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Lost Winston Churchill Essay Reveals His Thoughts On Alien Life (theverge.com)
"A newly discovered essay by Winston Churchill shows that the British statesman gave a lot of thought to the existential question that has inspired years of scientific research and blockbuster movies: are we alone in the University?" reports The Verge. "The essay was drafted in the 1930s, but unearthed in a museum in Missouri last year." Astrophysicist Mario Livio was the first scientist to analyze the article and has published his comments in the journal Nature. The Verge reports: Livio was "stunned" when he first saw the unpublished, 11-page essay on the existence of alien life, he tells The Verge. The astrophysicist was visiting Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, for a talk last year, when he was approached by Timothy Riley, the director of Fulton's US National Churchill Museum. Riley showed him the essay, titled "Are We Alone in the Universe?" In the essay, Churchill reasons that we can't possibly be alone in the Universe -- and that many other Suns will likely have many other planets that could harbor life. Because of how enormously distant these extrasolar planets are, we may never know if they "house living creatures, or even plants," Churchill concludes. He wrote this decades before exoplanets were discovered in the 1990s; hundreds have since been detected. What's impressive about the essay is the way Churchill approaches the existential and scientific question of whether life exists on other planets, Livio says. Churchill's reasoning mirrors extremely well the way scientists think about this problem today. The British leader also talks about several theories that still guide the search for alien life, Livio says. For example, he notes that water is the key ingredient for life on Earth, and so finding water on other planets could mean finding life there. Churchill also notes that life can only survive in regions "between a few degrees of frost and the boiling point of water" -- what today we call the habitable zone, the region around a star that is neither too hot or too cold, so that liquid water may exist on the planet's surface.
I don't know if we are *truly* alone in the University, but it sure is empty here in the proof-reading department.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
'Intellectual' used to be an admired quality in a leader.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
He also wrote:
"Might not a bomb no bigger than an orange be found to possess a secret power to destroy a whole block of buildings -- nay, to concentrate the force of a thousand tons of cordite and blast a township at a stroke? Could not explosives even of the existing type be guided automatically in flying machines by wireless or other rays, without a human pilot, in ceaseless procession upon a hostile city, arsenal, camp or dockyard?"
in 1924.
Tsss, no education!
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Plus, all those conversations with The Doctor probably stimulated his thinking on the issue.
The Winston Churchill connection to H G Wells was well known.
The why of Frederick Lindermann who was liked over a lot of other staff and the design of the British nuclear project.
Lindermann sent Churchill a book on nuclear physics in 1926 and gave a talk that ensured Churchill was ready for nuclear issues.
H G Wells was just one of the people Churchill kept in contact given the interest in The World Set Free https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/....
So Churchill had been reading and meeting a lot of interesting people over many decades. Given the early contact with Wells and the topics in his books,
Churchill was much more ready for nuclear e.g. the work of Frederick Soddy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... and space topics.
That later interest in science, nuclear weapons was what saved the UK's nuclear weapons design work from the USA.
The "other planets" question would have been talked about a lot given the interest in H G Wells.
What can political leaders learn from this? Read a lot, be interesting and talk a lot to the best minds of your generation.
Find the scientist who can speak about emerging topics and who can hold a conversation. The best scientists to work on any project are easy to find later on.
Never trust another nation with your own science, they will not share or give back.
That allowed the UK to be ready for a nuclear future.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
I think you mean the anthropic principle. It doesn't state that the Universe "tweaked" its laws for intelligent life to exist, as if this is some active on-going process. It just means that we can only exist in a Universe in which the laws of physics allow us to exist.
Would such an universe be left extremely vulnerable to few mad men who could destroy intelligent life at the touch of buttons or some cosmic phenomena destroying intelligent life on the only planet?
Absolutely, why not? The laws of physics allowed us to evolve, and those same laws of physics allow us to be wiped out by an asteroid, a nuclear war, a gamma ray burst, or a plague (man-made or otherwise). They are not mutually exclusive scenarios.
Only crack the nuts that crack. You don't put the ones that don't crack in the sack.
That's a question I usually ask myself when the holidays kick in. The answer has still to be found.
Video of some good progressive thrash music
The western, romanticized image of Churchill is of the stoic rock that beat the Nazis in WWII, bravely leading the British people to oppose fascism while America dithered.
The rest of his bio is rounded out by his fond nostalgia for shooting "savages" in Africa - i.e. blacks not yet subjugated by European colonialism. And the post WWII crushing of Kenya's rebellion against British rule, where you'd have a hard time looking at the treatment of prisoners and thinking you weren't hearing descriptions of a Nazi concentration camp. Shit like shoving sand in anuses with metal rods, crushing men's testicles and shoving glass into women's vaginas. "I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes" was a real knee-slapper, too.
Churchill wasn't opposed to barbarous tranny, as long as it was coming from his own country.
Well, it might a be a slightly garbled statement of the Strong Anthropic Principle, which posits that in some kind of deterministic way, the laws of nature are fashioned to ensure that intelligent life (specifically, us) will result. Personally, I find that slightly presumptuous.
The Weak Anthropic Principle, however, posits that the laws of nature are what they are, and intelligent life (specifically, us) is simply the serendipitous by-product of the way that things happen to be. In a universe of this size, the probability that such an event might happen at least once, somewhere, must be close to 1, one might think.
I think the difference is how deterministic you think the mechanics of the universe are, and how important we are within that situation.
Personally, I'm an agnostic atheist, which brings me to the Weak side, but even that doesn't deny the existence of a non-interventionist God. Take your pick.
It's not you: I'm just this horrifically socially awkward with everybody.
Would such an universe be left extremely vulnerable to few mad men who could destroy intelligent life at the touch of buttons [...] ?
Based on recent development in some countries on planet Earth, I would say this is a definitive YES.
I deny the existence of anything for which there is no evidence. The alternative is foolhardy. If you can believe anything without evidence, then you can believe anything without evidence. It is the first (of many, but still) step along the path to being a suicide bomber.
Moon is no egg Khaleesi. Moon is Goddess, wife of Sun. It is known.
Only crack the nuts that crack. You don't put the ones that don't crack in the sack.
Churchill did read the Last and First Men https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
So the very long view was well understood.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
What does your post have to do with the topic?
Nothing.
This topic has to do with opening the book of Winston Churchill.
The parents post, although poorly titled, is just another chapter.
So yes, while the content may be a bit unsettling, it is relevant.
One thing which gets left out is ... I hate to say this but ... consciousness. We know matter exists, and we know consciousness exists, but we really don't know the first thing about how consciousness works. I don't mean information processing, because eventually any robot will be able to do everything a human does, as it is just about having a machine that's processing inputs and converting those to behaviours.
No, the real mystery is why such a robot would even need to be sentient. There is no reason why humans, as we are, need to be sentient. We are just biological machines. We could go about performing human functions and communications all running our complex brains just as we are, just not sentient, not experiencing any of it. One human could say to another, "I love you" as simply a code for certain information which gets processed into various probabilities of scenarios for future survival, and so on. Even poetry can come down to that, given we're now starting to develop machines which can work with intuitive patterns.
So that leaves consciousness as a) totally irrelevant and b) the most core part of our existence as sentient experiencing humans, humans watching the movie of their lives.
A lot of people tend to dismiss consciousness as just a byproduct, but that's maybe just because it is so hard to study that any self respecting person stays well clear of it. But it is also known as the "hard problem" and it is so "hard" that some say we'll need to start thinking about consciousness as another law of the universe, along with the other fundamental laws. And that would eventually start to modify these "anthropic" principles in some way.
As for "gods" well, humans have always had very powerful imaginations, and we make stories, but that's a separate thing altogether, and those stories about identity and belonging are perhaps seen as survival strategies between groups, where rather than physically fight another group, you just reprogram them to act as if they are part of your group already, "owning" as it were, without destroying.
And even if one puts aside survival questions, and one assumes there may be an afterlife, it really is up for grabs what form that could take, as the possibilities are endless and in my mind, either you die and disappear in which case you don't know you're dead, or something else, which could be anything. Nobody knows. But I digress.
Back to the point, ideas like the anthropic principle tend to go a bit too far with their conclusions given that they take no account of consciousness and what part that plays in existence and the cosmos.
And inventing trillions of trillions of other universes as a way to explain why this one happened to be tuned just right for us, is hand-waving and as made up as any myth which was made up as an ad-hoc explanation. An explanation isn't more rigorous just because it avoids mentioning gods or turtles.
We don't know why matter was tuned just right, and we don't know what consciousness is, and we don't know if there is life out there. Although there's no reason to think that Earth is special. I mean, it is more like the naughty corner if anything, you get sent here and ignored until you learn to calm down and behave. (See, stories.)
The alleged fine tuning for life in our physical laws will probably turn out to be nothing more than part of our address in space. Whether that be the string landscape or some equivalent in quantum loop or some other theory. Don't waste your time looking for design.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
According to what studies specifically? The Drake Equation and Fermi Paradox are not fast friends. The former insists there should be life. The latter says we should already have seen it. Many attempts have been made to explain the latter in a way that doesn't contradict the former. We really don't know what the right answer is.
Honestly, I'm very much in opposition to the "follow the water" people. The argument goes, "everywhere that we find liquid water on Earth, we find life - so we just need to find liquid water elsewhere, and we should find life". Which I find to be patently absurd. It's a truism that anything life is made of, it has to be able to get, in some sort of reactive form. On Earth, water pretty much has to be the source for hydrogen, and hydrogen is one of the elements that make up all LAWKI (that is, CHONPS). That says absolutely nothing about whether water must be the source of hydrogen, or whether forms of life that don't use hydrogen are possible. It just says that life on Earth is well adapted to build itself out of the elements found on Earth. Well, duh, that's going to happen by definition.
The other related argument is that life appeared on Earth shortly after the planet cooled, so not only should life form wherever there is water, but it should do so quickly. You know, as if the seas as a whole simultaneously and spontaneously evolved life proto-cells across their breadth, rather than there existing some particular isolated location that happened to have the right conditions for life, which seems vastly more likely, and which the vast majority of abiogenesis theories call for. We do not know what that situation was, and can only speculate on it. But assuming that wherever you have liquid water you're going to have paired with it such a situation is such a huge unsupported leap of logic. And one thing we can say for certain about Earth's early seas is that they were nothing like today's; they were bright green, full of unreduced iron. Earth was a dramatically different place then.
Water is bloody everywhere in the universe. Liquid water not that much rarer. If you accept the "follow the water" peoples' ideas, than life should exist in almost every solar system, and on the surface in a good number. That's just turning the dial on the Drake Equation up to 11, and consequently, doing the same with the Fermi Paradox. Fermi Paradox solutions like "life evolving toward intelligence is rare" flies flat in the face of evolution, and "intelligence reaching sentience is rare" is way too much human hubris, insisting on some sort of magical Rubicon-crossing intelligence jump that sets us apart from other animals. In reality our problem-solving ability isn't so vastly greater than our nearest relatives; the main Rubicon that we've leaped across, the one thing that we do vastly better than our relatives, is communication - the ability to convey ideas to our fellow humans. And "communication" hardly seems like some sort of unevolvable barrier.
It seems much more likely to me that the answer to the Fermi Paradox is just that life is not a common occurrence, not something that just spontaneously and quickly generates wherever you have water; that life is rare, rare enough that cosmological distances keep us from encountering each other.
I'd also like to add that I think the chance of planetwide extinctions (especially before life is really tuned) is perhaps underrated. The more we learn of our neighbors - even here in our middle-of-nowhere location around our relatively tame star - the more we learn that they haven't always been as they are now. Venus, for example, appears to have once had seas of comparable scale to Earth. If the "follow the water" people are right, then life should have evolved there. But of course Venus hardly resembles Earth at all day. It's not even just the issue that Venus has lost the vast majority of its water; Venus's entire crust (with the possibility of some small exceptions) was resu
I spent the evening flickering into your darkness.
With current AI we see the 'mechanism' expressing a certain 'behaviour' when inputs are triggered and somewhere inside a threshold is crossed. We learn such an AI with examples and the treshold should cross when 'similar' (but different) examples are used as input. Sometimes it triggers on examples that may not, at first glance, have enough similarity with the learning set. That's where things get interesting. It has been often enough the AI eventually was 'right' (and it detected cancer cells where no doctor could, won a Go match, etc.).
But AI currently doesn't analyze a problem from all sides, weighs arguments and consciously comes to a conclusion, like humans (would like to) do. It's in my idea more like a subconscious processor. And I think, maybe, most of our brain works on a similar level, doing things intuitively. Because to do things consciously requires a lot more energy. I think consciousness does emerge when enough 'intelligence' is connected together, when there is enough 'idle resources' to analyze a part of your input from every angle possible. and when you 'learn' (and trust) to let most of your processing be prepared through your subconscious and then only cherry pick the really tough examples to give them all the attention (and energy) you have reserved for your conscious part to process... And then consciousness isn't just a by-product, its a valuable tool that reduces your false positives. But who am I to use my meager consciousness to ponder such a question and with so little (close to no) evidence?
There is no reason why humans, as we are, need to be sentient. We are just biological machines.
What you describe as two different things (sentience and a purely functional deterministic machine) are the same thing. If you made a computer advanced enough that it would be functionally equivalent to a human, it would automatically be sentient as well.
Imagine you have a terrible toothache, and I offer you a special pill for it. The pill doesn't take away the pain itself, and it doesn't change anything in your functional behavior. You will be exactly the same as before, with one difference: the pain no longer hurts. The pill takes away the conscious experience of the pain, but none of the functional aspects. You will still experience the same constantly nagging distraction urging you to take care of it, and you will avoid hot and cold foods on the tooth, as before. When describing the pain, you will use the exact same words
.
Half an hour later, I ask if the pill works, and you say: "no, I can't tell the difference".
If you can't tell the difference, there must be no difference.
The Nature article while more informative only provides a handful of selective quotes from the essay but still no link. Instead it frames the essay in the context of Churchill's interest in science. How about an actual link to the actual essay?
Ask Africa: has kicking out the Europeans helped? Who, among the Africans, has benefited from their departure? There seems to be no lack of savages in the continent. Cf. Congo. Or Rwanda. Or Nigeria. Or SA. All of which are various levels of fucked-up disaster. Best you can get is, maybe, Kenya, where there are still beggars everywhere (in the midst of an incredibly fertile land) and gates blocking the entry to the driveways of hotels in Nairobi - and that was before the mall catastrophe.
You will still experience the same constantly nagging distraction urging you to take care of it
You're contradicting yourself by first stating that the pill fundamentally changes the experience, then stating that the experience will be similar (whilst using terms such as 'nagging' and 'distraction' that imply consciousness, I might add).
What makes experiences experiences is that you (consciously) experience them. At least, that seems to me to be the only sensible definition of 'experience'. 'Subconsciously experiencing' is an oxymoron to me.
You're contradicting yourself by first stating that the pill fundamentally changes the experience, then stating that the experience will be similar
Yes, I did that on purpose. It's "reductio ad absurdum" to show that the original assumption (that you can have a functional pain without the experience) leads to a contradiction, and is therefore not true.
'nagging' and 'distraction' that imply consciousness
One of the functions of pain is to focus your attention away from what you're doing, and fix the cause of the pain. You can't have that function without a nagging distraction, otherwise you would just ignore it and continue with your business.
Remember guns don't kill people. Physics kills people.
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
"Churchill’s scientific papers reveal an even greater politician than we thought" (17 February 2017
https://www.theguardian.com/co...
"Churchill will also have benefited from his reading of Olaf Stapledon’s science-fiction masterpiece, Last and First Men, which was published in 1930."
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
We are finding water in enough places just in our solar system that the Follow the Water hypothesis will soon be tested.
Water is literally the most abundant compound in the universe. It's silly to look for organic chemistry that uses some rare compound when the universe is drowning in water which we already know works great.
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A brave little theory, and actually quite coherent for a system of five or seven dimensions -- if only we lived in one. Academician Prokhor Zakharov, "Now We Are Alone"
Inheritance is the sincerest form of nepotism.
I can't take him seriously after he recruited Darleks to fight the Germans. There is a dark side to him if he teams up with a race that want to destroy the universe.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Churchill wasn't opposed to barbarous tranny, as long as it was coming from his own country.
Unfortunately, his position on shemales and ladyboys remains unknown.
The Wikipedia article.
I think it's rather unlikely that you are.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
That's just the point (although not exactly correct, H2 is the most abundant compound in the universe, and carbon monoxide is second... but still very abundant). The concepts of "life occurring wherever there's water", "water being everywhere", and the Fermi Paradox do not play well together. If life occurs wherever there's water then there should be millions of pan-galactic civilizations in the Milky Way. The very point that water is so abundant strongly argues against the "follow the water" hypothesis.
And I'll repeat my point, since you apparently missed it (with your "already know works great") remark: the fact that LAWKI "works great" with water is practically a truism, because water is by far the easiest source of hydrogen to come by on Earth, and LAWKI is built on CHONPS. Even LAWKI (let alone whatever other potential kinds might exist) can already deal with all sorts of other hydrogen-bearing molecules found in the universe, such as CH4, H2S, and NH3. And this on a world where those things are not common at the surface.
The argument that life depends on water because on Earth we find life wherever we find water is like an anthropologist in ancient China saying that human life depends on rice, because wherever rice can grow, you find people, and human civilization is adapted around the cultivation of rice. It misses the point that rice is just one potential source of the nutrients that humans need, and that their civilization adapted to the cultivation of rice, rather than there being some simple A=B relationship between humanity and rice cultivation.
But this all misses a more important point, in that the question is not about what "highly evolved life can use to live and reproduce". The actual issue is about what conditions are required for abiogenesis. And we have absolutely no clue about that whatsoever - just widely divergent hypotheses. What we can say is that when it happened on Earth, Earth was a very different place, and whatever sort of peculiar environment set it off is almost certainly long gone. And not knowing what that environment was, we have no ability whatsoever to say how common it is - except to point to the Fermi Paradox and say "probably not bloody common at all".
I spent the evening flickering into your darkness.
"A lot of people tend to dismiss consciousness as just a byproduct, but that's maybe just because it is so hard to study that any self respecting person stays well clear of it."
Quite a lot of people have studied consciousness, actually, just not in an empirical/scientific framework, because as you've pointed out consciousness doesn't even exist in that model. There's no measurement of consciousness, only behavior and information processing. It simply doesn't exist in objective reality.
But we know that it does exist, because we experience it. So what does that tell us? That we need to abandon the notion that empiricism is the end-all-be-all of understanding, for one. Down that path is mysticism, philosophy, meditation, and a whole bunch of stuff long considered witch-doctor mumbo jumbo, and surely some of it is, but there is also truth in there. Truth that is dismissed by empiricism because it lacks a measurement.
As for the issue of what we should be looking for, it's hypercycles. Complex interactions of chemicals being driven by an energy source, cycles which might have the potential to "close the loop" and catalyze their own creation. And in that regard, I'd argue that Titan is a more likely place for life than Mars (although I don't expect to find life there, either - but what you can learn from studying the chemistry has so far proven to be fascinating, there's apparently a whole range of cyanide compounds at Titan surface temperatures that can perform the basic steps of all major life processes - even photosynthesis - and in some cases even more effectively than LAWKI can in Earth conditions).
I'd also argue for looking for phenomena that are difficult to explain by other means. For example, some people have pushed the "Martian methane" thing, but that's not particularly compelling, it just means that Mars isn't entirely geologically dead. I've heard a similar non-compelling argument for OCS on Venus. Of the "unknowns" in our solar system, I again think Titan has presented the best case to date, in the fact that multiple lines of evidence show higher hydrocarbons apparently disappearing at the surface, and some evidence (less clear) suggests hydrogen also disappearing at the surface. The this sort of metabolism of theoretical life on Titan - decomposition of higher hydrocarbons with hydrogen - was theorized before the above data was discovered (published right as Huygens was landing, actually). And that's something very difficult to explain by natural reactions at Titan surface temperatures - discovery of a natural catalyst that could do that would itself be an incredible find. There are argued non-life explanations (some sort of method that sequesters higher hydrocarbons underground where we wouldn't detect them - they're not dissolved in the seas, at least, which appear to be pure methane), and due to the Fermi Paradox I expect explanations involving non-life answers to be the correct ones. But, to me at least, Titan certainly seems more compelling than Mars and its destroy-organics-on-contact regolith.
And don't get me wrong, I absolutely want to see what's under the ice in Europa or Enceladus. But I don't expect to see anything swimming. Enceladus appears to have a soda ocean (Mono Lake-style), and I wouldn't be surprised if Europa's is similar. Dead, but potentially with interesting chemical clues.
I spent the evening flickering into your darkness.
as the bible dictates the universe being created by God for man
I think that you're making assumptions about what the Bible actually says.
Earth was made for man.
I'm not a Christian but I know their book. It does not preclude intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, in fact, it might even suggest that there is. John 10:16 mentions "Other sheep" who are "not of this sheep pen(or fold)". Could those other sheep or the other fold refer to non-humans who are not on this planet? It's debatable.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Not from College student. "RE: Aliens in my University. We are hiding in a safe space and have no idea what is out there. Please write something nice on a note and slip it under the door after sanitizing the document. As we consider the amount of analprobaphobes on campus it should be known that messages not fitting our confirmation bias will be ignored."
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
I like to call it "kinetic energy poisoning"
It might have been lost once upon a time, but now surely it's a found essay.
OK, semantic moment, I should have known better.
No, your children are not the special ones. Nor are your pets.
It's existential in that it addresses breaking apart the frozen sea inside each person?
Or its highly reflective with a possibility of enabling us to confront our own superficiality?
Oh wait. This is like "existential" according to the Charlie Gibsons and intellectual snobs who don't know what it means to have an existence.
Surely if a lot of money "exists" in my bank account than I'm existential also.
To elaborate a bit, it's obvious that Africa isn't in great shape right now. But it should also be acknowledged that things _are_ improving, at least at the moment.
Extreme poverty is on the decline, though work is ongoing (poverty statistics, poverty report) and it seems like Africa is overall starting to move into Stage 3 of population growth (In a Nutshell - Overpopulation)
So colonialism fucked the place up, things are _generally_ getting better since then, but it's still going to take awhile (and more hard work.)
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If you made a computer advanced enough that it would be functionally equivalent to a human, it would automatically be sentient as well.
Begging the question.
You shouldn't have posted this as AC. Many will not read what you wrote because of it.
You should not have posted this as AC. Many will not read your comment who otherwise would have.
Also known as perpetual explanation machine.
Why do we need to be sentient. Couldn't I be the only sentient being in the entire universe and "everyone else" for whatever meaning that would hold, just be Philosophical Zombies?
I think the Bible is quite clear that non-human intelligent life exists. For example the angels.
I deny the existence of anything for which there is no evidence.
God and Heaven are just made of Dark Matter, that's why we can't see them. See, no contradiction with physics. ;-)
I think in the late 19th and early 20th centuries intelligent alien life was a concept more widely accepted than today. For example life on Mars was considered a possibility. Visible features of Mars being interpreted as canals received some support until better optics were developed and the "canals" were determined to be an illusion.
But we know that it does exist, because we experience it.
Considering the fact that defining "consciousness" is proving very slippery, I'd say it's a big assumption to say that we know it exists, considering we can't even agree on what we mean by "it."
So what does that tell us? That we need to abandon the notion that empiricism is the end-all-be-all of understanding, for one.
And another big assumption. Just because we can't define consciousness yet doesn't mean we can't subject whatever it is (if it exists) to empirical tests. We simply don't know yet. Just because we don't know something now doesn't mean we never will. It's too early to invoke hand-waving.
Yeah, clearly believing in God is thinking "outside the box".
I didn't say I deny the existence of anything I can't see... although some of the things you mentioned are directly observable: air pressure (I'm literally looking outside my window at trees blowing in the wind), round Earth (objects disappearing over the horizon, the phases of the moon, etc.). I've even seen germs with my own eyes, using an amazing invention called a microscope (maybe you've heard of it).
There is a huge difference between all the things you mentioned and God, and it's not that they're invisible (even though they're not). It's that there is observable and verifiable evidence of all of those things, and diddly-squat for the magical man in the sky.
My mind is open to absolutely any idea, but the price of admission is evidence. If you can't pay the cover charge, you get bounced at the door.
Only crack the nuts that crack. You don't put the ones that don't crack in the sack.
Instead, smart people don't deny it. They simply state there is no evidence for it and discard it.
Pedantic difference. Discarding it is denial as it results in effectively the same thing, i.e. it is not used as a prior for any future conclusions. In the future, the moon might crack open and release a thousand-thousand dragons who drink the Sun's fire, but until then I deny (***discard***) the idea that the moon is a dragon egg, and I don't base any other conclusion on the assumption that it is. Are you saying that I should?
You're right about one thing, I do "believe" (read: have concluded the existence of) many things I can't see. The difference is that there is evidence for those things, unlike God, for which there is absolutely none.
Only crack the nuts that crack. You don't put the ones that don't crack in the sack.
Yes, I did that on purpose. It's "reductio ad absurdum"
My apologies, I misread your comment. It seems we are and were in agreement.
I know (think) you're joking. But why do so many of these replies equate evidence solely with things you can see. We can't see dark matter, but we can see it's effects.
Only crack the nuts that crack. You don't put the ones that don't crack in the sack.
You look at humans and see consciousness. I look at humans and see life. I see no difference between the two. Life is consciousness, and vice versa.
You experience consciousness as the ability to think, to say to yourself, "this is why I am doing this." Sadly, the FMRI machine, transcranial magnets, and some modern science experiments have shown that consciousness is just a side effect, a plausible explanation of our actions fed to the conscious mind by the real workhorse of human action and thought, the non-verbal parts of the brain. For instance, say you decide to move your arm. TOO LATE! Your brain started sending the signal before you consciously thought if it, before you decided, before you thought. Then thought is merely the reflected afterimage of non-conscious/non-verbal modules of the brain, the part of the brain that thinks it is the motivator, the initiator of action when in reality it is merely the translator of actions and thoughts into verbally accessible structures and experiential sensory phenomena. It is almost as if consciousness is just the "seminal memory," an altered version of events that gives the verbal part of the brain an understanding of what has just happened in terms it can relate to, but which actually deviate quite strikingly from actual reality.
Seeing thought and consciousness as the illusion they are, realizing that the actual human experience of life is inaccessible to the verbal mind, and therefore not able to be experienced truthfully, and that every verbalization of experience is fundamentally flawed with the untruths inherent in our experience of reality as "thinking beings" with "consciousness" becomes a little disorienting. Better to take the observation of "life" and "consciousness" outside the organism which we have proven has issues (massive ones!) with internal consistency, objectivity of experience, and even cause and effect.
From outside we see a complex system, reacting to the environment based on a system of internal rules. We call it life. It has movement, structure, and seeming purpose. An issue arises though. This is is in many ways functionally indistinguishable from the levels of complexity we see expressed from sub atomic particles, to atoms, to molecules, to cells, and to other organisms. This thing we call life is made up of the things we call not-alive, and yet, when observed very closely, these not-alive things seem to behave much like life does. The molecules have movement, structure, and seeming purpose. When introduced to other molecules they seem to take action, operating in these actions according to a set of internal rules. Even their constituent parts are the same, having movement, structure, and seeming purpose. They operate according to a set of internal rules and seem to take actions when introduced into an environment with other similar scale parts.
This is a fundamental truth of our universe. There is a fractal arrangement of interactivity, structure, and purpose from the incredibly micro sized up to the macro size. Everywhere we can observe, and at every scale. Some would say this complexity has reach it's pinnacle in the human form. That our intelligence and consciousness is the top of the scale.
I call that arrogance. Hubris if you will. We would be as aware of the levels of organization, structure, and seeming purpose above us as enzymes are aware of cells, as heart cells are of the horse they inhabit.
Our first gods were the sun, earth, moon. If they are the next scale up, who is to say they don't speak the cosmic language of large bodies, expressed in magnetism and gravity, emission spectra and absorption, or forces we cannot yet detect in the dark spectrum? What would they converse about?
Yeah that last part is pretty woo, but would we even know the difference if it were true?
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
The Wikipedia article was to let people read more about the Last and First Men.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
It's just the way this universe is. The whole thing. At every level we can observe the pieces of the universe interact relentlessly with the space and other pieces of the universe. That is life. That we call the stuff on earth life and what is on mars not-life is merely due to the myopic lens of human vision.
It brings to mind the immortal words of a quantum physicist I once met. I referred to the double slit experiment and asked his opinion as to why the single photon makes a diffraction pattern when it has nothing else (observable) to interact with. He replied with a depth of certitude and fundamental conviction that preachers and popes wish they could posses, and said simply "oh, it just does that." No dwelling on the mysteriousness of quantum phenomena, no postulating his preferred reasoning for the effect. Nope, "It just does that" is sufficient in and of itself, just like that single photon passing through two places at once and interfering with itself.
That's how the universe is with life. It just does that.
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
"We know matter exists, and we know consciousness exists, but we really don't know the first thing about how consciousness works."
I hate to say this, but you don't exist. You're just a figment of my imagination, so you can't prove to me that you exist. All of you supposedly "other" people "out there" are images on a VR simulation permanently attached to me that gives me the sensations of sight and sound, and sometimes other more intimate sensations, like the taste of chocolate and bananas or the feel of sweat and heat.
The Solipsist (aka The Mind in the Vat)
I believe in Panspermia, with one caveat. It is a prophetic belief. Life, rare or not, begets life. It is incumbent on us to spread it everywhere we can, as we have not yet observed it elsewhere.
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
He quite clearly said poisoned gas. You yourself quoted it.
The previous sentence is "He also wanted to use M Devices against the rebellious tribes of northern India." What's that? "An exploding shell containing a highly toxic gas called diphenylaminechloroarsine."
If documented facts are "social-justice nonsense", then you just might be a dishonest, willfully blind American Exceptionalist.
Yeah, they might miss out on the sophistry of complaining about the previous sentence in the article...when the actual previous sentence was on Churchill wanting to use exploding shells containing diphenylaminechloroarsine to pacify areas of India under British rule.
Do you also pretend that Iraq is in shambles because the U.S. (nominally) ended its occupation of the country, rather than the Iraq War that overthrew the government and destabilized the region? Every place you just mentioned is a mess because of European powers who went there in the first place, not because those European powers (nominally) ended rule over the continent. You willfully ignorant Western Exceptionalist, you.
And I say "nominally" because western powers still dominate Africa, only now under the banners of the International Monetary Fund, rather than England or France. If you get too uppity, you get your country overthrown - just ask Zombie Gaddafi, after he tried to start a gold-backed African currency to compete with the Franc.
And you can thank the same western powers that screwed them over in the first place for the slow recovery. Enforcing debts accumulated under colonialist rule, IMF "bailouts" that force the sale of public assets to foreign "investors", being forced to rely on international monetary markets. Libya might have been able to help with some of that, as Gaddafi had plans for a gold-backed African currency, so naturally he was targeted for regime change.
I know (think) you're joking. But why do so many of these replies equate evidence solely with things you can see. We can't see dark matter, but we can see it's effects.
Perhaps because in causal conversation people very often refer to "seeing" something, directly or indirectly (via a displayed number, pointer on a gauge/meter, physical byproduct, etc). For example we can "see" gravity on a bathroom scale, particles in a cloud chamber, etc. "Seeing" isn't necessarily being used in a literal sense, rather a figurative one.
But I also think people are sometimes making an indirect point, trying to somehow demonstrate the evolving nature of human understanding, of discovery, of the existence of things that were until very recently beyond belief. Demonstrating the logical flaw in that if we can not directly or indirectly perceive something it must not exist. That the universe is not limited to things we perceive or understand. Which addresses your statement: "I deny the existence of anything for which there is no evidence." The Higgs boson existed whether we had evidence or not, whether we even had a theory of its existence or not, whether we existed as a species or not.
A person who doesn't even understand the concept of splitting up paragraphs is in no grounds for criticizing someone else as being "unintelligible". Likewise, starting off a debate by accusing the other side of "psychosis"... well, I'll not comment about what that says about you.
1) The presence of water inside a cell does not require that a wet external environment was the source of the hydrogen in said water.
2) There are countless solvents in the universe. Out of sheer coincidence over the past two days I've been reading papers on the solvency properties of ionic liquids and carbon disulfide (the latter being common naturally). The studied possibilities of cyanide chemistry on Titan use methane as a solvent. Ammonia is also common in the universe and is an excellent solvent. (if you want to argue against methane and ammonia because they're not polar, you're going to have to defend the concept that solvents must be polar - which in the studied case for Titan, they absolutely don't have to be in order to create some spectacularly complex cyanide chemistry). Carbon dioxide is a superb solvent in its supercritical state. There are lots and lots of common natural compounds that are excellent solvents in widely varying environments. Not environments that LAWKI would survive in, but that's because LAWKI is evolved to the conditions of Earth, utilizing molecules that are stable on Earth conditions for its life processes.
Which can be resolved by combining terms. Feel free to present your alternative (many people have); each form nonetheless invariably projects massive numbers of civilizations.
A premise I'll gladly accept.
Except that there still is, because even if a civilization evolved only 1% earlier than ours did (a very tiny margin!), it's 138 million years old, and can thus be expected to have been long moving out at relativistic speeds in all directions. The Milky Way's diameter is only 100-180k light years. Even Andromeda is only 2,5 million light years away. Even civilizations having advanced to the point of interstellar travel just a mere 1% earlier than we've reached our current state should be arriving from all over the local group - let alone ones that developed 5%, 15%, 50%, etc earlier. The fact that life tends to spring up wherever there's water is not consistent with the observed emptiness of the universe.
Cosmological distances help keep is apart, but it is also a requirement that life be very rare.
The more appropriate comparison, since we're talking about beings that reproduce, and over timescales representing countless generations, is to claim that every square meter of Earth's surface must have been visited by bacteria. And golly gee, it has. Even ignoring the point that bacteria don't have intelligence to guide them.
I spent the evening flickering into your darkness.
I think as a whole we would be a lot better off as a species without it.
The Higgs boson existed whether we had evidence or not, whether we even had a theory of its existence or not, whether we existed as a species or not.
The difference is that we found evidence for the Higgs Boson. We didn't know it existed before we found the evidence. To presume the existence of things before there is evidence means you presume the existence of ANYTHING AND EVERYTHING. The moon is a giant dragon's egg! I have no evidence, but apparently it can't be denied according to you and everybody else! Tomorrow it just might crack open and a thousand thousand dragons will emerge and drink the Sun's fire!
Only crack the nuts that crack. You don't put the ones that don't crack in the sack.
My point is not about presuming something exists, its about ruling out its existence given our limited and flawed understanding of things. Denial due to a lack of evidence is unscientific, scientific is hypothesizing and seeking evidence.
Denial due to a lack of evidence is unscientific
No it's not. It is one of the most fundamental aspects of the scientific method. It does not preclude forming hypotheses and seeking evidence. You assume the 2 are mutually exclusive, but they're not.
Only crack the nuts that crack. You don't put the ones that don't crack in the sack.
Denial due to a lack of evidence is unscientific, scientific is hypothesizing and seeking evidence.
No it's not. It is one of the most fundamental aspects of the scientific method. It does not preclude forming hypotheses and seeking evidence. You assume the 2 are mutually exclusive, but they're not.
Actually denial is precluding, it is a conclusion; and it is a conclusion that goes beyond unscientific to illogical since it tries to claim a negative due to a lack of evidence. Proper denial requires evidence to the contrary not ignorance. Denial is something different than "there is currently no evidence to support/demonstrate/etc".
"Argument from ignorance (from Latin: argumentum ad ignorantiam), also known as appeal to ignorance (in which ignorance represents "a lack of contrary evidence"), is a fallacy in informal logic. It asserts that a proposition is true because it has not yet been proved false (or vice versa). This represents a type of false dichotomy in that it excludes a third option, which is that: there may have been an insufficient investigation, and therefore there is insufficient information to prove the proposition be either true or false."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
No, not unlikely at all. In fact, totally the case
I cannot prove that God exists. But I cannot prove the God does not exist (and even that would be contingent if you were positivist, because the conclusive evidence for either case could arrive at any point in the future). The hypothesis is not one amenable to falsification. That's the agnostic part.
But, on the availability of the current evidence, I see no reason to accept that God exists: there is no convincing argument to me that supports it. That's the atheist part: I do not think there is a God (or Gods).
It's not you: I'm just this horrifically socially awkward with everybody.
You can't be both. If you're an atheist you believe god doesn't exist. If you're an agnostic you either don't know or you believe it's not possible to know.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
You look at humans and see consciousness. I look at humans and see life. I see no difference between the two.
Nope there's a slight difference in how the word consciousness is used. I do NOT look at humans and see consciousness. If I look at other humans, all I can see is brains (and life, as you put it), and if I think about it, I assume those brains are conscious. BUT I cannot see their consciousness. Only I can "see" my consciousness, and it isn't even a seeing in any normal sense of, a subject looking at an object, because for me, consciousness is the subject, or to get religious, the Supreme Subject or Supreme Self, but that woo language isn't necessary, albeit poetic, it is just that, if I wasn't conscious, then I would experience nothing, and not even nothing, there could be no sense of "experiencing nothing" because experience itself, of anything, would simply not be, for me. I would not be. The analogies for consciousness are that it is a mirror on which everything is reflected, but the mirror itself is not made of anything, it is more like "space" or "emptiness". Again, poetic, but just that's consciousness.
Life is consciousness, and vice versa.
You experience consciousness as the ability to think, to say to yourself, "this is why I am doing this."
Again, not quite. Descartes said, "I think therefore I am" but he was mistranslated! It was more like, "Being, therefore Existence". A dog may be sentient, but that doesn't mean it has thoughts about itself. Man 500,000 years ago may have been sentient, but the contents of his experience didn't include thought out questions like, "why am I doing this", rather, he may have operated purely on instinct, but also, experienced his life, or given he didn't have the thought, "my life", he may simply have experienced running down large animals and experienced his hunger satiated by the flesh. Likewise elephants might be sentient but because they lack the neurones for abstract reasoning, they just hang about in their herd and look for water, experiencing life on the savannah like that.
Sadly, the FMRI machine, transcranial magnets, and some modern science experiments have shown that consciousness is just a side effect, a plausible explanation of our actions fed to the conscious mind by the real workhorse of human action and thought, the non-verbal parts of the brain. For instance, say you decide to move your arm. TOO LATE! Your brain started sending the signal before you consciously thought if it, before you decided, before you thought. Then thought is merely the reflected afterimage of non-conscious/non-verbal modules of the brain, the part of the brain that thinks it is the motivator, the initiator of action when in reality it is merely the translator of actions and thoughts into verbally accessible structures and experiential sensory phenomena. It is almost as if consciousness is just the "seminal memory," an altered version of events that gives the verbal part of the brain an understanding of what has just happened in terms it can relate to, but which actually deviate quite strikingly from actual reality.
Seeing thought and consciousness as the illusion they are, realizing that the actual human experience of life is inaccessible to the verbal mind, and therefore not able to be experienced truthfully, and that every verbalization of experience is fundamentally flawed with the untruths inherent in our experience of reality as "thinking beings" with "consciousness" becomes a little disorienting. Better to take the observation of "life" and "consciousness" outside the organism which we have proven has issues (massive ones!) with internal consistency, objectivity of experience, and even cause and effect.
From outside we see a complex system, reacting to the environment based on a system of internal rules. We call it life. It has movement, structure, and seeming purpose. An issue arises though. This is is in many ways functionally indisting