5 ms·

This is just the same set of anxieties and hopes, ultimately religious in nature, that surround "superintelligence", except this time projected into space.

OscarCunningham 6y ago
What would you say are the nonreligious answers to the same question?
- idlewords 6y ago
  I think the answer requires more epistemic humility. You can't anticipate the behavior of a hyperintelligent entity (almost by definition) even if you build it right in your own lab. And about the only thing we know about aliens is that they'll be alien. So right there you have two dimensions of "unknown unknowns" that this analysis sweeps aside. The pattern that I find distasteful in this kind of thinking is deducing universal rules of complex behavior from a few first principles. A good analogue of this is the Cold War era infatuation with game theory, as it would pertain to nuclear war, or many simple models of economics. We know that in reality, human beings are quite complex, and their actual behavior bears no relationship to such "first principles" models, no matter how persuasive their authors find them. Yet we have the advantage of being human and understanding our own thinking. The idea that we could be more successful making such inferences from first principles about non-human, hyperintelligent entities, when we can't do it for ourselves, is laughable. Even such basic questions like "does life always arise from Darwinian evolution" or "what is the physical basis of consciousness" are open. So in a strong sense we know nothing at all about the nature of intelligent life in the Universe, except that it happened at least once, and caused everyone no end of trouble.
zackmorris 6y ago
Ya I was just thinking that the fact we haven't discovered aliens is strong evidence of new physics. Otherwise we'd see their electromagnetic emissions everywhere. I tend to think that we're just 1 or 2 discoveries away from a very different view of the universe. The low hanging fruit being stuff like: detecting neutrinos cheaply, having a better understanding of quantum computing/entanglement/etc, knowing how the extra dimensions at subatomic levels work (and how a dimension might be lost/gained or open up sub-universes within black holes), understanding how the electromagnetic/strong/weak/gravity forces converge at high energies and how to modulate one or more with the others, etc. If we're able to take all that stuff for granted, then the answer is probably that aliens communicate over some kind of encrypted quantum communication channel over something like neutrinos that is very hard to detect. They probably live around energy sources like magnetars and black holes and such so there's no way we'll ever see them against that glare. And their brains have almost certainly been uploaded to a metaverse that we have difficulty imagining, where our whole planet's computation would fit on a microscopic chip of theirs. I guess what I'm saying is, we might be more likely to find aliens through an altered state than out in space. They're probably here right now waiting for a knock on the door, once we know which door we're looking for. So yes, their superintelligent technology that's indistinguishable from magic to us might as well be religion at this point.
- sliken 6y ago
  How far exactly do you think normal electromagnetic radiation could be detected from? What percent of the galaxy do you think we could detect an expanse like civilization from?

OscarCunningham 6y ago

What would you say are the nonreligious answers to the same question?

idlewords 6y ago
I think the answer requires more epistemic humility. You can't anticipate the behavior of a hyperintelligent entity (almost by definition) even if you build it right in your own lab. And about the only thing we know about aliens is that they'll be alien. So right there you have two dimensions of "unknown unknowns" that this analysis sweeps aside. The pattern that I find distasteful in this kind of thinking is deducing universal rules of complex behavior from a few first principles. A good analogue of this is the Cold War era infatuation with game theory, as it would pertain to nuclear war, or many simple models of economics. We know that in reality, human beings are quite complex, and their actual behavior bears no relationship to such "first principles" models, no matter how persuasive their authors find them. Yet we have the advantage of being human and understanding our own thinking. The idea that we could be more successful making such inferences from first principles about non-human, hyperintelligent entities, when we can't do it for ourselves, is laughable. Even such basic questions like "does life always arise from Darwinian evolution" or "what is the physical basis of consciousness" are open. So in a strong sense we know nothing at all about the nature of intelligent life in the Universe, except that it happened at least once, and caused everyone no end of trouble.

zackmorris 6y ago

Ya I was just thinking that the fact we haven't discovered aliens is strong evidence of new physics. Otherwise we'd see their electromagnetic emissions everywhere. I tend to think that we're just 1 or 2 discoveries away from a very different view of the universe. The low hanging fruit being stuff like: detecting neutrinos cheaply, having a better understanding of quantum computing/entanglement/etc, knowing how the extra dimensions at subatomic levels work (and how a dimension might be lost/gained or open up sub-universes within black holes), understanding how the electromagnetic/strong/weak/gravity forces converge at high energies and how to modulate one or more with the others, etc. If we're able to take all that stuff for granted, then the answer is probably that aliens communicate over some kind of encrypted quantum communication channel over something like neutrinos that is very hard to detect. They probably live around energy sources like magnetars and black holes and such so there's no way we'll ever see them against that glare. And their brains have almost certainly been uploaded to a metaverse that we have difficulty imagining, where our whole planet's computation would fit on a microscopic chip of theirs. I guess what I'm saying is, we might be more likely to find aliens through an altered state than out in space. They're probably here right now waiting for a knock on the door, once we know which door we're looking for. So yes, their superintelligent technology that's indistinguishable from magic to us might as well be religion at this point.

sliken 6y ago
How far exactly do you think normal electromagnetic radiation could be detected from? What percent of the galaxy do you think we could detect an expanse like civilization from?