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Angulate In reply to Eagle1Division [2011-06-08 21:26:24 +0000 UTC]

Hah, yeah, I suppose I would be hesitant too...but hey, we're humans. Maybe aliens wouldn't have the same qualms. I checked out the things you cited. Some qualia cannot be explained by methods we now possess. However it is my belief that we needn't attach any metaphysical properties to them to explain them. All that is required is more research, more knowledge. I guess what I'm saying is that I believe that all knowledge is strictly physical. You and I have our differences (the best example being your belief in religion) and until I see direct, incontrovertible evidence the contrary, I would rather stick to scientific explanations than try to explain the unknown with more of the unknown.

Also, you're very right about the whole "experts" think. My rant was typed hastily; even now I'm spotting contradictions in my own logic. I suppose what I meant to say is that our general concept of an alien visitor is humanoid. The main thing that makes me think aliens might not be flesh at the point they meet us is the overall fragility of the body. Of course, it's equally likely that they could be immortal. I choose to take the leap of faith and say that they're not. Really, when discussing this sort of thing, it's what one person thinks versus what another person thinks

FTL is interesting too. However, at this point, it's only theoretical, just like quantum physics and all that creepy unanswered-question stuff. It's laden with math, which I will admit I am horrible at. The thing is, if it were more than a theory, it would be reality - but it's not. I'm not saying it's impossible, or even unlikely...again, I'd just like to see it happen first

As for the unlikeliness of us encountering another civilization, I agree. Still, with that extreme time scale comes an extreme physical scale as well. I'm sure you've seen Hubble deep field. I'm pretty confident that somewhere in that image, there's life. I don't know what kind, or how advanced it is, but I think that the odds are in my favor. The size of the universe never ceases to amaze me.

And yes, I think it's reasonable to assume that any alien capable of visiting us would have technology that would appear as magic to us. We can't imagine what we haven't seen before in some form. We can combine forms, or alter them, but we can't really envision stuff that we have no concept of - hence, humanoid aliens. When we do create something new, it's always in small steps. For instance, from the *discovery* of electricity to an iPod. Our forbears couldn't imagine an iPod by themselves, but if we were to explain it to them, they could grasp the concept, as magical as it would seem.

Your observation of human violence is spot on...I really have my doubts about mankind as well. In my mind, it's either we wipe ourselves out, or something else does...like a virus, gamma ray burst, massive impact or...*gasp* aliens!

Thanks for taking the time to write this huge response to my huge rant It's definitely given me more to think about, especially concerning the qualia thought experiments and FTL. But I suppose we have to leave it at disagreement, since neither one of us can prove a speck of it. I guess we'll have to wait and see.

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Eagle1Division In reply to Angulate [2011-06-09 02:20:07 +0000 UTC]

Oh? In your favor? Did I put somewhere I don't think there's intelligent life out there? No, I do think there is. I think anyone that has any grasp of the scale of space would be an utter idiot for believing there's not life out there. Which is funny, because even people who study it their whole lives simply cannot come close to fathoming the smallest piece of the cosmos. And then to think that you can go in the other direction, and that the quantum world is just as small as the astronomical world is vast? It's staggering, the more you realize it.

I don't think people ever truly realize how big the Earth is. And it's not even comparable to just our Solar System. And just our solar system is nothing. It's simply beyond comprehension. It doesn't take Hubble deep field, the more you appreciate just how vast everything is, just a single star or a planet like Jupiter is enough.

And galaxies? Have you ever been outside in fog, where each water droplet is clearly distinguished and visible? The "foginess" of galaxies is stars. Clouds of stars! The single smallest slice of one is far beyond human comprehension.

You know what creeps me out is large-scale images of the universe that reveal clouds of galaxies. It looks almost disturbingly like neurons in a brain, at the opposite end of the size scale. I'm not suggesting anything, it just looks like it, I'm sure it's due to the dynamics of gravity at those scales.

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Angulate In reply to Eagle1Division [2011-06-10 20:18:51 +0000 UTC]

Again, I was hasty I know you agreed, your first post made it obvious...let's just excuse my blunder and call it 'our favor'

And yeah, I don't think anyone understands the true nature of the size of our universe either. We can put it down in numbers, but that's nothing. You can do the old thought exercise all you want...a thousand thousands = a million, a thousand millions is a billion, etc...The thing I like to use as reference is the light year. 300,000km/h is far faster than we can comprehend, yet the distance you could cover in one year at that speed is the unit we use to measure the cosmos. And the nearest *star* is 4.2 light years away. And there are billions of stars in our galaxy alone. And hundreds of billions of galaxies in our universe. It mindfucks me every time I think about it, including now.

We've got a lot to learn

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Eagle1Division In reply to Angulate [2011-06-11 01:19:23 +0000 UTC]

One thing I like to say is that you get a better idea of the distance to the nearest star by saying it's infinite, rather than naming some large, though factually accurate, number. Because the human mind won't comprehend the number, and will get a better idea from "infinite". (I repeated myself... Was this a Kiasmas? I'm talking in Hebrew, now )

That's a pretty neat way of visualizing it. But actually you put and "h" where an "s" belongs on little c

What's funny is the human mind can't even really comprehend a year. We don't remember every moment from a year, only key "landmarks" in time, so when we remember an entire year, we're only remember the course of a far shorter time, I doubt we can even comprehend an entire week at a time. Now, travel at an incomprehensible speed at 52x an incomprehensible amount of time, and that's a LY.

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Eagle1Division In reply to Angulate [2011-06-09 02:10:45 +0000 UTC]

Well, that's not entirely true. You say all that's required is more research, more knowledge, but that simply won't work. No amount of data, no amount of experimentation can ever cross the bridge from data to actual Qualia, and actual experience as per Mary's Room Argument.

I wish I could find what it was called, but I like to think of it as "data theory", and I wish I could find what the analogy was called, maybe you've run into it back on the Wiki, but it goes like this;

Picture all of reality as a digital billboard. Now think of a digital billboard in every day life, when you describe the digital billboard to another person, you'll say something like: it showed a car move along, then there was a flashing light, then text scrolled across saying x, etc. etc. That's the wordy explanation.

A different way to describe it would be to take the actual data of the animation shown on the billboard, a long series of numbers representing pixels locations, colors, and times, or you could even describe it as a massive string of binary. This would be the binary explanation.


Nowhere in the wordy description was there a single number, and in the binary description the words "car", "colors" or "text" never appeared. However they both describe the exact same thing, and both can be with a high degree of accuracy.


This can be applied in 2 ways; first, Scientific study and Qualia. Science is far more technically precise, and would be more like the description in pure binary. But no matter how much binary you gather, you'll never see the words "move", "car", "red", or "text". And in that same way, no matter how much you study the human brain, you will never truly understand Qualia, at least not in the descriptive worded form, which would be that of conscious experience. Gathering more binary data will not cause a bridge to form in-between these two descriptions.


Honestly, when it comes to people who think the whole universe is strictly physical, my thought is they need to get out more. You can explain the human brain entirely in binary format, but you won't see any words appear there. This doesn't mean the wordy description is wrong, or doesn't exist, they're both correct, just different formats. To take a physicalist approach is to say that Qualia does not exist; because you cannot describe Qualia with any amount of data, in just the same way you can't get any words out of binary data.
Yet the words are there. Counscious experience does, in fact, exist. I'm sentient, and so I can only assume you are, too, and that alone is proof of Qualia. Just because you can describe the billboard with binary does not mean that the wordy description is incorrect, or that the car and the text don't actually exist. The car and the text do, in fact, exist, regardless if they can be described in terms of binary or not.


The second way I apply that is religion. It's a different descriptive method, but same reality. Religion would be more like the wordy description, more comprehensive and practically useful but less precise, technically. I've found that generally people looking for proof will never get it, because there's always an explanation; they're searching for magic, not religion, and so when they discover the "binary" explanation for what's on the billboard, they automatically believe the wordy description of the billboard is false. But it's not. Both descriptions are true. You can "explain away" the wordy description with binary, and you can also "explain away" the binary description with the wordy one. They're both true.

And the best part is, there's correct and incorrect scientific theories, just as there are correct and incorrect religions.
There are correct and incorrect religions, just as there are incorrect and correct scientific theories.
Two ways of describing something, both true, neither even slightly resembling the other.

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Angulate In reply to Eagle1Division [2011-06-10 20:37:30 +0000 UTC]

I get what you're saying here. I completely agree about some things not being explainable with any means we possess. A couple years back was when I first thought of this, when wondering how one would describe color to a blind person. The thing about that is, there's not a binary OR wordy way to describe is. I was, and still am, completely baffled by this fact. Anything to do with our sensory experience isn't really explainable by any conventional means. Still, just because we don't see a way to do it doesn't mean it's impossible. I think that qualia are directly linked to the way the brain works. Once we figure that out, we'll be able to have data in that format, but not before. Of course, I could be wrong and the whole universe could be a creation of [insert god/s here]. But I never was much for agnosticism, I like to pick sides. My side is that of the nihilists. No higher meaning to life, no spirit, no soul...everything is explainable by science, eventually. I would believe this over any religion (for reasons I won't go into here...there are unanswered questions, both sides provide potential answers...) Let's just say I'm a fan of Occam's Razor.

Anyways, I haven't really given this sort of thing a lot of thought for a couple of years. Thanks for being so willing to discuss it. Truth be told, I kind of missed philosophical/science conversations People don't talk about this sort of thing nearly enough too materialistic

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Eagle1Division In reply to Angulate [2011-06-11 01:09:15 +0000 UTC]

On Agnosticism, there are those who don't care, which upsets me greatly that people could not care on something as pivotal and meaningful as the existence, or lack thereof, of a God, and then there's those who I do respect, who are agnostic because, as Albert Einstein put it:
"I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our own being."

In other words, he's realizing that the Universe is big and complicated, and to comprehend all of it is far beyond what the human mind is capable of, and I am in complete agreement to the belief of that fact. I do not believe I have come to an understanding of the universe through my own limited intellect, which is literally nothing in respect to the total of all the knowledge the universe has to offer, which is the only solid standard there is to hold our human intellect to, which only goes to say that the human mind is nothing, even so much as the human body is nothing in relation to the vastness of all of space.

Personally, I find the claim that "it is illogical for God to exist" to be one of pride and arrogance if one truly understands "the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our own being."
Our science has only reached where it is by continually checking itself against reality through observation, our human understanding alone has done absolutely nothing to the effect of science.

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Eagle1Division In reply to Angulate [2011-06-11 00:15:29 +0000 UTC]

What's funny about this is that you don't like the idea of blindly believing something by faith, and I understand that completely. Funny thing is, however, you're forced to from a physicalist perspective, because there's no evidence that you'll ever be able to describe to a blind man what vision is like, in fact, odds are strongly against it, because our conscious experience of reality is sort of a dimension of it's own. I don't mean that in any metaphysical sense, but a dimension, by definition, is: one of 3 axes (and a fourth of time) in the physical universe, that in description are entirely independant of eachother. In other words, you cannot use the X axis to describe the Y or Z axes, nor the Z to describe the X or Y, and so on. And in that same way that it's impossible to describe one dimension with another, it's impossible to describe consciousness from a physicalist perspective. So, as much as I correct people when they say "dimension" to mean an alternate reality, perhaps it really is accurate, in that it is a sort of reality indescribable in terms of any other sort.

(thanks for the blind man example, It's a great way to articulate it; I don't think I ever even thought of it that clearly before )


Now, I don't doubt that senses, nor mental ability, nor even thought are all directly controlled by the physical human brain and chemical reactions therein. However, there's more to that in human consciousness. What would it be like to be blind, deaf, with no taste nor smell nor feeling, and dumb to the point where you are incapable of logic or reasoning? Just imagine yourself in that state. As you strip away each ability and sense, until nothing is left of the human brain, the mind remains in existence. If you're like me, you imagined nothing, but it wasn't entirely nothing, because your perception is still there, regardless of senses or reasoning ability.
That's because there's more to our minds than reasoning, calculation, or sensory perception. There's a distinct "awareness", that is, sentience or consciousness. So, then, what is that? Where can you find the computational chemical reactions responsible for it? Because it's not a form of computation even, it's just a form of simply existing, completely independent of the human brain altogether, completely independent of anything you could ever find within the human brain, because, like I said, it's not a form of computation.


It sounds exotic, even metaphysical, and for some people it doesn't align to their reasoning. But we don't alter observation to meet our hypothesis (our reasoning), that would be bad science. We alter our reasoning to match observation. I am not aware of anyone else's raw Consciousness as I've described (I think I just re-illustrated Qualia), but I can only assume everyone has one (and perhaps animals, or even more, though that discussion is for a different time).


You know, my perspective on the nihilist view comes from C.S. Lewis' in Mere Christianity. I would recommend it, it's just about nigh identical to my tone, and it's a big long reasoning, logical discussion like this, it was originally aired over the radio, bits at a time, in England during the Battle of Britain in WWII. He, too was originally an atheist who said, quoting himself: "'Whatever you say, and however clever your arguments are, isn't it much simpler and easier to say that the world was not made by any intelligent power? Aren't all your arguments simply a complicated attempt to avoid the obvious?'". It's not just a counter-argument he was posing to defeat in the book, it really was his point of view at one time, which is really a way of saying Occam's Razor. What makes it interesting is he builds an interstingly effective argument against it.

I warn you, though. There is a prerequisite. You must be a sentient human being, and not a philosophical zombie.

By the way, Wiki has this to say about Occam's Razor:
"The principle is often inaccurately summarized as 'the simplest explanation is most likely the correct one.' This summary is misleading, however, since the principle is actually focused on shifting the burden of proof in discussions.[3] That is, the razor is a principle that suggests we should tend towards simpler theories (see justifications section below) until we can trade some simplicity for increased explanatory power. Contrary to the popular summary, the simplest available theory is sometimes a less accurate explanation. "

As one example gives it: "It is possible that the Sun and planets actually revolve around the Earth. However, this possibility requires a vastly more complex explanation than the sun-centered model."

One note I make here, is that if it wasn't for Galileo's observations, then the heliocentric model would actually make sense, because we were lacking in data, i.e. there wasn't data to conflict it, and so by Occam's Razor the geocentric model (Swap the g and e, I call it the egocentric model) would be correct, since the heliocentric model has unnecessary complexities, such as "universal gravitation" and "ellipses". May I even note at the time, they had no idea how graviation would even work, or why things would travel in ellipses in the first place, so they were even strongly lacking in being able to effectively construct a theory at all! They had only one thing: observations of the stars.

And as it is, when it comes to describing the universe in terms of Qualia, we are indeed, very badly lacking in data.
And my religion specifically, initially has one observation going for it: That of God.
(Personally though, once you've gone with that one, I have countless more. But I wouldn't expect myself in the same position you're in to take it for anything more than the next 12 million that claim the same; that somehow the almost universal observation of God is some mass delusion, which IMO borders on "conspiracy theory" territory. So for the sake of argument, I only offer one initial observation, namely, that of God.)

Really, when it comes to something as broad as religion, I think a lot of the "complexity" view comes from the fact that an outsider doesn't see just one "model" [of how the universe works as described by religion], but rather sees a whole mess of different models all tangled together, all argueing over which is correct. And you can't say the confusion is evidence against it, there are plenty of scientific models that disagree as well, but perhaps not quiet to the extent of religion. However, religion has had a lot more time to vary, and far more cultures during that time as well.

But, I've caught my own attention and want to return to the earlier paragraph. And I wonder; surely atheists have had some sort of experience, or at least sought; only to refute it as a form of delusion. But let me ask this, though; what would be an acceptable amount of evidence? Everything has some "binary" explanation, so as I said earlier, it would seem most atheists, at least if I were of that disposition (which all it would take in my case is a different history), would only be satisfied with magic, and so look for magic instead of religion. Magic is not religion, it's just a different way to describe reality. So in this case, what would be an "appropriate amount of evidence" in the first place?



I'm the one that started it, so I definitely agree wholeheartedly with your second paragraph . I think if schools really sought to educate then you should see this discussion in high schools or colleges, I think that would help the world immensely to expose adolescents to this form of conversation.

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