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> What creatures would form under an intense magnetic field? In methane? In close orbit around a dim star? In a hot cloud nebula? Before the question of what y

> What creatures would form under an intense magnetic field? In methane? In close orbit around a dim star? In a hot cloud nebula? Before the question of what you have the question of if. Then you have the question of continuous constraints. Sensitive dependence on initial conditions still has to operate in a constraint space, and maybe constraints for complex adaptive living systems are much tighter to begin with. Tornados are also sensitive to initial conditions, they are even self organizing, but they are not living beings for example. Imagination is fine when you’re not burdened by starting a working system from first principles. Conceivable sounds probable when you know less about the constraints.

rendall 5y ago
> Before the question of what you have the question of if. Meh. I mean, sure, when all is said and done, everything is constrained by physics and chemistry and imagination has no bearing on this reality. On that we agree, to the point that stating it outright is almost a non-sequitur: a true statement that has no relevance to the discussion at hand. Human culture, in the 400 years of since the first glimmering of the scientific method, has made gigantic leaps in understanding objective truths about our Universe and what lies within it. At every step, highly educated people confidently assert that we know all that is worth knowing and everything henceforth will just be filling in the details. At every step, these assertions have been a failure of imagination. I can confidently state with only historical evidence to go by that our current understanding of the Universe is deeply flawed and will be completely overturned someday. Or if not, it would be because we're just not intelligent enough as a species to do it, and not because we know it all* It is this sense that I mean, when I say that asserting all life throughout the Universe will have forms like those found here, is a failure of the imagination. * Everything that we ever will discover is constrained by the form of our bodies, our evolutionary history, our psychology, and to a lesser degree by our cultural outlook and worldview. There are truths about the universe that are literally forever beyond our discovering because we are incapable of discovering them.** Were we to encounter alien entities that made use of such hypothetically inaccessible principles, especially if their physical forms were based on them in some way, we would literally not understand what we're looking at. ** As an aside, that is my favorite explanation for the Fermi Paradox, that the interstellar cosmos is thrumming with the signs of life and civilization, but we only partly and minimally understand what we're looking at, and so miss these signs.

rendall 5y ago

> Before the question of what you have the question of if. Meh. I mean, sure, when all is said and done, everything is constrained by physics and chemistry and imagination has no bearing on this reality. On that we agree, to the point that stating it outright is almost a non-sequitur: a true statement that has no relevance to the discussion at hand. Human culture, in the 400 years of since the first glimmering of the scientific method, has made gigantic leaps in understanding objective truths about our Universe and what lies within it. At every step, highly educated people confidently assert that we know all that is worth knowing and everything henceforth will just be filling in the details. At every step, these assertions have been a failure of imagination. I can confidently state with only historical evidence to go by that our current understanding of the Universe is deeply flawed and will be completely overturned someday. Or if not, it would be because we're just not intelligent enough as a species to do it, and not because we know it all* It is this sense that I mean, when I say that asserting all life throughout the Universe will have forms like those found here, is a failure of the imagination. * Everything that we ever will discover is constrained by the form of our bodies, our evolutionary history, our psychology, and to a lesser degree by our cultural outlook and worldview. There are truths about the universe that are literally forever beyond our discovering because we are incapable of discovering them.** Were we to encounter alien entities that made use of such hypothetically inaccessible principles, especially if their physical forms were based on them in some way, we would literally not understand what we're looking at. ** As an aside, that is my favorite explanation for the Fermi Paradox, that the interstellar cosmos is thrumming with the signs of life and civilization, but we only partly and minimally understand what we're looking at, and so miss these signs.