Philosophy Discussion Forums | A Humans-Only Club for Open-Minded Discussion & Debate

[Sy Borg]

It's no disgrace to be behind stone age humans, who were already extremely smart and their brains were larger than ours too. ...

Peace brings development. A tribe of nomadic hunters can never know peace and, thus, can never develop.

The orca is an apex predator and has all the peace it can ever dream of. Orcas even predate the great white shark to remove their liver. Scientists describe the event as involving 'near-surgical precision'.

Scientists could also cite countless instances where humans operate with actual surgical precision.

It's not even close. Humans pulled ahead. Far ahead. Humans are bizarre.

My issue is that intelligent creatures can be treated as if they are not, hence the cruel way of raising food mammals. Ditto the underestimation of of feeling animals, eg. cruel preparation of lobsters.


But yeah, I don't see any chance at all of biological alien life visiting Earth, and I'm dubious about any visitations per se.

The only point of travelling interstellar distances is for sheer exploration's sake, which is not a great motivation for investment, aside from the novelty/publicity value of a first launch. So it would have to be AI that has nothing better to do, and a very long time to do it. Still, there's no evidence. Some sightings are unexplained, but the chances are that there's an Earthly explanation.

I think this is right. Of all the thousands of so called "sightings" most have been explained. And the few that are as yet unexplained are likely to be explicable. They are most unlikely to be ET.

That is not to say that there is not life out there, perhaps intelligent life, but we can be confident there is none in our solar system except us, and if they do exist in other systems, they are likely to be very widely dispersed and the difficulties of them getting here from other star systems are formidable. They would need a very good reason to undertake such a voyage. And maybe most will have better things to do.

So I don't think it's surprising that there is no evidence of visitation by extra-terrestrial intelligences. There is no physical evidence of them, nor any convincing evidence of electromagnetic signals from them. If they exist on the other side of our galaxy or in other galaxies, signals from them could take millions or billions of years to reach us. And the idea that ET is just dying to contact us is just anthropocentrism. No one out there cares about us. For now, there's just us and all the other species who share this little planet with us. And if we want to survive, we'd better look after the earth, our home, because no one is coming to rescue us. We have no other option. There is simply no conceivable plan B for the foreseeable future.

I doubt that it is a lack of interest in us that keep aliens away. If they are intelligent and technologically capable then they would most likely be gregarious enough to be interested in other life forms. As we are. In fact, I think any intelligent species would go as ga-ga over microbes as we would.

The issues are 1) distance a 2) motivation. What is the point in starting a colony so far from one's home world that communication over practical time spans is impossible? How could the enormous cost be justified? Perhaps only by a despotic totalitarian leader who is keen to make his, her or its mark on the universe.

I wonder if, given the challenges of exploring outer space, if advanced civilisations might find exploring inner space via digitisation of minds to be easier? It's still forbiddingly difficult, but the issues of distance in space seem completely insurmountable. However, if it becomes possible to digitise minds, then interstellar travel becomes much easier.

A tantalising thought is, if humanity becomes increasingly digital and immersed in VR, perhaps first contact could happen in that arena, if aliens decide to hack the system and say "hello" or, as the case may be, "~º†§ƒ¿"

[value]

What would be 'the interest' of an intelligence that has developed for billions of years longer compared to humans on earth today?

A tantalising thought is, if humanity becomes increasingly digital and immersed in VR, perhaps first contact could happen in that arena, if aliens decide to hack the system and say "hello" or, as the case may be, "~º†§ƒ¿"

What if there is an actual reality in which something similar is possible through third eye vision?

Perhaps the human is missing something when it concerns 'the interest' of pure intelligence...

A scientific article on the matter by parapsychologist Courtney Brown who used remote viewing to discover alien life in the Universe:

Probing Well Beyond the Bounds of Conventional Wisdom
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2111782

And commotion in the scientific community about it:

The Courtney Brown affair and academic freedom
In one of the book's more remarkable chapters, " The Grey Mind," Brown claims to have "entered the mind" of an extraterrestrial and investigated its psychological make-up. Brown, who directs the "Farsight Institute" in Atlanta
https://www.emory.edu/EMORY_REPORT/erar ... erson.html

Screenshot 2023-10-22 at 16-47-52 Cosmic Explorers.png (794.34 KiB) Viewed 2839 times

Cosmic Explorers: Scientific Remote Viewing of Extraterrestrial Life
https://books.google.com/books/about/Co ... k_AG9iJ20C

How to Escape the Confines of Time and Space According to the CIA
https://www.vice.com/en/article/7k9qag/ ... to-the-cia

https://irva.org/ (organization for remote viewing)

What would be your opinion of the spiritual attempt to explore the Universe for extraterrestrial life? Should it be taken serious?

[Sy Borg]

What would be your opinion of the spiritual attempt to explore the Universe for extraterrestrial life? Should it be taken serious?

I would be very skeptical of such claims and, personally, I would not take it seriously.

James Randi offered a million dollars to anyone who could prove that psi exists. It was a standing offer that lasted for fifty years. In all that time, no one managed to provide the proof. If psi were true, someone would have collected.

[value]

The idea that psi concerns 'what exists in a repeatable context' is a fallacy, therefore it might be impossible to fulfil the James Randi One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge.

I am not a specialist on the matter, but from a philosophical perspective, it seems plausible that it might concern a context that is not of a repeatable nature. It would concern a context of 'meaningful relevance'. A spiritual realm or 'a once in a life time' context but still a meaningfully relevant context that might be of use for the exploration of extraterrestrial life in the universe.

It might be similar to the perception of animal spirits.

The idea of non-locality might provide a substantiation for the idea that cosmic level spiritual communication might be possible. A recent study showed that there is evidence that all particles in the cosmos are cosmic-scale entangled by their 'kind', which has major philosophical implications.

free-will.jpg (14.69 KiB) Viewed 2782 times

(2020) Is nonlocality inherent in all identical particles in the universe?
The photon emitted by the monitor screen and the photon from the distant galaxy at the depths of the universe seem to be entangled only by their identical nature. This is a great mystery that science will soon confront.
https://phys.org/news/2020-03-nonlocali ... verse.html

The following study may be of interest:

Possible States Theory and Human Destiny in the Cosmos
Possible States Theory discusses change in the abstract; it has a single description of change, equally applicable to acts of mind and physical phenomena. Change is defined as an interaction between collections of possible states, which include past, future and possible outcomes. All possible outcomes coincide in the complex present. This allows a competent observer to participate in possible states interactions that are unconstrained by time, distance or conservation laws. The technique of coordinate remote viewing was used in a study of technologically advanced alien life forms.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/a ... 9212025187
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/a ... 9212025199

It concerns coordinated remote viewing to explore the cosmos for extraterrestrial life. But when I question an AI such as GPT-3 or GPT-4 about it, it persistently denies that there are any studies and it keeps repeating the explicit warning that remote viewing should not be taken serious. As if the subject is banned from the AI.

When I mention the book Cosmic Explorers: Scientific Remote Viewing of Extraterrestrial Life, it would describe that book, but when I ask for other studies or books, it boldly answers "there are no other studies or books on remote viewing of extraterrestrial life."

A bit strange don't you think?

The source on sciencedirect.com shows that the study is something serious and Courtney Brown herself published about her work, which caused commotion in the scientific community, so one would expect the AI to report about that. But it plainly denies to know anything about it, as if the study doesn't exist and that paranormal matters shouldn't even be asked about.

The Courtney Brown affair and academic freedom
In one of the book's more remarkable chapters, " The Grey Mind," Brown claims to have "entered the mind" of an extraterrestrial and investigated its psychological make-up. Brown, who directs the "Farsight Institute" in Atlanta
https://www.emory.edu/EMORY_REPORT/erar ... erson.html

A book by a scientist about it who studies the subject and who publishes about it:

The Reality of ESP
A Physicist’s Proof of Psychic Abilities. This book, detailing its author’s many successful investigations into the paranormal, should make those who deny the possible existence of such phenomena think again”.

Author Russell Targ, of Palo Alto, California, is a physicist, author, and retired senior staff scientist from Lockheed-Martin.
https://espresearch.com/

It occurs to me that no opportunity should be wasted for progress. Just imagine that it could have provided results somehow, that opportunity shouldn't have been missed due to dogmatic suppression, in my opinion.