness is required to advance the concepts presented here beyond the hypothesis stage.

Love reading these sorts of highly speculative ideas (it immediately reminded me of Lem’s Solaris, and also previous things I’ve read about consciousness as an emergent phenomenon in complex systems). Though Centauri Dreams is a properly sober, scientific website devoted to interstellar travel/exploration, so as you can imagine there’s some fairly predictable reactions in the comment thread. But as Matloff himself says in the comments, he expected some heat for publishing the paper, but believes that such speculation is necessary for the progress of knowledge.

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  1. from the Divinities-of-Place-Dept.
    Greg,

    make friends with someone from Russia — they are steeped in what my culture would consider strangeness :3

    I guess that is what happens when Christianity isn’t allowed to infect a country?

    Oh my…

    1. The idea that stars have
      The idea that stars have consciousness always reminds me of Gurdjieff who alleged that celestial bodies exist simultaneously in different dimensions as very different entities. In a universe of varied dimensions things that seem one way here in the more mundane may be something else entirely in higher dimensions. It would be like regarding a stone statue of a person here in the now as “inert” when it might be something very much alive in another dimension. Quantum reality too with its furious spinning and buzzing permeates every material thing, and it makes it much easier to grok that all things are “alive.”

      1. Holography
        This kind of thing always makes me smile at the brain ache that results from my attempts to understand what the hell physicists mean when they say matter might be a holographic projection from the boundary surface of the universe.

        The upper dimension stuff becomes a little innane when you start reading about hyper-spheres and what-not. For example a four dimensional (4 space dimensions, not just normal space-time) hypersphere moving through our 3 dimensional space would look like a small sphere growing bigger and bigger and then shrinking again.

        I.e. Just like if we moved a sphere across a 2D plane (like a ball across an imaginary piece of paper) we would see a circle starting small and growing, then shrinking again. So a 4D hypersphere moving through our 3D space is basically the same scaled up one dimension.

        So thats all pretty boring. Note that I don’t mean it wouldn’t be amazing to see through a telescope or in a lab since it would be proof of higher dimensions. I just mean that in both culture, paranormal culture and fluffy language ‘higher dimensions’ is a term that itself is not dimensionalised. It remains undefined and as such is used in a fluffy mind expanding, sci-fi, limit of your imagination type way. A sort of spirituality or sci-fi of the Gaps. Whereas when physicists talk about higher dimensions they actually mean something specific and spiritually something far less interesting (I guess because being a mathematical and physical construct it falls well within the bounds of materialism, and so is not the escapism searched for by spiritualities).

        I wonder if I can take a guess. A prophecy of sorts. If physicists discover higher dimensions then pop culture will shift lingo and we will be on to higher-higher-dimensions.

      2. from the Wonder-of-it-All-Dept.
        i grok :3

        it would be awesome to be able to communicate with beings like this

        what would it be like to experience geologic & beyond time scales? what would it dream aboot? want? taste? enjoy? what ethics would it have? arts?

    1. Lol
      I don’t know whether to try and read the paper. The claim that it does not interferer with QM obviously necessitates that it both discuss and feature the reasons why it does not, that, alongside the difficulty in theories of consciousness is not pulling me over there straight off the bat.

      So instead I will ponder a little.

      Firstly, what a bummer to be a conscious star and have your free will expressed as a slight discrepancy in general relativistic equations of galactic momentum. A bit like someone spotting that I am conscious because I walk ever so slightly faster than the wind – deviating a little from the maths.

      Secondly – if this is conscious behaviour, or more precisely if this is individual behaviour, physicists are screwed in any attempt to unify star motion using modified theories of relativity – be it dark energy, dark matter, MOND or whatever. This should make it really easy to test, surely? If it is something like a modified gravity, like dark energy, which in general relativity is expressed using the fudge of the cosmological constant, then no fudge like the cosmological constant would work. No single variable will suddenly make stars behave how we observe them, since consciousness adds a unique variable to each. Shouldn’t his be testable right now? In fact, if no single physical variable can account for star motion then how have physicists narrowed it down to a modified theory of gravity? Since I have heard it described that it is possible to account for star motion using modified theories of gravity (the problem is that they do not know which is right) what exactly is the stars consciousness doing again???

      Thirdly, I can already smell notions of group consciousness on the horizon to explain why there is no reason to think that stars are consciousness.

      Fourthly, and a big bloomin eck on this one. What the hell happened to the easy and hard problems here? We seem to find it hard enough to agree even on a single point about consciousness even when we have the brain on a table in front of us and all the correlative data about brain physiology and consciousness. Now it seems so long as you claim that a star is conscious, or a rock, or the entire universe, the theories are interesting.

      I might read the paper after all just to see how the author even defines ‘consciousness’ before setting out to explain how the physics and structures in a star fit any theory of its emergence.

      And if I get there and find that it basically just goes ‘stars have souls’ i’m going to be cross 😉

  2. Stapledon was the Inspiration
    Olaf Stapledon’s speculations about intelligent stars in his History of the Cosmos “Starmaker” (1937) was the inspiration for Greg Matloff’s paper, and the occasion was a symposium at the British Interplanetary Society celebrating Stapledon, so I think Greg deserves some latitude in his dig at the status quo. These days the very possibility of psychokinetic stars is verboten in most scientific circles, yet what do we really know?

    That being said there’s a couple of orthodox theories for the phenomena that Greg is tying together in his speculating, so don’t expect the average astrophysicist to be convinced. But we should try to imagine the truly alien – that will make us ready for when we finally confront it.

      1. teaser trailer
        Ha! I worked on that teaser in another life. Fox had no idea how to market this film. Their big problem was that women don’t like science fiction so they convinced Soderbergh to recut the movie and play up the romance angle, then they made this trailer:

        http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_pTtju_MPY

        You can’t even tell this movie centers around a sentient, reality-bending planet!

          1. from the Precursor-to-Cursors-Dept.
            i really like both movies for completely different reasons; they both hit my awe centre :3

      2. Echo echo echo
        [quote=emlong]And we can’t fail to mention the sentient hyperparanormal planet in Lem’s “Solaris.” The book describes it far better than either movie’s special effects though.[/quote]

        Already did, in the original post. 😀

        [quote=Greg]Love reading these sorts of highly speculative ideas (it immediately reminded me of Lem’s Solaris, and also previous things I’ve read about consciousness as an emergent phenomenon in complex systems). [/quote]

        1. Oh, my bad. Once I scanned it
          Oh, my bad. Once I scanned it and saw Stapledon’s name I quit looking for the next proper name. It did give us a little chance to elaborate though. I loved that riff in Solaris when the surface of the planet below the circling ship would erupt with visual images that complimented the mental states of the observers. I don’t read much science fiction, but I love Lem who also brings more of the tradition of classical lit to the subject. As a reader and writer at one point in my life long ago I found Lem interesting to read for the literary merit alone. I have always had a problem reading sci fi because so much of it sounds like boys stories to me. The writing can be hackneyed and cliche. Lem can be read as an inventive writer as well. There are probably more sci fi writers I could find readable if I exerted myself to look deeper I’m sure.

          I did also intend to interject here my experience with both ormus and orgonite both of which have this peculiar energy that is hard to pin down. It can be very clearly felt by many people, but as with the archaic Egyptian name for white powder gold “mfkzt” which meant “what is it” is still an apt name for it today because no one has definitively figured out what exactly is going on. In its most elemental it can be said to be a “torsion field” but what is being torqued? The aether comes the reply. What is the aether? And so on. Point being there are forces we cannot yet account for but which can be sensed, so it should not be surprising that the so called inanimate world might be animated by forces we do not yet understand and relationships of which we are unaware.

  3. Testable/observable?
    So if two stars of same type, mass and approximate surroundings (gravity fields) could be observed to move at different speeds, that would be a good start? Tracing back some major gravitational influences of the past might be hard, but would be it possible to observe acceleration/decelaration of stars within our timeframe?

  4. Will We Witness the Sun Giving Birth in the 21st Century?
    Greg for what it’s worth my own little informational downloads I’ve been prone to since at least the 90s onwards’ve tried to convince me not only is the Sun sentient and ‘She’ takes an active CONSCIOUS role in influencing life on Earth (viz the propelling hands emerging from the Sun in depictions of Akhenaten) but the planets and their moons are also sentient.

    Furthermore – supposedly – these aren’t randomly distributed around ‘Her’ but’re carefully arranged so as to have a collective gravitational effect which’s led to the development and maintenance of the body organ-like chambers and connective ‘tunnels’ within ‘Her’ (not unlike the plasma tunnels which connect ‘Her’ and the Earth) reported by helioseismologists.

    Nor’re things likely to get less interesting solar-wise if any of these ‘downloads’ have a basis in reality because apart from being told during the first half of the Nineties to watch out for the discovery of a race of highly evolved ants capable of overcoming normal ant hostility (even to genetically identical offspring colonies) to live in huge collective multicolonies covering areas large enough to form small countries (so far reported in France and I think Japan) and even more astonishingly spiders living under a similar arrangement (in South America/Australia?) but sometime during the 21st Century the Sun’ll supposedly be witnessed ‘giving birth’ to a new molten ‘planet’ of some kind which once it’s achieved its intended orbit’ll gradually bring about significant changes in the Sun’s own internal dynamics and lead to ‘Her’ developing at least one new ‘organ’ signifying ‘Her’ (and presumably our) attainment of a new evolutionary level.

    1. In some of Dolores Cannon’s
      In some of Dolores Cannon’s hypno-regressive interviews subjects describe sentient beings living in the most hellish places such as the surface of the sun. These are light beings to whom temperature means nothing, so there is the possibility that sentience is not limited to goldilocks planets and DNA. I fool around with stone energies quite a lot and though I tend to regard them as being inert and merely absorbers and reflectors of my own energy there is an old idea that the world of stone and crystal is actually calling to our human world and using people as conduits for stone energy and “life” to express itself more widely.

      At some point you find yourself falling in with the idea that so called inanimate objects can be extensions of living beings and therefore as appendages to life. To the extent that an appendage can be said to be alive then anything that absorbs and reflects sentient energy could be called alive. If any and everything can be appropriated to be part of life as we know it then any and everything are capable of appearing to be sentient as soon as sentience directs its attention to it. Something as big as the sun in our solar system is always being focused on by us and might be said to be “animated” by our metal attentions. I remember Seth or someone like that counseling humans to focus their attention en masse and prayerfully on the sun in order to rebalance it and keep it from erupting in earth threatening CME’s, and of course the sun has been held not only to be alive but to be a God by most of our ancestors. As soon as one commits to the idea of their being a Great Creator then it could be said that inasmuch as god mind permeates everything then everything is alive.

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