> On 23 May 2014, at 10:00 pm, ghib...@gmail.com wrote: > > I've been saying that it isn't necessary to refute something that contains no > knowledge about something fundamental to its claim. Consciousness was never > understood...and it's reasonable to think it is the more important mystery of > computation, than anything contained in the discovery of computers, so far. > It would be like, as I said, assuming something vast about matter in 1700 > before anything about matter had been discovered, and building streams of > logic from that along. What we'd have missed out on, was the discovery of > chemistry, the scientific method and eventually atoms and QM, if we'd gone a > way like that. Why would it be any different here? >
This is very interesting. Are you saying that if we somehow get our assumptions right - in whatever period and under whatever framework, theory etc. - and this, quite apart from the level of our knowledge, then it might be possible to circumvent the need for the endless search for the knowledge that would eventually get us closer to the truth? This would mean that a lot of science might be the "try hard" view of achieving cultural goals if all we must do is to assume the correct things at the outset and then build our knowledge downstream of these foundational assumptions. I think in this context of extra-terrestrial technology, supposed to be more or less undeniably real and evident, if you believe the supposed evidence for it these days. Perhaps aliens have not bothered with all the streams of learning in science, computing, mathematics etc. and have gone straight to the cultural goals they envisaged however inconceivable this thought to us might appear. I mean, it is said to be quasi-impossible for beings to cross the vast inter-galactic distances and this is the main argument used in answer to Fermi's Paradox, yet are we not almost certainly - to take a leaf out of GHibbsa's manual momentarily - unconsciously assuming that all sentient, intelligent beings, wherever they arise in the universe, will do the try-hard human thing of slowly and painstakingly amassing their knowledge in painfully slow and logical steps? Why do we assume this? What about Lateral Thinking, where the trick is to bypass logical correctness at every step of the way and to use some very novel and highly illogical procedures to forge previously unseen connections in information that were hidden to our logical mindset? What if the aliens are masters of Lateral Thinking? Then we would ipso facto have no way of understanding how they arrived at their technological level, yet we might emulate in some way the spirit of their enterprise which has self-accelerated in a way we can only dream of? Why do we have to spend forever working things out? Surely this is a plodding homo sapiens thing... Kim -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
