There are massive problems with ideas like individual galaxies making up parts of some kind of galactic neural network where the information being exchanged takes place of billions of years to form some “super thought.”

Not the least of which is that it doesn’t say anything, it’s a stoner thought that for all I know is totally true, but it’s so impossible to either prove, model or test, and it doesn’t provide a more plausible explanation for anything.

We can just as easily say that a handful of gravel I pick up may form some kind of neural network because technically they are sharing information in subtle ways. A panpsychist might say “exactly!” and I just say “Why? What does this idea explain better than the models we have now?”

The other huge problem is the expansion of the universe and the way light behaves. I am not sure the cosmic super entity is doing so hot considering how rapidly it’s tearing itself apart. Since light doesn’t really experience time either way, those “thoughts” trapped in patterns of light rays basically had one moment of thought and then dispersed so far and wide that it was essentially instant. I could easily come up with workarounds that keep the idea alive, but then at that point aren’t we just desperately trying to find God?

The science behind all this is pretty simple honestly.

When you shout you have to inhale first, and that act of inhaling gives you a burst of muscle power. But when you also combine that with a loud exclamation or a shout or curse, you actually startle yourself on some level. Your brain listens to you, always remember that. So when your brain hears you shout or scream, it drops everything and goes into survival mode. IE: a burst of adrenaline.

When you combine adrenaline and oxygen you can do almost super-human things like smash cinderblocks with your bare hands and lift cars off trapped people.

If you want to try charging your muscles for something strenuous like opening a tight jar lid, you can skip the cursing and shouting and just take three deep breaths, and on the last breath draw it in as fast and hard as you can and hold it for a moment as you try to exert the force, it will feel astonishingly easier.

Taught martial arts for many years, yes shouting does boost energy in specific circumstances. There’s a whole art to it, and really it amounts to raising adrenaline levels in yourself (shouting startles yourself) and oxygen. The inhaling before the shout charges your muscles.

In fact, you can get a fantastic demonstration of this without the shouting or cursing. Next time you have a jar lid or anything that you need to manually move that’s just slightly more difficult than your muscle power can comfortably move, take three very deep breaths, then on the last breath inhale as hard as you can and hold it for a moment as you try to open the jar or turn the thing, you will have a very noticeable burst of muscle power.

It depends on if you think consciousness is something that emerges from information exchange systems or some higher level “thing” we don’t understand yet, and I lean towards the idea that consciousness emerges from information exchange systems. If that’s the case, then the universe, while containing massive areas of complexity, isn’t entirely exchanging information, only in isolated areas that are borrowing energy even as entropy broadly increases. I would be more open the idea of some possibility of consciousness occurring in the hyper-low entropy state of the very early universe when everything was much closer together and there was enough energy to connect a whole universe worth of information in localized states.

The foundational idea behind what the user is talking about is called panpsychism, it’s the idea that consciousness or awareness is actually a fundamental quality of the universe like fields or forces, in that it’s in everything, but only complex systems have actual thoughts.

The theory(?) states that even a single electron or proton has a state of awareness, but without any functional way to remember any information or think it’s just like some kind of flash of experience like if you suddenly developed perpetual amnesia about literally everything… while you were hurtling through the universe at high speed. You would still have a conscious experience, it would just be radically limited in what that “means.”

I get the concept, but I don’t get the usefulness of it. It feels too close to people wishing The Force was real.

Guys. You are not getting your light sabers this way.

Not sure if you know that what you’re describing has a name it’s called Panpsychism and it is gaining some popularity but that’s not because there’s any reason to believe in it or any evidence, it’s a fanciful idea about the universe that doesn’t really help or connect anything. IE: panpsychism doesn’t make for a better explanation for anything than the idea that you are just a singular consciousness living in it’s most probable state to be able to observe or experience anything.

I’m not shooting it down, it’s one of those things we just will never know, but that’s a pretty huge list of things and possibilities so I just don’t know if it’s more or less useful than any other philosophical view.

You’re basically describing elephants.

They have a deep, rich language of sub-acoustic rumbling and vibrations that can travel long distances. They have names for each other, and they have words for things like “human” and “bad human.”

I once at a huge slice of boston creme pie from a local deli, I got nearly to the end before I flipped it over and saw the bottom crust was entirely black mold.

I had one of the worst stomach aches of my life for about 6 hours that night and enough gas to power a small town, but no lasting harm. I was also a teenager so likely my digestive system was nigh invulnerable.

It should be understood that most fungus won’t survive in your body, but it does produce toxins. Those toxins don’t have a hard line between harmless and toxic, so the small amounts of spores you ingest every day do nothing, but eating a whole moldy bread slice could make you pretty sick.

It’s a meme, but sadly our whole society seems to get their educations entirely from memes exchanged between racists on twitter.

For those not in the know, “rotten” puts it lightly, this cheese is made specifically to breed fly maggots which are eaten alive with the cheese.

It’s not particularly legal to sell or manufacture for consumption due to the fact that yes, the maggots can in fact try to chew through your stomach and intestines before they die from digestion and cause severe intestinal distress.

They ain’t the big, chewy grubs that Timon and Pumba might eat either, they’re piles of teeny, tiny crawling masses of mini-maggots, so extremely horrifying. Nurgle cheese.

I almost wrote out a joking idea about mandatory injections of live, healthy viral cultures that all children are required to get for “natural, effective immune system development” but I didn’t want to give the fuckers the idea.

We are not evolved for being capable of seeing the thoughts, reactions and feelings of so many people, especially in the form of text written on a screen that your brain reads in its own voice. We have not adapted to nor even begun to study and understand how vulnerable our minds are to outside influence.

But it’s okay because we’re building giant artificial neural systems in data centers that take the power of small cities to run, with the express purpose of predicting and exploiting those vulnerabilities with superhuman effectiveness.

To better understand how nature doesn’t always make smooth circles out of circular patterns, this Minute Physics video does a banger job using the Earth’s moon as an example.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBcxuM-qXec

For Saturn, you’re talking about storm patterns that aggregate near the poles, but the concept is somewhat similar, which is that forces acting on objects (storms) can arrange circles into wave-like shapes.

All that said, I believe that Saturn’s hexagon is still not fully understood, and still may be signs of a deeper alien death-star hiding in the clouds and we should probably like… I dunno, stock up on canned beans and toilet paper.

Here’s a better visualization from Minute Physics how these “wave” patterns can make geometric shapes, using the fact that Earth’s moon doesn’t make a smooth circle around the sun.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBcxuM-qXec

Star Trek was confined by budget, and used a goofy ass, obscure storyline that the galaxy was “seeded” by something in ancient times which is why everyone looks like humanoids with different kinds of bumpy foreheads. (despite it being a very specific set of environmental circumstances over millions or billions of years that led to primates on Earth becoming the dominant species, one of those “don’t think about it” plot devices.)

Does this suggest that there are non-humanoid empires outside of the galaxy? If Warhammer 40k taught us anything, it’s that beyond the Milky Way it’s only tyranids, which are probably going to be a much more difficult romantic option.

Someday artists are going to struggle to replicate this “look” in order to make memes and jokes.

On the sides of our cave walls.

I’m surprised in the year of our Lord, 2025, we’ve still only had a couple of serious interspecies relationship pieces in popular media. You would think with the tech we have no there would be so many science fiction stories and romantic comedies about people and odd sapient creatures or monsters in wacky romances.

And I mean fucking daring stuff. Even Shape of Water was almost tame, dude just looked like a jacked fishy man. But going in the right direction.

I genuinely think it would be good for society to mentally play with the far edges of our social constructs.

I blame the constant stream of bullshit, clickbait “science” headlines that media and internet has subjected an entire generation to, leading to the same effect as it’s had on politics, which is the average person tunes out completely and nobody knows what’s “standard” and normal anymore, and doesn’t really care either.

Am I “stealing” fat from the food I eat?

Yes you are and you need to be stopped.

You can live in a symbiotic relationship with your company’s break-room policy, but you can’t become a host for workers of your own. It’s really unfair.