You would never have known anything else. If you realized you were self-aware, say, sometime around reaching hydrostatic equilibrium, what would you even compare the experience to? Would the very concept of autonomy have any meaning to you? As a solipsistic consciousness, would you have an ontology into which to place such a concept?

(Apologies for the Socratic barrage, but this line of inquiry triggered my inner first-year philosophy student.)

Without the concept of free will in humans, which many now accept as a possibility, what would be the fundamental difference between an entity such as the sun, a plant and a human? None, except the lifespan.

You think that human free will is the defining factor of whether all things in the universe are the same or not?

I don't think that was implied, but rather the sun does, what the sun does and we do, what we do. If we do not have free will, but every action, every thought is a determined reaction of the state of things, than we would also be "trapped". But we do not (normally) perceive it as such. We experience our lives and we live it. We act. Even though our actions might come from a deep automatism. For the sun it might be the same, just on a whole different level.

Does a person completely immobilized but awake lack free will? Maybe free will isn't the right measurement of consciousness or intelligence.

"Other than that indefinable quality that distinguishes us from other things, how are we different from other things?"

I think the point is a bit more interesting than that. If you instead suppose we don't have free will, and there is no indefinable quality, then suddenly it’s not anymore scary to be a conscious galaxy than it is to be a human.

Right, but you're supposing away the entire essence of the discussion. If you take for granted we have no free will, our indistinguishability from anything else in the universe is an immediately obvious logical consequence.

FWIW, we humans also have no autonomy w.r.t. our habitable orbit path, but we find plenty of internal shit to keep ourselves busy.

Our 75 years long self-declared free-will narrative is maybe more terrifying.

I thought the exact same thing. We can feel pain and suffer on levels that I doubt the Sun would ever be capable of.

But at least there's no one else around to bother you.

> It must be terrifying if you're a galactic entity and have experience, awareness, and consciousness, but no autonomy w.r.t. movement, trapped in a trillion-year path that you cannot escape.

Surely such an entity would not see itself being trapped at all, any more than a tree does. It is what it is.

On the contrary, it probably pities humans, asteroids, comets, moons, planets, and everything and anything else that is smaller, younger, with a shorter lifespan, or less energetic.

That analogy really cracked me up since we have no idea what it's like to be a tree either.

Why would it be terrified? It doesn't have an amygdala.

> Why would it be terrified? It doesn't have an amygdala.

because your intellect would grasp the immense heaviness to realize you're mortal, that your ego will end.

I get that it would understand mortality and all. What I mean is, terror is a very specific, mammalian response to a perceived threat. There are unimaginably more possible responses to that realization than terror. Terror makes sense for immediate, fleeting threats, but I doubt a galactic scale awareness would develop that specific mechanism.

Because you perceive the galaxy as being on a railroad? Why? Doesn’t Stan look railroaded the way he drives to work, eats lunch, drives home, mows the lawn? Maybe the galaxy, like us,[1] experiences itself as doing things with volition. Which might seem weird given the sheer scale and timespan of a galaxy. But:

> Assuming that the galactic mind works in and through electromagnetic fields, then its thoughts and perceptions must be very slow indeed, by our standards. The radius of the Milky Way is about 50,000 light years, so it would take at least this length of time for the galactic centre to perceive what is happening at the periphery, and as long again for it to act on star systems at the edge.

Instead of having a consciousness that has to wait 50,000 years for some input, it makes more sense for a consciousness to experience time on a scale where input happen in (say) 100ms consciouss-perceived time or so. So what looks like 500,000 years for us is a second to a galaxy.

[1] The HN philosophers can argue about free will or not but here only the feeling of having it is relevant