Dear J2,
many thanks for your considered contribution to this thread, a few
further commments of clarification re my position if I may:
> >
> > Dear Ten,
> > I would be happier if you could qualify your claim. What is your
> > evidence for there being 'absolutely no "hard" evidence for ET
> > visitatuion' ?
>
> You are requesting that he prove a negative on the same basis as proving,
> (with hard evidence,) the existence of aliens here on Earth. This is a no no.
>
My intent here was not a request for proof, but merely to establish the
basis of the strong negative claim made. My own position remains
an agnostic one on this issue (coming clean, therefore, I am a skeptic
rather than a cynic).
> Firstly, We ( J2- made the original claim that there is no hard evidence of
> intelligent alien existence on Earth )are NOT required to prove that aliens
> don't exist. The more extraordinary the claim, the more solid the evidence
> needs to be. There is none. What there is plenty of, is 'stories'.
>
> >
> > That I, myself, have not knowingly been exposed to any, does not tell me
> > therefore that such evidence does not exist.
>
> If you deconstruct this sentence you will find a very a problematic
> suggestion. These words if taken in a serious context, will cause you to
> undermine your own judgment.
Maybe so, but this is a risk that I am prepared to take in guiding my
intellectual growth trajectory. I find that a healthy skepticism keep me
open-minded and more likely to entertain a wider variety of novel
solutions to unsolved problems. I am not happy to hold the view that
something is NOT the case on a priori grounds. The search for
inconsistencies and falsification would appear to better satisfy my
curiosity, whilst at the same time entertaining as wide a number of
possibible explanations as conceivable (which ideally should reduce in
number as data continues to comes in).
>
> In our society there are few tools which help
> develop judgment. School should be one of those tools but it's not. TV could
> be the best tool but it entirely monopolized by people who know for CERTAIN
> that a consumer with good judgment is a very bad business idea. Aint gonna
> happen. Religion...to put it politely is not the right tool for the job.
>
> So it's up to each individual to start his/her own Judgment Buildup Program.
> It's tougher than body building. Every one will encourage you to build up your
> body.
With these sentiments I would largely agree. The evolution of the
brain/nervous system is co-emergent with the evolution of what we call
intellegence. The mind/brain system would appear, at least to me, to have
evolved as much a problem-seeking device, not just a problem-solving
device.
Much of our formal education establishment activity (possibly not
guided by pedagogic aims alone) involves the teaching of WHAT to learn
rather than HOW to learn. I find that my brand of 'healthy skepticism'
allows an emergent process of "learning to learn" which scaffolds
exponentially (in the face of some degree of task-success, of course).
This latter learning-to-learn scenario supercedes (although operates
partially in addition to) more 'reflexive', hard-wired behaviours not
necessarily requiring much intellectual input under normal circumstances
(e.g., blushing, panting, hearing [can you urn your ears 'off' ?] and the
chemotoxin regulation processing of the liver).
>
> If all your life you had never experienced the lingering aroma of Unicorn
> droppings, and you are running through a beautiful meadow, and your foot
> crashes through the crusty crown of cow crap, and the home baked smell of
> cooling cow pie wafts you in the face, your first thought ought not be -
> "Oh my god I stepped in Unicorn shit!"
>
OK, here, I would propose that it would be "what's this funny brown stuff
on my foot, coincident with that novel aroma ? - have I come across
anything like this before ?"
It would not be efficient at that time to decide what it was not (the
exponetial list of possibilities will always be too large a set). The job
at hand is to decide whether and what action be required on my part in the
face of this novel situation once recognised as such.
> The people who diminish your judgment OR your ability to trust your
> judgment, or prevent you from developing your judgment, are doing you
> the individual, real harm. This is done both intentionally and unintentionally
> in our interactions with people.
Yep, so keep an open mind and watch how many explanations are quickly
ruled out due to lack of knowledge, rather than lack of evidence. It is
not always obvious to the uninformed what one might 'need' to know in
order to establish existence proof of some phenomenon. [e.g.,knowing
what cholestrerol is/functions to do before deciding whether one needs
to change diet in order to ingest more or less of it; or knowing what
detector device switches causes the wee red light to blink before
deciding whether the fuel level is really needing a top up]. On the other
hand, acceptance of some phenomenon is as you say, a matter of personal
choice at some level appropriate to one's current schema re how things
work [e.g.,this procedure should also apply in daily life situations:
knowing what cholestrerol is/functions to do before deciding whether one
needs to change diet in order to ingest more or less of it; or knowing
what detector device switches causes the wee red light to blink before
deciding whether the fuel level is really needing a top up]
As we each move along our individual growth curves (or not), our data sets
and hypothesis testing abilities are themselves also developing in a
constant flux (bearing according to their local task-success, of course)
> Unless YOU YOURSELF has ever directly experienced contact with an alien or
> alien paraphernalia, you have no reason to assume that the more unlikely
> experience is the true one.
>
Here I feel that the point of my argument has been missed. My position
remains here operationally skeptico-agnostic. Whilst I currently witness
no evidence for (non-microbe) ET, neither do I see any evidence of its
absence. Why constrain my belief repertoire by assuming the negative case?
This would place a burden on the problem-seeking, as well as the
problem-solving aspects of the task at hand - necessarily restricting the
range of approaches and solutions allowable in the research phase.
In a nut shell, I guess that what I'm saying is that in my view, those
choosing to use strong negative existence proofs as working hypotheses are
essentially seeking to test the null-hypothesis. This is done at the
expense of developing novel operational hypotheses (some of which might be
very strange) then available for empirical enquiry.
> We are not talking about space bacteria or viruses. We are talking about
> intelligent beings
OK,.. so are these necessarily mutually exclusive categories ?
(NB: I'm not saying that microbes ARE intelligent beings (alien or
otherwise) ..., but my view would be that I'm not sure at present
what tests one might apply in order to determine that are not so!
For me, the case for human IQ is still way up in the air.
Cheers,
Tony.
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