Gibbonstrength posted:think about all the hidden premises contained in this argument. its assuming that 1. communism is the predefined outcome for all intelligent life and b. that notions like technology, development, society, etc., are something that apply to all intelligent life too, regardless of their circumstances.
if anything this kind of thing always strikes me as a lack of imagination about how genuinely alien an alien organism would be.
"Communism," "technology," "development," "society" are not human qualities though. They, like life, are properties of a thermodynamically ordered environment. The iron catastrophe gave earth an exceptional ability to shield its emergent biology from radiation and sublimation, both terrific vectors for entropy. The crust of the earth and its toppings are essentially a massive slab of potential energy. Earth life was only able to go multicellular by trapping energy on a half-billion-year timescale - catching it and then sequestering it - and this is probably true anywhere since you can't maintain thermodynamic order if you're shitting heat all over your own face. So I don't think what you're saying about divergent evolution means much. Aliens still have to interact with physical matter and, for us to use the word "intelligent," have some kind of discernable intention in a human-comprehensible timescale and "mode" of existence (ie. aliens made of 10000ly filaments of gravitons can fuck off)
its not really surprsiing, since octopuses are so "alien". they evolved their cognitive abilities seperate to us, in a different context. they have a totally different body and way of interacting with the world and others. they can stretch their body to any size, it can engage very flexibly with their world. their limbs are totally prehensile and lack predefined joints. their brain is distributed throughout their limbs and hence their experience of the world and others will be nothing like ours. their society is weird and we don't understand any of their social behaviours, like the weird gesturing and boxing stuff they do. there are no human analogues.
They didn't necessarily evolve their cognitive abilities separate to us. It's not like the internal monologue is the seat of human volition. They have a central body and limbs and do plenty of things we understand, like mating, grazing, hunting, hiding, escaping.. I can think of analogues. We even eat some of the same stuff. It just really doesn't matter how intelligent they are or what "kind" of intelligence they have, because the question of leaving a big rock and travelling through space is not about intelligence, it's about energy management.
Gibbonstrength posted:true i should have just said Read Lem (readlem.org)
swampman posted:10000ly filaments of gravitons can fuck off
Perhaps a talking points style front page article?
edit: you know, so everyone knows rhizzone can tackle the big issues. (The internet is making this sound facetious, not me)
The grey area (no pun intended) of mass comprehension on ET issues is a surprisingly implicative and murky territory. I think this conversation really elucidates a lot of false positives of the field.
That's all.
swampman posted:It's not like the internal monologue is the seat of human volition.
catchphrase
swampman posted:you can't maintain thermodynamic order if you're shitting heat all over your own face
But enough about your posts
- Occasionally someone will launch a little capsule of tardigrades out toward the heliosphere but hyper advanced tardigrades always tunnel in from the future and blow it up to stop themselves existing
- Aliens dont like to be called aliens they prefer otherkin.
- IMO we should probably come up with an explanation for the garbage that doesnt make us look likecomplete morons
- George W Bush, David Frum and Bhaskar Sunkara, and also Kid Rock and Bono are all a kind of alien known as Reptilian. If youve ev er seen the movie Men in Black, you might have formed a wrong idea about how aliens exist on earth. Its a lot more like an infilitration of the highest power structures by lizard aliens called Reptilians, fyi.
- The scariest aliens would actually be alien fleas or ticks. Gross!
swampman posted:They didn't necessarily evolve their cognitive abilities separate to us. It's not like the internal monologue is the seat of human volition. They have a central body and limbs and do plenty of things we understand, like mating, grazing, hunting, hiding, escaping.. I can think of analogues. We even eat some of the same stuff. It just really doesn't matter how intelligent they are or what "kind" of intelligence they have, because the question of leaving a big rock and travelling through space is not about intelligence, it's about energy management.
i see the move you're making here. you're defining technology (for instance) as something that's reducible to some basic features of physics. like technology is objectively a thing, because it's really just about thermodynamics or whatever. it can be boiled down to a few physical processes that are universal wherever you are or live in the universe, or whatever kind of being you are.
if you define things this way, then you're making technology just an elaboration on thermodynamics, so everyone will be able to engage in technology/technological progress etc. no matter where you are or what body or kind of mind you have, you'll be doing technology and society and communism in the same way that physics is going to be the same everywhere.
but the problem is that this redefinition of technology is plainly wrong. i don't think its controversial to say that phenomena like life and mind and technology are not just thermodynamics. even if you were a radical reductionist (which I doubt since you're a Marxist) you'd still require a pile of elaboration on the phenomenon beyond "its all thermodynamics". i mean it's trivially correct that the activities involved in doing these activities involve processes that can be described in terms of thermodynamics. like yeah being alive and doing stuff while alive can be described in terms of entropy or free energy. but you're not really describing (let alone explaining) the same phenomenon anymore. we're not talking about technology in this case; we're talking about the appearance of thermodynamic principles in nature. i can take the same approach to life and say hey, being a living thing is a situation where there's a high concentration of covalent bonds. sure, that's trivially correct, but it's not actually describing the phenomenon (life) but just pointing to a substrate that it supervenes on.
also cephalopods did evolve their whole nervous apparatus (and sensory organs) seperately from us, so their cognition and ours do not have a common origin.
Also arguing that communism only makes sense for the specific human psychology and biological needs sounds no more valid than the usual "human nature" arguments against it.
likely: Alien is a masterpiece of film
swampman posted:Unlikely: aliens will visit earth Likely: aliens already visited earth Discuss
I know your just joking around but that chariots of the gods/ancient aliens shit is super racist
cars posted:how did people miss that tears admitted to being a fuckin alien???!!? I cant even.
Didn't tears also admit to being AI in another thread? Didn't really strike me as weird...
Unlikely: peaceful, benevolent "we're just taking a look around the universe" aliens.
Likely: Incomprehensibly rich Capitalists separation from "mortal endeavors" gets them so drunk on their own privilege they start believing they are the aliens and just keep being rich and laughing gluttonously.
levoydpage posted:cars posted:
Didn't tears also admit to being AI in another thread? Didn't really strike me as weird...
that was me actually