In a blog post, Musk said the acquisition was warranted because global electricity demand for AI cannot be met with “terrestrial solutions,” and Silicon Valley will soon need to build data centers in space to power its AI ambitions.
This dumb fuck. Unfortunately, his boosters will be all-in on this messaging. Whatever.
“Sentience” is like this hand-waving magic word. Defined typically as the ability to experience sensations and feelings, it’s very anthropic and egocentric.
We know that life evolved on Earth, to include our own species. We know that much life on Earth has an internal sense for pain and pleasure, as well as many instinctual drives like self-preservation. We know that our species knows things, and we know that other species don’t have the same depth in their capacity to know things. We’ve demonstrated that other species don’t seem to understand the world in the same way as us humans. Yet, we’ve never quite figured out what any other species knows. We’ve never modeled their form of sentience, let alone our own. We only really know about sentience intuitively, via our own experience. We judge everything’s capacity as though it’s either less than, equal to, or greater than our own — without consideration for how something might just be different. Not higher or lower, but parallel in a way.
I don’t know what sun sentience would be like, not any more than I already know why any sentience is like (beside my own), but I can say one thing for sure. Our own sentience is heavily influenced by bias: social, political, legal, economical, financial, emotional, religious, moral, and scientific bias. Peel back those layers of bias, what’s left? Sun sentience might be something like that, like a blank slate that just exists.
The sun is not only sentient, but sapient and aware of it’s eternal damnation; be thankful you can’t hear it screaming.
if there was a infinite line, like so:
… where it marks each stage of “awareness,” where would you personally think humans go on that line?
If you think it belongs over the “sapient” point, I’d think that’s very interesting. Isn’t it also interesting that we bond most well with animals that exhibit human-like social behavior?
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Big tangent, but I just want to say I love this reply, and it’s a great example of what reddit has lost and lemmy has preserved.
Speaking of other species and knowledge, whale songs IMO are something like the dialup sound we used to hear when our internet went over the land line. Apparently they can hear each other from an ocean away as well. Whales may have entire religions for all we know. It’s fascinating to think about, and they’re right here on this planet with us; the Sun only knows what else is out there.