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What would you say are the nonreligious answers to the same question?
by OscarCunningham 6y ago
What would you say are the nonreligious answers to the same question?
- idlewords 6y agoI 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.