tuco - it is painfully obvious to anyone looking at this exchange that you have not understood what your interlocutors are saying and are responding to points they have not made.

As far as point scoring in exchanges go, you have yet to reach the lofty heights of zero.

Ah, but one may aspire, Sendraks

Nicko wrote:

solazy wrote:Where are they?

Ah, the Fermi Paradox.

The answer to which is the Great Filter.

Essentially, as a civilisation attains the ability to contact another solar system, it must necessarily develop the ability to destroy itself. Given the systemic risk posed by such an ability, one would expect most such civilisations to fail to pass this test.

It occurs to me that the Great Filter might take another form: a civilisation that fails to free itself from it's planet of origin before that planet's fossil fuels are exhausted, probably just stays there.

Hey Nicko, that 'o' isn't short for [Nick] Bostrom is it?

I'm a huge fan, I don't agree with everything he says of course, but he's got fascinating ideas. Another solution to the Fermi Paradox is what I mentioned earlier, another is that advanced civilizations, after going trans-[alien species], acquiring 'brains' that can think billions, maybe trillions, of times faster than we can, will live subjective lives at an astronomical rate. This results in them realizing the utter horror of boredom, which arises rapidly and often, and also causing them to fully comprehend the absurdity of everything, so each and every one of them terminate their operations soon after reaching the trans stage, though it could be millions of lives in subjective time, or maybe better thought as 'amount of thought' time.

Do you?

crank wrote:

Nicko wrote:

solazy wrote:Where are they?

Ah, the Fermi Paradox.

The answer to which is the Great Filter.

Essentially, as a civilisation attains the ability to contact another solar system, it must necessarily develop the ability to destroy itself. Given the systemic risk posed by such an ability, one would expect most such civilisations to fail to pass this test.

It occurs to me that the Great Filter might take another form: a civilisation that fails to free itself from it's planet of origin before that planet's fossil fuels are exhausted, probably just stays there.

Hey Nicko, that 'o' isn't short for [Nick] Bostrom is it?

I'm a huge fan, I don't agree with everything he says of course, but he's got fascinating ideas. Another solution to the Fermi Paradox is what I mentioned earlier, another is that advanced civilizations, after going trans-[alien species], acquiring 'brains' that can think billions, maybe trillions, of times faster than we can, will live subjective lives at an astronomical rate. This results in them realizing the utter horror of boredom, which arises rapidly and often, and also causing them to fully comprehend the absurdity of everything, so each and every one of them terminate their operations soon after reaching the trans stage, though it could be millions of lives in subjective time, or maybe better thought as 'amount of thought' time.

That is the cartesian error that brains (or minds or souls or spirits) are separate from bodies. I suggest reading Humboldt, De Waal, Claxton...

Are you calling me a dualist? Thems dualing words!

I don't think the cartesian error is about this. That's putting des carte before the horse. Or something like that. Descartes's error was, in simple terms, in believing that thinking was done by some immaterial thing. Rejecting dualism says nothing about creating minds without brains as we know them today. It will not be all that long before we have computers with the processing power of a human mind, that isn't saying that it could simulate a brain to any useful degree, but that will come in time It's inevitable, assuming we keep progressing scientifically and technically and don't off ourselves, or create an AI that turns us all into paper clips, but that is actually offing ourselves also.

What I am discussing is how intelligence and bodies cannot be separated- the octopus is the classic example, but how we perceive the universe is utterly dependent on our senses, and abilities to handle and move.

Artificial intelligence will not get it until it is also going through all human developmental processes including epigenetics and the whole system processes that we are - we are not things but verbs. Some sci-fi has got this - complex adaptive dynamic systems.

On Descartes, we reify sight, when that is a klugy process. We are too used to framing things, in photography, tv, film. But our critical sense is actually touch, all the senses are specialisms of skin, which is about relations with the surrounding world and universe.

So if we find aliens, communicating with them will be about working out how they relate to the universe, with their set of senses and prostheses.

Computers are a blind alley - they are too specialised in a very small set of ways of interacting with the universe.

I think we all have dualist assumptions almost hard wired in us - cognitive behavioural therapy is a classic actually meaningless formulation, because cognition and behaviour do not exist separately! So the huge problem is about working out where these assumptions are, but how we all write and think is framed by these myths!

Nicely said. However, robots have potential we might never have due to our biological limitations - computing speed and memory capacity or sensor variety and accuracy, to name two. Then again, its my opinion that its quite foolish to make even remotely serious predictions in this regard 1000, 100 000 or 100 000 000 years ahead. We've been watching the skies, as far as we know, for couple of centuries at best, more like couple of decades, and we ask: Where are they? Please, have another beer bro.

Role model Quark :)

I'd really like to know why so many Americans are obsessed with aliens.
As many as 48% believe in UFO's.
27% believe aliens have visited earth.
2% have been victims of abduction.
66 million in Roswell (when there is perfectly plausible explanation).
Women who have given birth to human-alien hybrids, and others who have been subjected to sexual exploitation from an early age.
Sleep paralysis is one possible explanation, media mass hallucination another.
Then there's Stephen Hawking who is clearly worried about our vulnerability.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/201 ... n-new-film

Hands up all those who think Verne and Wells are to blame.

Because they landed right in our backyard!! In Roswell! Why wouldn't we believe in them?

solazy wrote:I'd really like to know why so many Americans are obsessed with aliens.
As many as 48% believe in UFO's.
27% believe aliens have visited earth.
2% have been victims of abduction.
66 million in Roswell (when there is perfectly plausible explanation).
Women who have given birth to human-alien hybrids, and others who have been subjected to sexual exploitation from an early age.
Sleep paralysis is one possible explanation, media mass hallucination another.
Then there's Stephen Hawking who is clearly worried about our vulnerability.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/201 ... n-new-film

Hands up all those who think Verne and Wells are to blame.

Where the hell did you get those stats?

2% believe they've been abducted? That seems just a tad high... Maybe 2% THINK other people have been abducted by aliens?

97% dunno who Verne nor Wells is. Hollywood, as noted, could be.

PensivePenny wrote:

solazy wrote:I'd really like to know why so many Americans are obsessed with aliens.
As many as 48% believe in UFO's.
27% believe aliens have visited earth.
2% have been victims of abduction.
66 million in Roswell (when there is perfectly plausible explanation).
Women who have given birth to human-alien hybrids, and others who have been subjected to sexual exploitation from an early age.
Sleep paralysis is one possible explanation, media mass hallucination another.
Then there's Stephen Hawking who is clearly worried about our vulnerability.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/201 ... n-new-film

Hands up all those who think Verne and Wells are to blame.

Where the hell did you get those stats?

2% believe they've been abducted? That seems just a tad high... Maybe 2% THINK other people have been abducted by aliens?

4 million.
http://www.csicop.org/si/show/abduction ... _paralysis

Still don't know why in America, but not in Europe.

solazy wrote:

PensivePenny wrote:

solazy wrote:I'd really like to know why so many Americans are obsessed with aliens.
As many as 48% believe in UFO's.
27% believe aliens have visited earth.
2% have been victims of abduction.
66 million in Roswell (when there is perfectly plausible explanation).
Women who have given birth to human-alien hybrids, and others who have been subjected to sexual exploitation from an early age.
Sleep paralysis is one possible explanation, media mass hallucination another.
Then there's Stephen Hawking who is clearly worried about our vulnerability.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/201 ... n-new-film

Hands up all those who think Verne and Wells are to blame.

Where the hell did you get those stats?

2% believe they've been abducted? That seems just a tad high... Maybe 2% THINK other people have been abducted by aliens?

4 million.
http://www.csicop.org/si/show/abduction ... _paralysis

Still don't know why in America, but not in Europe.

Thanks for the link (I think). You read the whole thing? When you asked "Why are so many Americans obsessed with Aliens?" I thought, I don't know anyone... in fact we often use "alien abduction" as a dog whistle for someone who's cuckoo

From the link, I didn't read the whole thing, it seems a "study" determined 2% of some "represented sample," a subset of "Americans," not all Americans were asked 5 questions. If they answer yes to 4 of the 5 questions, then they have obviously been abducted... sound science there, no? Below are the 5 questions.

1) “Waking up paralyzed with a sense of a strange person or presence or something else in the room” (18 percent);
2) “Feeling that you were actually flying through the air although you didn't know why or how” (10 percent);
3) “Experiencing a period of time of an hour or more, in which you were apparently lost, but you could not remember why, or where you had been” (13 percent);
4) “Seeing unusual lights or balls of light in a room without knowing what was causing them, or where they came from” (8 percent); and
5) “Finding puzzling scars on your body and neither you nor anyone else remembering how you received them or where you got them” (8 percent).

There is nothing that says those 4 million represented people (or even the 119 fitting the criteria) have any thought whatsoever about aliens. Clearly, the person or persons involved might be "obsessed," but I think that is about the only practical conclusion one could make.

solazy wrote:

PensivePenny wrote:

solazy wrote:I'd really like to know why so many Americans are obsessed with aliens.
As many as 48% believe in UFO's.
27% believe aliens have visited earth.
2% have been victims of abduction.
66 million in Roswell (when there is perfectly plausible explanation).
Women who have given birth to human-alien hybrids, and others who have been subjected to sexual exploitation from an early age.
Sleep paralysis is one possible explanation, media mass hallucination another.
Then there's Stephen Hawking who is clearly worried about our vulnerability.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/201 ... n-new-film

Hands up all those who think Verne and Wells are to blame.

Where the hell did you get those stats?

2% believe they've been abducted? That seems just a tad high... Maybe 2% THINK other people have been abducted by aliens?

4 million.
http://www.csicop.org/si/show/abduction ... _paralysis

Still don't know why in America, but not in Europe.

Not that it matters but ..

MOST PEOPLE BELIEVE INTELLIGENT ALIENS EXIST, POLL SAYS

Are we alone in the universe? Most Americans, Brits and Germans think that we are not. In fact, a new poll shows that slightly more than half of respondents from each country think that intelligent alien life exists.

The poll, conducted by the market-research company YouGov, found the Germans are most likely to believe, at 56 percent, followed by Americans and British, at 54 and 52 percent, respectively.

http://europe.newsweek.com/most-people- ... 3839?rm=eu

---

Germans lol

I believe intelligent aliens probably exist or have existed at some point. Probability says they do. I just don't believe they've been to this solar system.

I have no way to confirm nor deny such information because, no surprise here, how to calculate this stuff? How to calculate if someone wants to meet us or not? Fermi and Drake fucked.