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This puts so many weird and obviously unproven assumptions on other intelligence that it's hard to take seriously. It's not obvious that morals at all are nece
by wheels 5y ago
This puts so many weird and obviously unproven assumptions on other intelligence that it's hard to take seriously.
It's not obvious that morals at all are necessary for intelligence.
It's not obvious that another intelligence encountered would come from a society rather than being a single evolved entity and as such would have had any reason to develop empathy.
It's not obvious that another intelligence would see us as an earlier state of itself.
It's possible that other intelligence is so different than us that it wouldn't recognize us as being alive in the way that it is.
There are just so many unknowns that it's very difficult to reason about. If any of these statements seems suspect, keep in mind that humans held these to be true of chimpanzees just a few decades ago, and other humans a few centuries ago, and we're literally as close as it gets.
- RappingBoomer 5y agoyeah, all these pundits have no idea about anything regarding aliens...what do they really know? It's all pure speculation, mostly nonsense..
- gilmore606 5y ago> from a society rather than being a single evolved entity Evolution happens to populations, not entities. I think this is one assumption that's pretty firmly grounded.
- wheels 5y agoIt does here; there's nothing that guarantees that it would elsewhere. Taking our biology as a starting point, imagine that red blood cells reproduced independently, and could compete and be upgraded within the organism with no loss of consciousness. There are a bajillion other mechanisms the same thing could happen.
- gilmore606 5y agoYou mean if blood cells were selected by the environment, and thus experienced evolution within their population? I cannot see how 'evolution' is a concept that makes sense outside of populations, is what I'm saying, so I don't think we have any plausible mechanisms whereby complex lifeforms can exist without this process. So I'd rank the epistemic status of "single lifeform that evolved outside of any population of similar" about equal with Russell's teapot.
- wheels 5y agoTo some extent, yes, I could imagine external intelligence arising in something that approximates a colony rather than a single organism. There are a bunch of (much simpler) examples of that on Earth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colony_(biology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colony_(biology) It's not a giant stretch from that to imagine evolution happening within the components of the colony.