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Alien Truth

• mberning 4y ago
  I didn’t realize that the concept of absolute or universal truths was so boring that it needed an “ancient aliens” style rebrand.
  • znpy 4y ago
    What did you expect from the idol of the startup scene?
  • felipeccastro 4y ago
    Perhaps it’s not that they are boring, but fearful. I can’t recall a single time I mentioned these words in a conversation that weren’t abruptly interrupted with “there is no absolute truth!”. If the rebranding helps us calm down and think about it without fear, it might be worth it.
• bkishan 4y ago
  Looks like PG was inspired by reading Project Hail Mary, and decided to be philosophical about it :)
• deleted 4y ago
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• blueprint 4y ago
  that's the definition of truth. all truths are fixed.
  • nh23423fefe 4y ago
    lol tarski
    • blueprint 4y ago
      "[when] the inferior scholar hears of Dao, he greatly ridicules it" -laotzu
• mark_l_watson 4y ago
  Perhaps a little off topic, but I have thought about this a bit: the type of consciousness and ways of acting in physical reality would probably be very different for digital vs. biology-based life. As strangely different alien biological life might be, true AI will be stranger, unless it is designed and evolves to emulate us in some sense. I am reading the sci-fi book The Sea of Rust right now, that takes place on earth after AI’s have finally killed the last humans. In this fictional work, AIs take on human traits and I don’t find that “believable” even for sci-fi.
  • gpvos 4y ago
    Indeed. Intelligent alien life is likely to have evolved out of other forms of life, so concepts as competition, survival, cooperation, are likely to be innate somehow (not necessarily in a conscious way). AI does not need to share that basis at all.
  • songeater 4y ago
    I disagree. "AI" even if it were to exist independently of humans or other pre-existing life still needs to process and dissipate energy in order to perpetuate itself... ie it needs to be "life" first. Intelligence requires the processing of information, and the processing of information requires energy. For example, even if silicon-based AI replaced humans on earth, it would eventually [0] need to find a way to power itself / continue itself. Ultimately, it would have to revert to solving the same "problem of life"... how do we transform energy/entropy available in the environment into something that "perpetuates the system." When that happens, this AI will itself become subject to the forces of natural-selection, and - over a long enough period of time - naturally-selected traits will be re-aquired (even if such traits were "lost" during a human-to-AI hand-over). [0] Yes, of course, there could be a very large period of time during which currently constructed energy infrastructure continues on... and this period could be measured in hundreds/thousands of years... very long in terms of human lifespans, but not in geological terms.
• rrwo 4y ago
  That's a rather naive view of truth. For intuitionistic mathematics (which is very important for theoretical computer science), truth is a mental construct of a proof in a language, and only shared by communicating that construct to other minds. The question is whether we can communicate our mathematics to non-humans, whose senses may be radically different from our own. And likewise, would we be able to understand a non-human proof?
  • jondeval 4y ago
    > That's a rather naive view of truth. I'm a puzzled by the confidence here. I would assume pg is at least minimally familiar with some of the key philosophical themes and schools of thought around this topic. > For intuitionistic mathematics ... truth is a mental construct of a proof in a language, and only shared by communicating that construct to other minds. Even assuming you are fully and accurately representing the intuitionist view, you must be aware that there are competing schools of thought with strong pedigrees, like mathematical platonism, that are grounded in a more realist view of mathematical objects. PG didn't go so far as to stake out that position here in the essay, but his thought experiment leverages a view of mathematical truth that hues closer to this (platonist) camp. > The question is whether we can communicate our mathematics to non-humans ... That is an interesting question, but pg did not ask that question in the essay, and its answer doesn't seem relevant to the point he was trying to make.
    • n4r9 4y ago
      It's Graham's confidence that I (and I think OP) find puzzling. He doesn't say "According to Platonist ideas...", or "In my opinion...". Just "mathematical truths are true by definition". There's a brashness and lack of nuance there that makes me want to stop reading.
      • jondeval 4y ago
        Some of that is a stylistic judgement call on the part of pg. He wants to move quickly to his central idea, not enter into a nuanced discussion of the philosophy of mathematics. I think pg is educated, at least the broad outline, of the age-old controversies in this topic and I'm grateful as a reader that he spares me the details and assumes some preliminary context.
• boh 4y ago
  My dog is an intelligent being and he doesn't share our affinity for math. We have to acknowledge that our concept of intelligence is human-centric. What we interpret as knowledge is based on our specific limitations and perceptions. We don't know what intelligence is and won't necessarily know it when we see it.
  • yetihehe 4y ago
    My dog is pretty dissatisfied when I show him 3 treats and then give him 2, so he has uses for maths, but he can no longer multiply.
  • swalsh 4y ago
    Your dog is unlikely to visit other planets searching for other intelligent life
    • myshpa 4y ago
      Let's hope then that aliens coming here will be vegan. We're not intelligent enough yet not to harm others, or to go to other star systems, or even other galaxies. Would we be considered intelligent, or a source of protein?
  • swader999 4y ago
    Why does my dog growl at my other dog when it tries to eat it's food? It seems to understand subtraction at a basic level.
  • dandanua 4y ago
    Many "successful" humans don't know a lot of math or physics either. It seems you only need to know how to subtract and divide.
  • carapace 4y ago
    Has your dog ever jumped somewhere and landed where he intended to? Has he ever caught a ball or frisbee that you've thrown? If so, then he understands basic calculus. He can't write the equations, but he can solve them.
• ncmncm 4y ago
• mikkergp 4y ago
  I appreciate what he is saying, but this also feels like the speech given at the beginning of a sci-fi/horror movie where you realize you’re completely wrong.
• motohagiography 4y ago
  The beauty of thinking about other civilizations is it provides a due balance for materialist views, where instead of a universal truth, the question becomes what values and principles would be sufficient for us to co-exist with more (and less) advanced beings without respective reduction to foodstuffs, pets, or slavery. To a more advanced civilization, we are chimpanzees who are both outwardly intelligent, but also tremendously dangerous, and so on what basis could they establish trust with us, or could we establish trust with a civilization of others? As Graham notes, math is one indicator that we are capable of apprehending the universe around us, but given the infinity of life and its necessary physical conditions of beginning and ending, and evolving in aggregate using tools and principles, it's not sufficient. Maybe one way to ensure trust is to share DNA, so that we become each other and we are all "us" - or, perhaps the Girardian mimetic concept generalizes such that it is better to preserve our differences so that we are not competitors for the same resources, and so that we can co-exist with an obvious other but without an existential threat or intrinsic power struggles. Are there existing moral or philosophical systems that are suited to this problem? Probably, I'm not a religious scholar, but the golden thread that links them seems pretty consistent in attempting to derive alignment to an external truth. The proto-Christian tribe of Essenes, from whom John the Baptist originates and who was the one who baptized Jesus into what became Christianity (solving a weird bootstrapping problem, imo) espoused the values that became the first Church, so there is a historiographical way of looking at moral systems instead of as dogma. Outside religion, in the search for these values that would be suitable for a community of inhabitants, I've come to suspect this is what freemasonry is about, and while not about aliens, I was impressed by their allegorical emphasis on tools instead of doctrine as the landmarks for discovery. The essential question to me is, once you have accepted there is an other that is greater, or a place that is elsewhere, does it matter whether it's a dude with a beard, multi-armed flying blue people, or an ineffable oneness? That there is a concievable elsewhere beyond your current limits, there must therefore be some point or idea to align and orient yourself to so as to be able to relate to the other beings who have discovered the same point outside our current perspective. It's all very meta, but it implies a logical and even rational case for some guidance or alignment to this otherness to navigate our present, and that isn't material. The value of the idea of an "alien" truth is it is a means to reconcile secular rational thinking and moralism with universal, essential, or spiritual values, and that could be a very useful tool.
• deleted 4y ago
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• zelienople 4y ago
  That is a work of stunning arrogance and foolishness. Math is a game we play in our heads that represents a fictionalized ideal version of reality. An alien intelligence might have realized that two plus two never equals four not because the underlying logic is wrong, but because two does not exist in reality. The idea that the little game of math we play represents an immutable and universal truth is typical of the overwhelming anthropocentrism of our kind.
  • dan_mctree 4y ago
    This is a comment of stunning ignorance. Just because some alien societies will not mimic our rules of addition, we do know for certain it is possible that other societies can build abstract concepts that are isomorphic to those we have. And many of these concepts, such as addition, are very useful. Does this guarantee that aliens come up with the same stuff? No. Does it guarantee that if they did, they would these concepts to the same esteem? No. Is there an element of 'truth' here that can be replicated by others? Absolutely
  • deleted 4y ago
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• incomingpain 4y ago
  I wrote a scifi book in which I wrote 'heaven' as being an alien construct. Somewhere in the universe a tremendously technologically advanced civilization constructed a device which simulates 'heaven' for all people in the universe. Through 'enlightenment' the discoverer is able to bring knowledge of 'heaven' back to their people but in our history how could a figure like Buddha or Jesus post-enlightenment explain aliens and advanced technology. So you end up producing a story at a level of your current day scientific understanding. Fundamentally your message to humanity post-enlightenment would be the rules on how to get to heaven. Which many world-religions classes go into depth. There are fundamental rules that benefit everyone to follow that wouldn't really be inherently human to follow. >We'd probably share Occam's razor. There doesn't seem anything specifically human about any of these ideas. Aliens will also have developed the piano and chess. They are inherent things to discover eventually. Fundmantally a great way to analyze what the rules are would be impossible to list. Just look at the list of crimes in countries which are so large lawyers dont even know them all. So you need a system that's much more simply. Isn't that system 'karma'.
  • bmitc 4y ago
    > Aliens will also have developed the piano and chess. They are inherent things to discover eventually. How could that claim be true? We have highly intelligent beings (i.e., “aliens”) right here on Earth that have not developed these things. These discussions on aliens are often off the rails from the start because they implicitly begin with the assumption that humans are the only intelligent beings on Earth.
    • incomingpain 4y ago
      >How could that claim be true? We have highly intelligent beings (i.e., “aliens”) right here on Earth that have not developed these things. Are you using the 'illegal immigration' definition of alien? >These discussions on aliens are often off the rails from the start because they implicitly begin with the assumption that humans are the only intelligent beings on Earth. Do please elaborate because I don't share this opinion. Do you believe aliens live amongst us?
• deugtniet 4y ago
  I guess I disagree that math and physics are universal truths. For maths, I would say 1+1=2 is a pretty universal truth (although it takes a while to get there in the principa mathematica), but didn't we just invent complex numbers because they are useful? Same goes for physics, the speed of light is the same everywhere, but how quantum mechanics work is still subject to many discussions. Love to hear some thoughts on this, as claiming a whole field as universal truth is something I'm a little uncomfortable with.
  • Koshkin 4y ago
    > because they are useful? But the usefulness is objective, that is, it is not an arbitrary product of the mind but rather it is dictated by the logic of things once the goal is set, so invention (or discovery) of useful things is more or less unavoidable. As to quantum mechanics, you are talking about the variety of interpretations which from the practical standpoint are simply different ways of looking at quantum behavior, which, in turn, sometimes leads to different methods of calculation.
    • mistermann 4y ago
      > But the usefulness is objective, that is, it is not an arbitrary product of the mind but rather it is dictated by the logic of things once the goal is set, so invention (or discovery) of useful things is more or less unavoidable. It certainly seems like it is objective, and often it probably is, but in a more general sense, any instance of "x 'is' y" very often turns out to be subjective very quickly. Even with "is useful", things get complicated if one explicitly injects the dimension of Time into the question (it is there in the first place implicitly, but is easily overlooked).
  • m-watson 4y ago
    I think the argument is mostly that there are universal truths than math and physics describe not that our current level of math and physics are universal truths. So finding an example that we do not understand fully doesn't mean that there aren't truths in other aspects of math and physics. As for things like complex numbers there is an underlying debate that has been around in philosophy of science and math that distinguishes between discovery and invention. Our representation may have been invented but we discovered some thing that works historically and has predictive power.
• deltasevennine 4y ago
  >For example, I think we'd share the principle that a controlled experiment testing some hypothesis entitles us to have proportionally increased belief in it. This isn't even a shared principle among humans. How many experiments does it take for you to have 50% belief in a hypothesis?. What is the number of experiments? It's literally impossible to answer. It's not even clear what "belief" is or what 50% means. This ambiguity of the word isn't even the main problem. If I run the same experiment with perfect observational tools 10 billion times and it verifies my hypothesis. Does that raise my belief further? What if on the 10 billionth and first time the test shows a negative result? That literally invalidates the hypothesis. Keep in mind we are assuming my observational tools are perfect. Does this make my belief shoot down to zero? If this possibility of a negative result remains true after any number of tests then what does it say about belief? Why should I believe anything if a single negative experiment can invalidate 10 billion positive experiments (assuming perfect observational tools of course)? Let me bring a more concrete example. I hypothesize all zebras have stripes. I observe zebras 10 billion times. They all confirm my hypothesis. Then on the 10 billionth and first time I see a zebra with spots. My hypothesis is wrong. This can happen any time. Anyway to bring it back to his point. Don't assume shared axiomatic truths. PG already assumed that it's shared among humans. He's wrong. The nature of science and the scientific method is not universally shared or even fully understood among humans. He's likely also wrong about aliens as he is about humans.
  • naasking 4y ago
    > This isn't even a shared principle among humans. How many experiments does it take for you to have 50% belief in a hypothesis?. What is the number of experiments? It's literally impossible to answer. It's not even clear what "belief" is or what 50% means. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomonoff%27s_theory_of_inductive_inference https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomonoff%27s_theory_of_induc...
    • deltasevennine 4y ago
      A bit of a complicated read. Not sure what you're trying to say here and I don't even completely understand it. But anything that gets into bayesians and frequentists ends in a fundamental divide in humanity. Humans don't agree on which interpretation is correct. Which is the point of everything I wrote. So why would aliens hold this "principle" the same if humans don't even agree on it? PG is wrong. His own principles upended not even by aliens, but by humanity, thus how accurate can his assumptions about universal principles even be? No that accurate imho.
• jefftk 4y ago
  In addition to alien truth there are probably also alien games: ones so simple for their level of depth and enjoyment that you would expect them to be independently discovered. For example, Hex [1] is reasonably deep and has been invented at least twice. Go, with something like the Tromp-Taylor rules [2] might be as well? Probably not Chess, though! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hex_(board_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hex_(board_game) [2] https://senseis.xmp.net/?TrompTaylorRules https://senseis.xmp.net/?TrompTaylorRules
• bmitc 4y ago
  > The truths of mathematics would be the same, because they're true by definition. Ditto for the truths of physics These are pretty strong statements for which there’s no arguments provided for but serve as assumptions for the rest of the article. I don’t think there’s consensus among mathematicians, philosophers, cognitive scientist, or biologists on this. Mathematics is most definitely a human endeavor, and so we can’t really make claims about its existence in the universe independent of humans. I think alien analogs to mathematics are unlikely to match ours. If we are lucky, I think it could be the case that the various structures could be similar, but the likelihood the implementations resemble each other are slim. It’s even a stretch to assume the structures would relate. Even humans do not fully agree on mathematics. There is no “one” mathematics because mathematics is the human exploration of idealized objects using a variety of human logical systems. And then there’s the possibility that our mathematics and overall perception of reality is shaped by our biology in far deeper ways than we imagine and currently understand.
  • cloogshicer 4y ago
    Fully agreed. These beliefs you quoted from the article, which unfortunately most people don't even recognize as beliefs, form the basis of the dominant religion of the western world (scientism). The worrying thing is that the majority of people who believe in this religion don't even realize they are believers.
    • bmitc 4y ago
      If I am not mistaken, this is similar to what Feyerabend seemed to be on about. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/was-philosopher-paul-feyerabend-really-science-s-worst-enemy/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/was-philoso...
    • gregmac 4y ago
      Science doesn't have "facts" or "truths". It is based on falsifiability: for a theory or hypothesis to be considered scientific it must be able to be tested and conceivably proven false. This is the key difference from religion, which has no such "falsifiability" equivalent. The closest thing to "beliefs" is probably an individual following which of several competing theories is most likely correct -- but there's always the underlying basis that any of them might have evidence showing they're incorrect at any time, and one's view should adjust as a result. Often this comes in the form of deferring to other people or a consensus view, which could be construed as "faith" but is different: If you asked me how the universe exists, I'd say the big bang theory is the best answer we have, but I don't understand enough about the underlying science to explain why nor can my brain comprehend the reality of it. I have no loyalty or allegiance to this view, though; I could be swayed to another theory if the big bang is ever proven false or if a better theory arises. Further reading: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2015/11/why-scientific-faith-isnt-the-same-as-religious-faith/417357/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2015/11/why-scie...
• deleted 4y ago
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• kardianos 4y ago
  I call Alien Truth "What Is". It must form a common reality that each individual can point to and share. More at: https://corinth.kardianos.com/ https://corinth.kardianos.com/
• randallsquared 4y ago
  > I wouldn't want to bet that all intelligent beings would understand the concept of justice, but I wouldn't want to bet against it either. Given that even people (loosely) in the same culture often disagree about what constitutes "justice" and use the term in mutually exclusive ways, we should definitely bet against the proposition that "all intelligent beings" understand it.
  • garbagetime 4y ago
    For a person to have an opinion about what constitutes justice is for them to demonstrate an understanding of the concept of justice (assuming their opinion is cogent). So, if people are disagreeing about what precisely justice is, it actually means that they do understand the concept of justice.
    • koliber 4y ago
      Maybe for some highly abstract definition of justice. But for more everyday use, it's not hard to come up with examples that one society considers just while the other unjust. Justice does not have to be cogent, which is defined as "(of an argument or case) clear, logical, and convincing.". There were and are justice systems that leave out one or more of these ingredients to some extent. Some leave out some logic by presuming the existence of a supernatural being. Some are more authoritarian and not very convincing.
    • Koshkin 4y ago
      But “the concept of justice” is not universal, because it really cannot be understood outside the context of law.
      • garbagetime 4y ago
        > it really cannot be understood outside the context of law What do you mean by that?
        • Koshkin 4y ago
• benjaminjosephw 4y ago
  Would injustice exist in an alien society if that society didn't recognise it as such?
• jondeval 4y ago
  I really liked this essay. It poses some interesting questions, but it's short and it doesn't try to do too much. There is overlap between pg's ideas and what in the classical tradition is called Natural Law Theory. PG may or may not be interested in drawing out the connection, but since he references Aristotle I have to believe he is at least aware of a touch point. To give a distilled definition, Natural Law Theory is the application of the laws of nature to rational creatures. In the context in which NLT developed, the only free rational creature was the human being. But both AI development, and concepts from evolution through natural selection, potentially allow us to apply aspects of the theory to different rational agents.
• rbanffy 4y ago
  > that it would be true for aliens that one can get better at something by practicing I think that one depends a lot on how they learn or can transfer knowledge. We rely on language for it, and language is severely limited - We can't learn olympic gymnastics from watching TV, but a species that could directly transfer memories and behaviors would have a huge leg on us in that regard - I'd assume we'd quickly notice their fast-paced technological advance. Or completely miss it, because they'd anyhilate themselves a couple hours after discovering the military use of nuclear fusion ;-)
• cies 4y ago
  If Occam's razor is presented as a truth (which is pretty subjective, as it depends on what we/someone considers "simple"). Then finding one case where what most people thought was the simple reason, was not actually the reason after evidence came to light, then Occam's razor can be rejected as a theory right? I think this has long happened, and do not understand why this is still presented as "truth". I prefer the standard of truth used by natural-sciences. The rest I find pretty bendable (virology included).
  • naasking 4y ago
    > If Occam's razor is presented as a truth (which is pretty subjective, as it depends on what we/someone considers "simple"). It doesn't though. Firstly, Occam's razor is not about simplicity but about "parsimony". Parsimony is calculated in information theory via Kolmogorov complexity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity This then lets us describe how to do induction so it provably converges in the fastest way possible, Solomonoff Induction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomonoff%27s_theory_of_inductive_inference https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomonoff%27s_theory_of_induc... Arguably, this can be seen as a formalization of the scientific process.
    • mistermann 4y ago
      > It doesn't though. Firstly, Occam's razor is not about simplicity but about "parsimony". Parsimony is calculated in information theory via Kolmogorov complexity In theory perhaps, but in practice it is firstly calculated by the mind of the person who plays the Occam's Razor card, and then subsequently by people who ingest the claim, and typically all participants are performing their calculations using biased heuristics and flawed logic, and have negative interest in what is actually true, or if truth is even reachable.
• amelius 4y ago
  Hopefully they don't share the belief with us that there must be one species conquering them all.
• bo1024 4y ago
  (1) The examples he gives of "non-mathematical" concepts are pretty mathematizable. Randomized controlled testing -- mathematics can prove why this is a good idea. Occam's razor - usefulness can be formalized in the machine learning context. Different conceptions of justice, fairness, etc. can be modeled mathematically (at least certain aspects of them can), which helps one understand and distinguish them. (Examples: utilitarianism, equality of outcome versus equality of opportunity.) (2) The question of "functionally equivalent" is interesting here. If an alien species accurately predicts the trajectory of a complex rocket, many of us would say they must be using math, because we know that our mathematics governs how rockets move. Even if they cannot communicate their method in a way we can understand. Economists sometimes use the phrase "as if", e.g. the alien acts "as if" they have a utility function, regardless of whether that's how they conceptualize their own action. Similarly. they would certainly act "as if" they had math and physics. But the question of whether that would imply they "do", I'm less sure of.
• radford-neal 4y ago
  This essay would benefit from some examples of common beliefs that he thinks are not "Alien Truths", and what he thinks the implications of that are. As it is, I don't really see what he's trying to get at...
• benreesman 4y ago
  • simiones 4y ago
    > There is no distinct identity. You have no power over space time. Agreed. > There is no arrow of time. This is almost certainly wrong. Just because some of our models don't include it, doesn't mean it's not a meaningful physical construct. Show us an egg unscrambling itself, and then we can agree that there is no arrow of time.
  • dang 4y ago
    "Please don't fulminate." "When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. 'That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3' can be shortened to '1 + 1 is 2, not 3." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
• GistNoesis 4y ago
  There is only one truth : There is no single truth ! Is a forest intelligent ? Is a cat intelligent ? Is a human intelligent ? Is a chess program intelligent ? Is a proof-assistant intelligent ? Is a numerical solver intelligent ? Is the universe intelligent ? Depending on your choice of definitions, you can get the answers you like. Some intelligences will be able to comprehend other types of intelligence. Depending on their resources. There is usually a price to be paid, whether in raw computation, memory, or speed. And this price may often induce a hierarchy where the relation is only one way : where the greater intelligence can predict how the states of the lesser one will evolve, but the lesser one can't. Because these resources are of various nature, they generate a Pareto frontier. Only while the resources constraint stay relevant. For example, once you reach enough intelligence, given the rules of tic-tac-toe, you can play the optimal game. Similarly there are end-game tables for chess, that allow computers to play perfectly, but humans must use heuristics because they don't have enough memory. But you can always create a bigger game, or constrain your resources. You can always be a collector of mathematical curiosities, that are in some sense some extrema in the space you chose to restrict yourself to. AI will probably choose to live in constructs, where this dynamic game of collecting resources until they are no longer a constraint is perpetually maintained to keep it interesting, because the alternative omnipotence is no fun. Those constructs will be so disconnected from reality, that we won't be able to acknowledge their existence.
• BiteCode_dev 4y ago
  Just because we use a model of physics to describe our universe doesn't mean aliens would use the same model.
• miki123211 4y ago
  It's also worth thinking about the exact opposite of this, what truths are we least likely to share with aliens? The beauty and importance of art and culture comes to mind, and so does humor and jokes. Try explaining, in scientific terms, what makes a joke funny, and the task turns out to be far harder than expected.
• MichaelZuo 4y ago
  Every pg essay seems to bring out a cohort of nay-sayers and weirdos. Maybe there is also a revealed alien truth somewhere in there about the psychological effects of differences in expertise, knowledge, social status, writing skill, etc...
  • koyanisqatsi 4y ago
    That wouldn't be an alien truth, that would be a mundane fact of human psychology.
    • MichaelZuo 4y ago
      How would you know aliens don't share the same 'mundane facts'? It seems entirely possible.
      • Karunamon 4y ago
        They very well could, but it is plausible that they do not. Certain facets of mathematics however, it is not plausible that they do not share.
      • koyanisqatsi 4y ago
        We could argue about the definitions of "mundane" and "alien" but I've observed the same thing about HN comments and it's not specific to PG essays so that's why I said it is a mundane fact of human psychology.
• 0898 4y ago
  > If there were intelligent beings elsewhere in the universe, they'd share certain truths in common with us. For example, I think we'd share the principle that a controlled experiment testing some hypothesis entitles us to have proportionally increased belief in it. I was thinking more "triangular sandwiches taste better than square ones", but you do you!
• rfreytag 4y ago
  PBS SpaceTime notes the fine structure constant (~1/137) is dimensionless and ubiquitous in physics. As a result, transmitting that ratio would be a good and clear indication we are intelligent enough to have at least that much physics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCSSgxV9qNw&t=564s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCSSgxV9qNw&t=564s This might be better than mathematical constructs which conceivably do not require technology, "just" thought to discover.
  • koyanisqatsi 4y ago
    But this constant is an artifact of our symbolic encoding of universal properties. What reason is there to believe that alien civilizations would encode physics exactly as we do and would recover the same constant?
    • jondeval 4y ago
      > What reason is there to believe that alien civilizations would encode physics exactly as we do and would recover the same constant? There is no reason to believe the symbolic encoding would be the same. For example, if they evolved with 8 fingers instead of 10 they could be driven to encode their symbols in a base 8 system. I think the point of the OP sharing the PBS spacetime video in this context is that we have reason to believe that the fine structure constant is truly constant throughout the universe. So if the aliens have the capability of measuring and reasoning about electron orbitals and their binding properties with nucleus, then there will likely be significant overlap between our mutual concepts of 'fine-structured-constantness'. Just made that word up. :-) This would be independent of encoding scheme and independent of practical communication issues.
      • koyanisqatsi 4y ago
        Right but I can ask the same/similar question. Why would they have particle physics like we do? There are several degrees of freedom in existing mathematical theories of physics and I don't think there is a good reason to expect that electrons would be re-discovered in another encoding of physics by an alien civilization. The entirety of particle physics is contingent on a bunch of mathematical abstractions (e.g. group theory) so then the argument becomes that these abstractions are not contingent discoveries which then fixes the entire mathematical edifice to be the same across all alien life and civilizations. It's an interesting thought exercise but I don't think there is any reason to expect mathematics to be the same across all potential life in the universe. Human mathematics is adapted to human evolutionary contingencies and the same would be true for alien mathematics, physics, and engineering. By definition of "alien" their mathematics would be alien to us and even if there were commonalities they would be very hard to uncover.
• authpor 4y ago
  Why doesn't reader mode work in that webpage? Whatever happened to the (failing) promises of HTML + CSS ? where I was gonna be able to swap out this CSS for whatever I wanted?
• m3kw9 4y ago
  An alien truth that we can derive a lot of alien truth from is that life forms all prefer order rather than chaos. Having life is by itself is a very orderly process in relation to chaos, which implicitly opposes it.
  • m3kw9 4y ago
    one derivative would be discipline vs procrastinating, aliens won’t get far if they didn’t have any discipline. Heck even single cell organisms are highly single track disciplined.
• bobabob 4y ago
  > We'd probably share Occam's razor. There doesn't seem anything specifically human about any of these ideas. Except the fact that humans are the only species that we know so far to have thought about them?
• hlwaters 4y ago
  Timely article to prop up OpenAI.
• li4ick 4y ago
  Yeah, that first paragraph is completely wrong if you think about the universe in terms of computation...
• dr_dshiv 4y ago
  In the late 1600s, Christian Huygens proposed that aliens would share our geometry (circles, spheres, etc) and even our rough musical ratios (like an octave is a doubling of frequency and a fifth is 3:2)
  • elihu 4y ago
    Music is an interesting one. There's a lot of subjectivity in the understanding of music, but there are some very basic principles that seem near-universal in human cultures at least. Octave equivalence, the consonance of small-number frequency ratios. Presumably aliens wouldn't experience music the same way we do, especially if they don't have ears or physical bodies. But music itself might be interesting to them even if they don't really "get" it, due to the mathematical relationships involved. And they might have something analogous that we can't fully understand. On the other hand it's also at least possible that aliens would understand our music perfectly well, and find it boring or atrociously bad due to our obliviousness to phase relationships, or the inherent out-of-tuneness of modern music, or how the tempo of the music is untethered from its pitch, or because our range of human hearing misses out on all the good stuff that happens above 15-20khz.
• kmod 4y ago
  As much as I like PG's writing in general, this is him dipping his toes in waters that are already well studied and coming off as ignorant and/or presumptuous. His very first premise "The truths of mathematics would be the same, because they're true by definition" shows an ignorance of an entire field of discourse called the philosophy of mathematics. Whether aliens would have the same math as us is one of the fundamental questions, and to presume the answer shows a disdain of the existing body of thought on this topic. In particular, we humans still hotly debate which math is the "right" math. Is the axiom of choice "true"? Does it make sense to say that it has a truth value? Is such a truth value amenable to human discovery? Does PG know the answers to all of these questions? PG is either unaware of the human-choice nature of the fundaments of math or he thinks he has special knowledge of it. Either way makes this essay one of my least favorites.
  • danielvaughn 4y ago
    No shade to you personally, but I really dislike this frame of thought. There are mountains and mountains of literature about a great deal of things, no one human can be expected to be aware of them all. Since that is obviously true, the lack of awareness about a single topic isn’t “ignorance” - it’s not like PG studiously ignored all of that literature. More likely he just never came across it, so the more apt word is “unaware” rather than “ignorant”. To criticize someone merely for pondering about a subject they aren’t well-versed in is hostile gatekeeping. I think those who are educated in the relevant subject would do well to be more welcoming and informative to newcomers.
    • apeace 4y ago
      That's true, but this essay is written with an authoritative voice, not a pondering one. PG tends to write as if he is teaching his audience something profound. So I think it's fair to call out when he is wrong or misguided.
      • danielvaughn 4y ago
        This might just be a subjective thing then. My impression was that he was simply following a casual train of thought. I agree with the other comment that my words “hostile gatekeeping” were too strong. I just get irritated with philosophers specifically, because philosophy itself is a normal human experience. Everyone finds themselves thinking about things that veer into philosophical subjects. To even criticize people for doing so without reading the professional literature is just so annoying to me.
• adamc 4y ago
  "The Zoologist's Guide to the Galaxy" covers this, and a lot more: https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Zoologists-Guide-to-the-Galaxy-Audiobook/0593394380 https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Zoologists-Guide-to-the-Galax...
• theboywho 4y ago
  > it would be true for aliens that one can get better at something by practicing We get better by practicing only because of our brain's neuroplasticity, which one might argue, is a mechanism of adaptation, and thus a result of evolution. An intelligent life might have developed other ways of coping with change, and not necessarily through a neuroplastic brain, but for example, through an instant rewiring of the brain that doesn't require any practice. The same can be said for justice, even though it might seem as a social construct, it's still rooted in our biology (emotions are still "physical" reactions in our body) and so an intelligent life might have developed a different biological system different than that of emotions.
  • notshift 4y ago
    > for example, through an instant rewiring of the brain that doesn't require any practice. You might have an alien species that can copy the brain state of someone who already knows a task, or one that can gain skills extremely quickly through practice, but I don't think practice is going away. The fact that neural networks have been the only way we've been able to solve a lot of problems, which approximate the way that the human brain learns, is pretty strong evidence of this. You start out with some weights, you measure loss, you adjust weights, and then you try again. Justice as an emotion might go away or exist in a different form, but the underlying reason why humans have a sense of justice is evolutionary psychology / game theory. Probably any life form which is shaped by evolutionary forces would have some similar instinct. (Certainly not all possible intelligent life forms though, I'd agree.)
    • asdff 4y ago
      > The fact that neural networks have been the only way we've been able to solve a lot of problems, which approximate the way that the human brain learns, is pretty strong evidence of this. Chances are a lot of machine learning implementations can be replaced with just "boring" statistical models and achieve more power. OTOH plenty of creatures don't need to learn. Does a mosquito need to learn? No, it spawns thousands of offspring and doesn't live very long. The high spawn rate means you have a wide variety of natural mutations in your offspring, meaning one or a few of them are likely to have higher fitness in a given niche. It doesn't matter if most die if a few go on to survive. This is the strategy many organisms use to dominate the world in far greater numbers than our own species.
• apriljest 4y ago
  What happens upon contact with aliens? I believe that to be an important question, and one look at the warfaring, fearful history of humankind makes it clear, as best said from the most reprehensible book on philosophy I have ever read: "477. "If intelligent entities from other parts of the universe exist at similar or superior technological levels to ours, would they draw the same or at least similar philosophical conclusions to us?" That is a very good question. And my answer is this. They better f#%*ing do if they want to have any hope of withstanding our relentless, merciless onslaught."
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• jtwebman 4y ago
  So very human of us to think our truths are some other beings truths. Maybe they proved math isn't true? Maybe they don't think in any way like we do.
• koyanisqatsi 4y ago
  Michael Levin has an interesting perspective on this. The idea is that biology and evolution are processes that reveal some inherent and latent universal structures and so they would be the same across all life in the universe even if such life was not carbon based. But at this level of generality it gets pretty abstract and the definition of truth essentially becomes some kind of structural similarity in form and function.
• OscarCunningham 4y ago
  This is a side topic, but does anyone else have problems with the RSS feed for pg's essays? http://paulgraham.com/rss.html http://paulgraham.com/rss.html I regularly find every essay appearing together in my reader, as though they were all new again. Apparently the feed was created by Aaron Swartz himself, so I wouldn't think there would be any errors there. But it looks like it's hosted via Aaron's own site, so perhaps there's some problem caused by it not being maintained?
• gnramires 4y ago
  I personally believe we should also approach ethics from an Alien Truth perspective -- there's a lot of ethics and how we live our lives that's specific to our human being species, but we should expect the principles of human life to be compatible with more general principles, of which ours would be a special case. This really allows having a clearer global picture of ethics, and striving towards progress in ethics and human existence.
• chatterhead 4y ago
  1 + 1 = 3 (Because some aliens understand what state changes occur in the future and the equation is specific to the singularity of something not the progressive time.)
• breckinloggins 4y ago
  > We might find, for example, that it's impossible to create something we'd consider intelligent that doesn't use Occam's razor. We might one day even be able to prove that. I have no idea how one would go about proving this but personally I would start with something like the "Principle of Least Action" applied to thought.
  • carapace 4y ago
    Speaking in broad generalities (heh) Category Theory is what you would use for that (AFAIK.)
    • TuringTest 4y ago
      Because using Category Theory for explaining things is the opposite of applying Occam's Razor? :-P
• deltasevennine 4y ago
  >Justice, for example. I wouldn't want to bet that all intelligent beings would understand the concept of justice, but I wouldn't want to bet against it either. Justice is a biased concept. It's a biological phenomenon. Most of us are born with justice modules in our brain. Certain people aren't, they're called psychopaths and these people are basically proof about the genetic component of justice. Justice is simply a set of behaviors that helps you and your tribe survive from an evolutionary perspective. If you robbed and killed people all the time, well that doesn't help with survival does it? So brains evolve justice modules. There are alternative survival strategies that involve behaviors that are unjustified... and your emotions reflect this possible alternative path. One can be emotionally tempted by unjustified behavior and move in that direction when the situation allows for it. It's all preprogrammed... For PG to talk about justice as possibly universal is like talking about English as possibly universal. Clearly these are biased concepts unique to humanities biological situation. It's unlikely that a frog feels justice simply because the evolutionary pressures to make him feel that way don't exist. Hardly a candidate for even consideration of being universal. There can be aliens that are highly intelligent but anti-social. Such creatures have little need to develop a biological justice module as part of their intelligence. I would imagine communities of these creatures are only held at equilibrium because of mutually assured destruction. This has certainly been the case for humanity as humanity has multiple modes of operation, justice is just one component, fear of death is another.
  • alfor 4y ago
    All of our truths are based on biology. Without our body we cannot see, feel and experience. Something is true when it is useful, predictive to us, to our body, when it allow us to move away from pain and toward pleasure. If there is no observer and no sensations(feedback) I don’t think we can ever come to any truth.
    • deltasevennine 4y ago
      Some truths seem to be universal meaning they exist separate from our biology, for example: logic. Other truths seem inextricably tied to our biology, for example: happiness. One that is ambiguous is, Justice. To which I say the ambiguity is an illusion. Justice is like happiness. Completely unique to the human experience.
• verrp 4y ago
  I have long suspected that the aliens will recognize Go (the game), but (obviously) not Chess (the other game). I suspect they will even recognize Go's 19x19 board (b/c it has properties other board sizes would not have). But would they recognize 12 tones scales?
  • themodelplumber 4y ago
    > But would they recognize 12 tones scales? Relatively? More likely. "Oh yeah, we get that. At a number of levels which we call honktaves, incidentally." Absolutely? As in, we have that set of frequencies bolted on to our culture too? Seems less likely.
  • mostlylurks 4y ago
    > But would they recognize 12 tones scales? Assuming they have musical instruments and don't have far more digits (fingers or other dextrous appendages) than us, they probably would, and even if they did have more digits, it'd seem like a fairly obvious choice for a species with our anatomy. Especially for equal temperament, but also for just intonation, a 12-tone scale provides exceptionally good approximations or numerous instances of the simplest possible frequency ratios, so any creature that has to limit the number of tones on their instruments for practical considerations will have a high likelihood of stumbling on a 12-tone scale even before developing an understanding of why it actually works so well and/or find it a very compelling option given a more in-depth analysis.
  • elihu 4y ago
    > But would they recognize 12 tones scales? It's possible that they might, but if they have any kind of musical discernment they might find it objectionable unless they're as lazy as we are. 12-tone equal temperament works more-or-less because it gives good-enough approximations of almost all the small-number ratios that a musician making relatively straightforward music would care about. However, thirds and sixths are pretty out-of-tune and frequency ratios with sevens in them like 7:6 and 7:4 don't have any reasonable approximation. On the other hand, 41-tone equal temperament is a much better system in just about any way you might care about, except that it makes building physical instruments more complicated because there's more notes to worry about. 53 is also really good, but that's even more notes. And then there's pure just intonation, which is a great option if you don't really care about being able to transpose freely to/from any key, but you want each note pitch to be dead-on exact. In other words, 12-TET is a kind of local optimum that we're stuck in for historical reasons and because the barriers to change are high. You might as well ask if an alien civilization would recognize the concept of daylight-savings-time, or the QWERTY keyboard, or the electoral college.
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• tiffanyh 4y ago
  PG use of image maps for site navigation always bring back 1990s Web "1.0" nostalgia to me.
• lowbloodsugar 4y ago
  >For example, I think we'd share the principle that a controlled experiment testing some hypothesis entitles us to have proportionally increased belief in it. vs >I wouldn't want to bet that all intelligent beings would understand the concept of justice It would be unjust if a technologically advanced society murdered all its scientists for heresy during a religious coup, but Paul is unwilling to bet that all alien societies understand justice. Why the belief in science then? Our own planet has theocracies and a President of the supposed #1 country has updated scientific hurricane reports with a sharpie. Plenty of science fiction authors have speculated meeting theocratic aliens. Peter Hamilton's Salvation comes to mind (you get where that series is going from the title).
• at_a_remove 4y ago
  If I had to lay money on it, I'd be willing to favor the position that aliens we're talking to via radio have the concept of electrons, and metals, and the number forty-seven. The really esoteric branches of mathematics, I could see huge variances. Materials sciences would vary widely. But the basic high school stuff? I'd lay odds on it.
• srvmshr 4y ago
  It makes me slightly sad that a well-read tech icon like PG dabble in writing things which are not only beyond his creative expertise, but also speculative, imaginative & open to wide variety of interpretation, spirituality including. Aliens may exist as very intelligent species or maybe dumb bacteria. We are discovering the laws of nature ourselves. We don't know enough of the laws of nature, despite the vast strides we have made in the last century. Maybe there are universal truths & representations, like the GUT which all life forms may eventually discover in their notation/formalism. Or maybe the laws of physics will have different implications in different corners of universe or multiverses, and we don't know those too with any degree of certainty. Sufficiently long timelines of existence doesn't guarantee intelligence of species. Dinosaurs existed for about 140 million year & more, whereas we have stepped on moon in less than 25000 years of evolution. These things are entirely uncharted territory, left best to astronomers who discover life form or make any contact one day
• akomtu 4y ago
  In the ancient Greece there was a tradition of studying math. To the outsiders it appeared as if a bunch of dudes in white robes studied triangles, but the inner circle studied the absolute truths that happened to be represented well by geometry. The Pythagora's triangle wasn't just a shallow numeric relationship to them, they saw the inner truth behind it.
• bglazer 4y ago
  One of the bitter lessons I've learned is that when I think of something, I should always (always!) do a couple searches to see if anyone else has thought of it, before I commit to writing down my thoughts as novel or authoritative. Someone (typically at Bell Labs in like 1973) has nearly always already had my thought, but then explored it in much richer, finer detail than I have. It's disappointing to learn I'm not an unmatched genius, but much more illuminating to read and think about how others have considered similar issues. I don't fault Paul for not doing this, it happens to everyone, and I imagine he's quite busy. I do fault all the people who read this draft and didn't do this very easy exercise for him. I think it reflects a undue deference towards frankly uninformed and pretty basic observations.
• ifyoubuildit 4y ago
  These threads seem to invite lots of comments of the form "[I|someone I know of|both] [am|is|are] smarter than PG for xyz reasons". These can be interesting to read if you want to get into the nitty gritty. But they don't often seem to engage with the overall point. In this case, I think that point is that there are probably local truths and universal truths, and wouldn't it be neat to focus on the universal ones, or figure out which ones are only locally true, and why? But who knows, that's just my interpretation.
  • sillysaurusx 4y ago
    Agreed. One of pg’s examples was “If there are aliens, they’d probably discover that a stool with three legs is the most stable.” I’m surprised he didn’t include it in this essay.
    • asdff 4y ago
      What was the reason a three legged stool is the best? Doesn't that depend on your environment? E.g. the amount of gravity, perhaps wind, or the quality of materials available to construct a stool?
      • webstrand 4y ago
        Three points make a plane, a fourth point is redundant. Three equidistant stool legs are stable on any surface regardless of flatness, but four equidistant stool legs need to be aligned correctly with a non-flat surface to be stable.
        • asdff 4y ago
          If you live on a world where your wood is more like laffy taffy or whatever, maybe the stool buckles when it only has three legs.
          • IIAOPSW 4y ago
            If you're an oompa loompa living in Willie Wonka's world where there's no such thing as rigid construction and everything is candy, the ability to have any level of technological civilization (including stool building) is dubious.
• dav 4y ago
  Paul Graham needs to read this and get back to us. Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being by George Lakoff https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53337 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53337
• dropit_sphere 4y ago
  lol holy shit you guys are a rough crowd
• lakomen 4y ago
  SCNR has this guy never heard of https?
• galaxyLogic 4y ago
  This seems like lots of camp-fire speculation in awe of the night sky. Before discussing what might be different with our "truth" and alien "truth" we should first define what we mean by "truth". What if there is a War of Worlds? And we win. But according to the "alien truth" they win. This kind of thing seems to be going on some TV-channels already, The notion of "facts" is diluted by claiming that "We have alternate facts". "We have alternate electors". That just means it is unclear to many people what facts and truth mean and it is easy to misguide them.
• skybrian 4y ago
  An assumption that this essay buys into is that "universal" truths are somehow higher-status and more worthy of study. How people come up with reasonable fixes to local messes doesn't get enough attention.
• asdff 4y ago
  Why do people assume alien life would be intelligent? Intelligent life is extremely rare on earth and has only occured for a brief moment in its history due to highly specific environmental scenarios at the time as well has historical events. If we didn't get that meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs, mammals would probably still be shrew like creatures as they were for millions of years until mass extinction exposed new ecological niches. The great oxygenation event could have easily killed off all life on earth too. Most of the biomass on earth today comes from plants, famously unintelligent and sessile, commonly using strategies that favor spawning thousands of offspring that have random mutations, with a few who go on to survive in an ecological niche. If we use our own earth as a model, alien life is far more likely to be unintelligent. Its a big human bias to assume that if there were intelligent life out there, it would even think like human life, so our abstractions such as mathmatics and physics will probably look entirely different when a completely different mind formed from a different evolutionary trajectory encounters natural phenomenon and attempts to make truths. Even with our own species it took us millions of years to establish our current truths about what we consider true. This begs the question, if in millions of years we will consider our current abstractions that interpret physical laws of the universe to be just as worthless as past interpretations for these same physical laws that we used as truths in centuries previous.
• dadboddilf2 4y ago
  I'm very confused, I see the page with that guy's article (or any of his articles for that matter), but I don't see any instructions on how you can get paid to read it.
• benevol 4y ago
  > If there were intelligent beings elsewhere in the universe Wow some people still think we're alone. Wow. Just, wow.
• songeater 4y ago
  I think this discussion of convergent evolution is pretty interesting in context [0]. Namely, "intelligence" arises from natural-selection (ie from some non-intelligent predecessor that developed incrementally to better fit its environment)... and the process of natural-selection would necessarily lead to various commonalities between intelligent creatures that came to be independently. PG's essay seems to (implicitly, not explicitly) compare between technologically-sophisticated intelligence - ie not between octopuses and humans, but between species that could at least communicate through inter-stellar distances, if not traverse them directly. If so, convergent evolution would have imposed even more onerous similarities between such species: to develop a radio-transmitter, intelligent creatures would also likely to have been very socially developed, or how else would they have been able to transform the resources around them to build a transmitter? Therefore it is the physical world in which we live that most likely leads us to conceive "math" similarly... and even "justice." [1] [0] https://www.quantamagazine.org/arik-kershenbaum-on-why-alien-life-may-be-like-life-on-earth-20210318/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/arik-kershenbaum-on-why-alien... [1] tit-for-tat being one of the best strategies to solve an infinitely-recurring prisoner's dilemma
• hangaard 4y ago
  We'd also share algorithms. Including evolution.
  • kubanczyk 4y ago
    Maybe, knowing what we know today (i.e. almost nothing), a less boring approach would be from the opposite direction: assume there is a life which is not a result of evolution, offer educated guesses how would that work.
• lloeki 4y ago
  > was more discovered than invented I chuckled at this one because one of the first things I was taught early in science class was that the root of "to invent" is latin "invenire", which translates to "to find", "to discover". Kind of a humbling moment to realise we're not creating anything, merely too blind to see, groping in the dark for truths that lay out there for us to trip upon.
• politician 4y ago
  Would aliens use Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory as the foundation of their mathematics?
• machina_ex_deus 4y ago
  > We'd probably share Occam's razor. I already disagree here. Simplicity is a heuristic in the brain. Like all heuristics it helps you solve some problems easier, but behind the word stands the entire life experience of someone, and whatever is "simpler" depends on way too many human things in his life. "Simple" is something human. So is Occam's razor.
  • Tao3300 4y ago
    It's not we exactly "simplicity". If you have two explanations arriving at identical results, take the one with less assumptions. It's helpful to look at it the other way around. Thomas Aquinas worded his version of it: > it is superfluous to suppose that what can be accounted for by a few principles has been produced by many. There's a subtle difference, and that's probably why we see it called the parsimony principle instead of the simplicity principle. The point being not to have nonessential crap hanging off your theory -- provided you've established that it's genuinely nonessential.
• SkyMarshal 4y ago
  > What should we call the search for alien truth? The obvious choice is "philosophy." Minor nitpick, but the subfield of Epistemology (or Alien Epistemology) might be a better term. Literally the study of knowledge, or how we know what we know and what is true. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemology/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemology/ But trying to look at it from an alien (or AI) point of view is a really interesting thought experiment. What are universal truths in the literal sense of the word "universal"? And what are merely helio-centric cultural trends masquerading as universal truths. I wonder if that's ever been done before. There's a little bit of discussion of it online, but not much it seems: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22alien%20epistemology https://www.google.com/search?q=%22alien%20epistemology
  • elihu 4y ago
    I think alien truth about alien truth would be epistemology. The number of protons in helium might be an alien truth but it isn't really epistemology, it's just a fact. Whereas the scientific method itself would be a system of epistemology.
  • SkyMarshal 4y ago
    It also occurs to me to wonder if AGI will ever invent its own version of epistemology, wondering how it knows what it knows. Or will minds based fundamentally on binary logic, rather than the human mind's fuzzy logic, even need such a field?
• anonym29 4y ago
  Anyone else getting a TLS cert for this link with a CN of *.store.yahoo.com?
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• hoseja 4y ago
  Math might be universal but I think you're really underestimating the potential for wildly differing perspectives on it.
• simonswords82 4y ago
  Paul is well out of his depth here. We can all sit around pondering the universe - that's easy. Answering these questions is significantly harder - impossible given today's science. This essay reads like the ramblings of a man who's smoked too much weed. Paul should stick to tech start ups - if you want serious insight around science, space and the universe hit up people like Richard Feynman... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36GT2zI8lVA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36GT2zI8lVA