Vs. the reality is that the the whole process is just as deterministic and conscious-free as water flowing downhill. And after para 3, the article's tone and language change to straight & sober science.
For example, suppose I ask 100 people to memorize a list of fifty words, and then I ask you which word was a food item. Many people find this challenging.
If I change the experiment so that I tell a story using all fifty words, and then ask you "what did the grandmother have for breakfast?", you're much more likely to do better.
True, but orthogonal to my point. Outside of myth, fantasy novels, and children's stories, most writing about destructive natural phenomena does not anthropomorphize Mount St. Helens as it erupted, the asteroid which hit the Moon to create Tycho Crater, the solar flare which caused the Carrington Event, etc.
- roaring
- belching
- "[knocked down] millions of trees [...] like a giant playing pick-up sticks"
- slumbering
- menacing
That all sounds very anthropomorphic to me.
[0] https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/printout/0,8816,924...
No anthropomorphism there.
This isn't just an analogy, either...if the material happens to be water, it's _literally_ flowing downhill if it's falling into a black hole.
And you think you're so different? Do you have free will? Are you sure you're not just following a deterministic process?
If the boring sort, that wanna-be alphas argue endlessly about in Philosophy 507, then "no".
If the sort that real people need to have a sense of, to cope with life in the real world, then "yes". Given ~40 bytes of data about a black hole, its behavior can be predicted, exactly enough for ~all real-world purposes, and for millions of years into the future, by a pretty simple program running on a (say) old Z80 CPU. You can drop a billion empty beer cans into it, one by one, and if you match their trajectories then the outcomes will be ~identical. Humans, or even my sister's stupid pet dog, are nothing remotely resembling that predictable and deterministic.