4 ms·
Aliens don't exist? You seem very certain of that
by arrow7000 4y ago
Aliens don't exist? You seem very certain of that
- gardenhedge 4y agoI'm pretty certain. It just doesn't make sense for (intelligent) aliens to be out there.
- pfdietz 4y agoThe Fermi argument is on your side. Not a proof, of course.
- arrow7000 4y agoWhy not? We know of one occurrence of intelligent life. It would be pretty weird if it happened exactly once and no more
- gardenhedge 4y agoWhy would that be weird?
- pfdietz 4y agoObserver selection bias makes our own existence entirely irrelevant to the question of whether there are other intelligences out there.
- arrow7000 4y agoSelection bias notwithstanding, we exist, which means life evolved at least once. If the universe can give rise to life it would be extremely odd that it did so exactly once.
- pfdietz 4y ago"Extremely odd" is just handwaving here, an argument from personal incredulity. Regardless of how rare we are, we'd always observe ourselves. Therefore nothing can be deduced from our own existence.
- anotherman554 4y agoYou've created an axiom that says "randomized sample sizes are the only source of knowledge". So of course it follows that you keep saying we know nothing about aliens and must reject speculation from what we know of the laws of physics. But it's only as true as the axiom that led you to that conclusion. It doesn't strike me as a very compelling argument. In practice, every human believes things that don't have random sample sizes that prove their existence.
- pfdietz 4y agoNo, I'm just pointing out that regardless of how rare we are, we'd see ourselves. Our observation of ourselves is consistent with any theory where the probability that we would exist is > 0. Therefore, such an observation cannot rule out any such value for p. Randomized sample size (whatever the hell you mean by that) has nothing to do with anything.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- anotherman554 4y agoOkay, I think I understand you now. You are making a well debated philosophical argument which appears to fall under the term "anthropic objection", and philosophers have defended or attacked your position. (though it gets a bit confusing since some of the discussion has been around intelligent life in the universe in the context of religious beliefs, and other versions have nothing to do with religion.) I found one rebuttal here saying that applying your line of reasoning to other topics besides the existence of intelligent life leads to absurd results: "Critics of the anthropic objection argue that Sober’s reasoning delivers highly implausible results when transferred to examples where rational inferences are less controversial. Most famous is Leslie’s firing squad (Leslie 1989: 13f.), in which a prisoner expects to be executed by a firing squad but, to his own surprise, finds himself alive after all the marksmen have fired and wonders whether they intended to miss. The firing squad scenario involves an observation selection effect because the prisoner cannot contemplate his post-execution situation unless he somehow survives the execution. His observations, in other words, are “biased” towards finding himself alive (see Juhl [2007] and Kotzen [2012] for further useful examples). Sober’s analysis, applied to the firing squad scenario, suggests that it would not be rational for the prisoner to suspect that the marksmen intended to miss (unless independent evidence suggests so) because that would mean overlooking the observation selection effect that he faces. But, as Leslie, Weisberg (2005) and Kotzen (2012) argue, this recommendation seems very implausible." https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/fine-tuning/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/fine-tuning/ Obviously we are not going to settle the matter today on which philosophers are right or wrong, but it's been fun.