By 
A bong rip of a study shows that all matter contain some form of mind or consciousness, not only animals — involving, as one biologist claims, the Sun itself.
In a fascinating pitch into the hypothesis, which adherents call “panpsychism,” Popular Mechanics reports that this out-there idea has present for thousands of years, and in its more crystallized type has been bubbling around for the past few hundred years.
Though inklings of likely thought had present since ancient Greece, the word “panpsychism” was, as the report describes, coined in the 16th century by Italian philosopher Francesco Patrizi. Though it got 19th century reliability when the psychology superstar Williams James publicly credited to it, the theory was actually destroyed in the 1920s by the Vienna Circle when its “logical positivism” — the concept that philosophical doubts must have logical reasoning — took hold of the philosophical world.
In 2004, when another Italian, the neuroscientist and psychiatrist Giulio Tononi, suggested what he called the “integrated information theory of consciousness,” which recommends that consciousness is, necessarily, almost everywhere. By and by, a type of panpsychist renaissance began to take place, and in 2014 — approximately 100 years after the Vienna Circle ended the feel-good theory — the honorable neuroscientist Christof Koch claimed in Scientific American that if lumps of matter can create into human bodies and become conscious, there’s no reason that groups of basic particles couldn’t either.
While AI pioneer and fashion-forward hat-wearer Ben Goertzel has been a supporter since at least ’04, maybe one of the most convincing example of panpsychist idea came in 2021, when biologist and author Rupert Sheldrake published a paper questioning whether the Sun itself might be conscious.
“Consciousness does not require to be confined to brains,” Sheldrake told Popular Mechanics in its new story. “The connection between minds and physical systems appears to be through rhythmic electromagnetic fields, which exist in our brains for sure. They also exist in and around the Sun, and these could be the interface between the solar mind and the body of the Sun.”
To be very honest, there isn’t a lick of proof of support this theory. And Sheldrake is a peculiar character; he have a PhD in biochemistry, and he did research at Cambridge University in the 1970s. But since then he’s been drawn to a type of out-there topics varying from crystals to telepathy, and been dismissed in the mainstream in the large scale.
Still, it’s a interesting concept in a sci-fi type of way. The Sun is a complicated system; maybe it contain mysteries we haven’t yet recognized.
And say the entire thing is somehow correct — if so, what would the Sun think about?
“It may be capable to select in which way to send out solar flares or coronal mass discharge,” Sheldrake mused to PopMech, “which can have an enormous impact on life on Earth, and to which our technologies are very unprotected.”
