I don't see how this is a big secret. When you add an application there is a checkbox that says (and I quote), "Allow this application to... Know who I am and access my information." If you uncheck this box Facebook tells you "Granting access to information is REQUIRED to add applications. If you are not willing to grant access to your information, DO NOT ADD THIS APPLICATION."
I saw this the first time I went to add a Facebook app, and thought "hey, I don't want that, so I'm not going to add it."
Facebook is an advertising platform just like everyone else, so either I'm missing something (which, I'll admit is entirely possible--I recognize that I make mistakes all the time), or is there really a story here?
BTW, just read the terms of service for each application--if it doesn't say what they will do with your data, don't add the app. Then it isn't a whole lot different than putting the same data into any other web application. Also, being aware that this can happen, don't put data on your facebook profile you don't want the rest of the world seeing. It's not rocket science-just common sense.
I agree. I am a CS student and that type of complaint seems to be running rampant through the field. There is a huge difference between computer SCIENCE and software engineering. If you don't want to be doing the math/research side of computers, computer science is not your field.
Also, anecdotally, I code monkey (by that I mean: do grunt coding work) for a computer vision research group, and it seems, from my admittedly limited experience, that the best work being done in computer vision is being done by people that have a great command of "pure" math. Without math, computer vision is reduced to trying to code things that kind of work (the hack-it approach), whereas with math the computer vision field is building mathematical models of things like shape and is able to push the limits much farther than I think would otherwise be possible. IMHO.
I love blender, but I do agree with the bit about people jumping through hoops to make any changes to it. I rewrote one of the import scripts because it only handled a tiny subset of the specifications for the file format it was supposed to import and I needed it to import more diverse forms of OFF files for my work. I posted my changes with example files for review and didn't hear back for months. When I finally did hear back they wanted me to create more example files to show them what the point of my changes were (which I felt I had pretty clearly displayed). I decided to forget about trying to get the changes into blender because I don't have the time to spend on convincing other people that it works. The code works perfectly for me (I use it almost every day) and the blender folks have access to it if they ever decide to take the time to sit down and review it but the whole process was pretty discouraging to me.
Why should Microsoft care if companies are producing windows XP machines? They are still get money for the sale of Windows XP.
I understand giving up support for Windows XP to force users to move to Vista, but selling XP seems to just continue bringing money in. In fact, in another year, someone who buys an XP machine today might buy a Vista upgrade. I can't see how this is bad for Microsoft. It to be a win, win... win situation.
I agree. The January figures seem to point towards Nintendo simply not being able to meet demand. I wasn't able to get a Wii until Feb. even though apparently the Wii sold over 400,000 units in January whereas the XBox 360 sold around 250,000 units (if I am remembering correctly). IMO it seems like Nintendo is having to churn out more units than anyone else (but hey I have no idea what I'm talking about so take it with a grain of salt) and they just don't have the manufacturing power to keep up. I've also noticed this month that controllers for the Wii are readily available which wasn't the case last month, so maybe things are slowing down a bit.
As to your point 2). I think it is probably true for the majority of people but it certainly wasn't for me. I had a PS2 and a couple of computers and I wasn't interested in forking over another couple hundred dollars for a console with updated graphics. I like the 360 a whole lot, its got amazing games and amazing graphics, but I won't buy one. The PS2 is fun enough for now if I want to do a bit of classic console play. The Wii, on the other hand, got me excited because of the new controller paradigm and I was going to wait 6 months to get one if necessary. In other words, I was not in the market for a console, I was in the market for a Wii.
As to the PS3, its beautiful allright, but I can't lay down that much cash for a console. There are much more important things I need that money for.
Here here! And also someone needs to develop a misplacement-proof e-book reader so I don't cry when I leave my multi-hundred dollar appliance behind on the aircraft. Of course, I could use this feature on my cell phone and mp3 device as well, not to mention my wallet.:)
Okay, I'm not well versed in probability, but I still think you can talk about the chances of an event having occurred at the time of there occurrence. For instance, if you flip a coin you have a 50/50 chance of it landing on heads. If I just flipped a coin, and it landed on heads, would I now say that the chance of the coin flip landing on heads was 1? I think I would still say it had a 50/50 chance at the time.
Of course, if you think the entire universe is completely deterministic, there is no chance; but I don't think that, and I'm not going to argue with someone who does.
'Are you attempting to say that under "traditional materialistic evolution" no species can be the first to do anything ?'
Of course not. But like you said, 'It's true that it is very unlikely that any *one* species should be the first for any single property.' So we should at least be happily surprised that we were the first if in fact we are. Let's say you found a series of rocks in the shape of letters that spelled out the first paragraph of the constitution. Is it possible that those letters have been formed purely by natural causes and just happen to be in the perfect location to spell out the first paragraph of the constitution? Yes. Are you going to believe that? No. You are a going to think that someone came along and put them there that way. It is still possible that they came to be that way completely naturally without any intelligent intervention, but you aren't going to believe that. That is all I'm saying. If you deny the mediocrity principle, then you are far more justified in believing in God, then you are in believing in completely chance events. Yes, it could have still happened by chance, we could still be the first, but we are less justified (EVEN IF IT IS TRUE) in believing that, then believing in God.
Now before you get angry over the last paragraph, let me give you a way out: just say that the mediocrity principle is true. That is all I was trying to do in the first place is argue that if you deny the mediocrity principle it gets a lot harder to argue against the existence of God (IT DOESNT MEAN IT IS PROVEN BY ANY MEANS, JUST THAT THERE SEEMS TO BE FAR MORE WARRENT FOR IT). But why is that such a big deal? Just don't deny the mediocrity principle and attack some other part of Fermi's argument.
That's fine, but typically a necessary being in philosophy is called God even by people who don't believe in the Christian God or Jewish God or Allah or whatever. Frungy works just as well, but then someone would probably say, "Why didn't you just say God instead of Frungy?". Anyway, I'm not trying to argue here that there is a God (I don't believe you can make that argument). I was trying (unsuccessfully, my fault) to play devil's advocate and give some reason to believe the mediocrity principle (which it seems many scientists do in fact believe) by showing that denying suggests a conclusion that many people don't accept.
I obviously have some flawed arguments, but I still think either you have to believe the mediocrity principle or you have to strongly favor arguments about God. A good rational deist, IMHO, would have good arguments against one who denied both the mediocrity principle and God but believed in most of the things science tells us about our origins. Unfortunately, I am not a good rational deist, so I can't make that argument.
I did a bad job in explaining, and the readers did a bad job in understanding. I was attempting to provide reason to believe the mediocrity principle because doubting it came to what some might consider an unsavory conclusion. That's all.
That I can agree with. I was just trying to argue that if you take his premises to be true then you have to accept his conclusion. Unfortunately, I got a little strung out in my arguments and probably took a few a bit too far and for that, and I apologize.
I totally agree though, if you have reason to doubt the premises then you have reason to disbelieve him. If you believe his premises, however, the conclusion seems (at least to me) to follow.
Personally, I think that I have no way of knowing (as you pointed out) whether his premises are true or not (or at least the one you alluded to), and frankly I don't care because ultimately I have enough to worry about with life on this planet without aliens, thank them very much.
Okay, that makes sense. Somehow this whole discussion got way out of hand. I'm just trying to get these people to actually argue against Fermi, instead of randomly claiming that he is an idiot without attacking his actual argument. Also, your argument about my incorrect use of ~p => ~q is well said. I was more trying to point out that the guy I was replying to is pulling implications out of thin air without actually providing argumentation for them.
The main drive of the necessary being talk is that if he wants to argue about who made God exist, he isn't talking about the classical God of the Judeo-Christian tradition. That particular God is a necessary being, which is in effect the explanation for his existence.
Back to your comment that this is an actual reply to: I think I meant not the probability that we evolved the way we did in fact evolve, but the probability that it would have occurred in the first place. Similarly a coin having been flipped to heads still had equal probability at the time of being flipped to tails. I think I wasn't clear ron what I meant, but I don't even remember anymore.
Ultimately all I was trying to argue for was that Fermi has a good point, if you accept his premises (or the premises of the argument as written on wikipedia, maybe not necessarily Fermi's actual premises) it seems to logically follow.
"That's a load of shit. What makes you think we aren't the most advanced, or that the most advanced civilisations have barely just begun to colonise neighbouring planets?"
You are saying the same thing I am, and thus missing my point. I am saying that in order for the argument (Fermi's argument) to work, you HAVE TO SUBSCRIBE to the mediocrity principle. If you think that we are the most advanced civilization then you DO NOT SUBSCRIBE to the mediocrity principle, and hence you can rationally say Fermi is wrong. Many people, however, believe the mediocrity principle, including most evolutionary biologists (with good reason), and they have to contend with Fermi. If you don't believe it, fine, Fermi isn't arguing with you. He is arguing with the people that do believe it.
Maybe the principle is a "load of shit". That is one way of denying the Fermi argument. Without that principle as a presupposition the argument OF COURSE doesn't work, for reasons that you alluded to.
It comes down to how probable you think it is. If it is probable that we should have evolved the way we did, then you need to argue with Fermi, not me. Read his argument. He says, if you think it is probable, then here is an implication. If you think it is highly unprobable then you already think it is unlikely for other such civilizations to exist.
Look people, I'm not arguing against evolution. I'm saying that I agree with Fermi that there aren't the MULTITUDES of advanced civilizations out there that have been posited by certain people. I'm not saying there can't be others. I'm not saying that we didn't evolve. I'm saying that Fermi is right, and defending his arguments. I have yet to see an argument against any of his premises here, and since the argument seems perfectly valid, that is the only way to refute it.
"if the universe is really damn big, we should be the opposite of surprised if and when we finally encounter another intelligent civilisation"
Ultimately it is going to come down to how probable you think life is verse how many possible life bearing planets are in the universe. Since there are finitely many planets in the universe.
I don't think this destroys Fermi's argument at all however. If you take the rare earth view, then it is highly unlikely that there are other advanced civilizations out there. If you take the opposite of the rare earth view, the mediocrity principle, then you have to contend with Fermi, who says you should still be surprised.
Dude. Give me an argument with true premises and a valid form that shows that the improbability of life equates to the improbability of a God. I personally believe in evolution, though not materialistic evolution, and I don't subscribe to the mediocrity principle either.
Anyway, look at the converse of your argument. You are saying that the likelihood of intelligent life is equated with the likelihood of there being a God? That means that if we have a high likelihood of intelligent life, there is a high likelihood of God.
Also, God as a philosophically necessary being does not require an argument for his existence. Philosophical necessity means that it is impossible that he not exist, but this is outside of the point. I'm not saying science can even talk about that type of issue. I'm just saying that the lower the probability of life being in the universe is, the more surprised we should be to find it.
Still, since you brought it up. If there is a necessary being (and who cares about a God who isn't a necessary being, in that case what does God even mean?) then the question is not removed to how he exists, he exists necessarily, end of story. If there isn't a necessary being, then we should still be uber surprised that we exist at all. I haven't heard many people arguing for some god who is not a necessary being.
I addressed this in another post, but I like your line of argument here. I think Fermi, however, would say that he doesn't care about that possibility. What he is giving is a scientific argument. Science goes hand in hand with expiremental verifiability. What Fermi is saying is that the very best science can tell us (or put differently, if you are only going to believe the observations of science what you must believe) is that there are not as many intelligent civilizations as most scientists are assuming. As soon as you start talking about things that are unverifiable by science (at least unverifiable to with our current methods) you are giving a philosophical and not a scientific argument. Personally I'm not going to say that that is a bad thing, but it is arguing past Fermi, not against him.
In fact, I think you can reasonably hold both Fermi to be true, and that there are many other intelligent civilizations. You just have to believe that shortcomings exist in science that don't allow us to get at all possible truth.
Oh, and if nothing else, the start of life is random. Amino acids floating in the primordial soup have to be struck by lightning in just the right way to give rise to protiens or something along those lines, right? So regardless about whether once life gets started is it random, the actual start requires random events to occur. Or do you think that all possible universes with our particular brand of chemistry and physics will necessarily have life? If not, then it is, at least in some sense, random.
I'll admit that I could be woefully incomplete in my understanding of evolution as I am not a biologist, but can you explain that statement? I believe that the idea is that random genetic changes occur and the ones that give rise to better survival stick. If so then there is still the random changes part of the process.
Evolution in some sense requires the mediocrity principle. Humans are merely chance events in the universe and we should expect to find many other similar intelligent species around the universe. If humans were the only such outcome of evolution then the chance involved gets smaller and smaller. The smaller the chance that evolution could have occurred the more surprised we should be for finding that it has occurred. The more surprised we are that it has occurred, the more it seems to make sense that some necessary being (we can call him "God") is conducting things, possibly in ways we don't understand.
For tradional materialistic evolution to work correctly we have to be just another chance occurrence with a "nothing to see here, move right along" sign tacked to our foreheads.
I said this in another post, but I'll say it again. I think that Fermi here is giving a scientific argument. This means that expiremental verifiability is important. If you are saying that WE are the aliens, then evolutionary biology seems to have a body of evidence that we happened by chance, and to argue against it you need to posit some untestable hypothesis like (aliens struck the lighting into the primordial soup in just the right way as to create life that they knew would lead to intelligent beings eventually.) If you are saying that they are here but we can't detect them, then you are making claims also outside the realm of science since we have no expiremental faculty to test your hypothesis. Either way Fermi is going to say that he is arguing that if we take science to be the only way we humans can reliably come to know truth, then we must conclude that there is not a sufficient number of intelligent civilizations in the galaxy. It is merely an argument from what we can reliably believe given our science. Now you can say that this is a weak point in science's ability to come to truth. Which I would agree with you. But you need to recognize that this same hole also allows for arguments to the existence of God and a mariad of other things that cannot be verified by science but may be believed to be true none-the-less.
If you want to believe in undetectable aliens, then fine, but you have to realize that you are now asking a question of philosophy and not of science. Fermi is not saying that he has proven there can't be aliens, he is saying that the VERY BEST SCIENCE CAN DO, is tell us that there are countably few intelligent civilizations.
I'm also a Christian, but not a "Creationist" in the sense you are referring to. But I can tell you that the Bible is wholly concerned with this planet and this species. It makes no claims about life on other worlds. Creationism has no bearing whatsoever on this debate. You are making a leap from "God created man" to "God created man and no other intelligent species". This may be a strange example but every creationist believes in angels which I tend to think of as intelligent, although I suppose the use of species here could be debated. So we have at least one other intelligent creation. If you look at C. S. Lewis's space trilogy you have a view (albeit fictional) of life on infinitely many other planets, all created by God that has no incoherence with a belief in creationalism.
When I said "I see the Fermi paradox as saying that, the best conclusion we can reach through science is that there are no other life forms," I mean that I see the Fermi paradox as saying that the best conclusion we can reach through science is that there are precious few other possible advanced civilizations. (I don't think he meant there can be none, or that humans are the only ones or something like that, so don't get hung up on it.)
"Another possibility: aliens have visited us but have not revealed themselves to us. If their technology is so far superior to ours that it allows for space travel over great distances, it is also possible that they have managed to evade our attempts at detecting them."
The problem here is that science deals with what we can verify expirementally or empirically. Now you have a belief system that is untestable. You are out of the realm of science. Your question now is no different than "Is there a God?" because it is purely a product of your philosophy and not expirementally testable.
I see the Fermi paradox as saying that, the best conclusion we can reach through science is that there are no other life forms, because if the basic tenents of science are true, then we should have seen them by now. If you want to argue about unrevealed aliens, you aren't arguing against Fermi, because he only wants to talk science, not philosophy.
"We've also had 10 billion years to visit them. Since we haven't done so yet, does that imply that we don't exist?"
The argument requires the mediocrity principle which implies that if there are many other intelligent civilizations many of them would be far more advanced then we are. Given that it doesn't matter that we've had 10 billion years to visit them-we are the less advanced civilization.
"Even if there are a million advanced civilizations in this galaxy, that doesn't mean that we'd know about them."
Maybe, but if this is true you need to argue against one of the premises in the Fermi paradox. The argument itself seems to be valid, so you need to argue against it's soundness. Which premise is wrong then? It seems to follow logically from its premises.
Take it to be:
Premise: Mediocrity principle. Thus we are not special and as such if there are many civilizations many of them are more advanced then we are.
Premise: Life has a tendency to overcome scarcity and colonize new habitats.
Premise: Earth has been around long enough for a sufficiently advanced civilization to have densly colonized the area.
Assume for the sake of reductio ad absurdum that there are many other civilizations. Then because of the previous premises we would expect to see sufficient evidence of them in the galaxy. We do not see sufficient evidence of them in the galaxy, so we have a contradiction. So we conclude that there are not many other civilizations.
Notice this doesn't say there are NO other civilizations. This is merely an argument that if there are as many as people want to say there are (tons and tons of habited worlds with intelligent life beginning far before and far after ours) we should see them by now. Since we don't there can't be as many as people say. There could be some, just not a multitude.
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I don't see how this is a big secret. When you add an application there is a checkbox that says (and I quote), "Allow this application to... Know who I am and access my information." If you uncheck this box Facebook tells you "Granting access to information is REQUIRED to add applications. If you are not willing to grant access to your information, DO NOT ADD THIS APPLICATION."
I saw this the first time I went to add a Facebook app, and thought "hey, I don't want that, so I'm not going to add it."
Facebook is an advertising platform just like everyone else, so either I'm missing something (which, I'll admit is entirely possible--I recognize that I make mistakes all the time), or is there really a story here?
BTW, just read the terms of service for each application--if it doesn't say what they will do with your data, don't add the app. Then it isn't a whole lot different than putting the same data into any other web application. Also, being aware that this can happen, don't put data on your facebook profile you don't want the rest of the world seeing. It's not rocket science-just common sense.
I agree. I am a CS student and that type of complaint seems to be running rampant through the field. There is a huge difference between computer SCIENCE and software engineering. If you don't want to be doing the math/research side of computers, computer science is not your field.
Also, anecdotally, I code monkey (by that I mean: do grunt coding work) for a computer vision research group, and it seems, from my admittedly limited experience, that the best work being done in computer vision is being done by people that have a great command of "pure" math. Without math, computer vision is reduced to trying to code things that kind of work (the hack-it approach), whereas with math the computer vision field is building mathematical models of things like shape and is able to push the limits much farther than I think would otherwise be possible. IMHO.
I love blender, but I do agree with the bit about people jumping through hoops to make any changes to it. I rewrote one of the import scripts because it only handled a tiny subset of the specifications for the file format it was supposed to import and I needed it to import more diverse forms of OFF files for my work. I posted my changes with example files for review and didn't hear back for months. When I finally did hear back they wanted me to create more example files to show them what the point of my changes were (which I felt I had pretty clearly displayed). I decided to forget about trying to get the changes into blender because I don't have the time to spend on convincing other people that it works. The code works perfectly for me (I use it almost every day) and the blender folks have access to it if they ever decide to take the time to sit down and review it but the whole process was pretty discouraging to me.
Why should Microsoft care if companies are producing windows XP machines? They are still get money for the sale of Windows XP.
I understand giving up support for Windows XP to force users to move to Vista, but selling XP seems to just continue bringing money in. In fact, in another year, someone who buys an XP machine today might buy a Vista upgrade. I can't see how this is bad for Microsoft. It to be a win, win... win situation.
I think he said that the "screenshot" is 3 different screenshots in the same image. I'm reading it and it doesn't seem to be sarcastic (yet).
I agree. The January figures seem to point towards Nintendo simply not being able to meet demand. I wasn't able to get a Wii until Feb. even though apparently the Wii sold over 400,000 units in January whereas the XBox 360 sold around 250,000 units (if I am remembering correctly). IMO it seems like Nintendo is having to churn out more units than anyone else (but hey I have no idea what I'm talking about so take it with a grain of salt) and they just don't have the manufacturing power to keep up. I've also noticed this month that controllers for the Wii are readily available which wasn't the case last month, so maybe things are slowing down a bit.
As to your point 2). I think it is probably true for the majority of people but it certainly wasn't for me. I had a PS2 and a couple of computers and I wasn't interested in forking over another couple hundred dollars for a console with updated graphics. I like the 360 a whole lot, its got amazing games and amazing graphics, but I won't buy one. The PS2 is fun enough for now if I want to do a bit of classic console play. The Wii, on the other hand, got me excited because of the new controller paradigm and I was going to wait 6 months to get one if necessary. In other words, I was not in the market for a console, I was in the market for a Wii.
As to the PS3, its beautiful allright, but I can't lay down that much cash for a console. There are much more important things I need that money for.
Here here! And also someone needs to develop a misplacement-proof e-book reader so I don't cry when I leave my multi-hundred dollar appliance behind on the aircraft. Of course, I could use this feature on my cell phone and mp3 device as well, not to mention my wallet. :)
Okay, I'm not well versed in probability, but I still think you can talk about the chances of an event having occurred at the time of there occurrence. For instance, if you flip a coin you have a 50/50 chance of it landing on heads. If I just flipped a coin, and it landed on heads, would I now say that the chance of the coin flip landing on heads was 1? I think I would still say it had a 50/50 chance at the time.
Of course, if you think the entire universe is completely deterministic, there is no chance; but I don't think that, and I'm not going to argue with someone who does.
'Are you attempting to say that under "traditional materialistic evolution" no species can be the first to do anything ?'
Of course not. But like you said, 'It's true that it is very unlikely that any *one* species should be the first for any single property.' So we should at least be happily surprised that we were the first if in fact we are. Let's say you found a series of rocks in the shape of letters that spelled out the first paragraph of the constitution. Is it possible that those letters have been formed purely by natural causes and just happen to be in the perfect location to spell out the first paragraph of the constitution? Yes. Are you going to believe that? No. You are a going to think that someone came along and put them there that way. It is still possible that they came to be that way completely naturally without any intelligent intervention, but you aren't going to believe that. That is all I'm saying. If you deny the mediocrity principle, then you are far more justified in believing in God, then you are in believing in completely chance events. Yes, it could have still happened by chance, we could still be the first, but we are less justified (EVEN IF IT IS TRUE) in believing that, then believing in God.
Now before you get angry over the last paragraph, let me give you a way out: just say that the mediocrity principle is true. That is all I was trying to do in the first place is argue that if you deny the mediocrity principle it gets a lot harder to argue against the existence of God (IT DOESNT MEAN IT IS PROVEN BY ANY MEANS, JUST THAT THERE SEEMS TO BE FAR MORE WARRENT FOR IT). But why is that such a big deal? Just don't deny the mediocrity principle and attack some other part of Fermi's argument.
That's fine, but typically a necessary being in philosophy is called God even by people who don't believe in the Christian God or Jewish God or Allah or whatever. Frungy works just as well, but then someone would probably say, "Why didn't you just say God instead of Frungy?". Anyway, I'm not trying to argue here that there is a God (I don't believe you can make that argument). I was trying (unsuccessfully, my fault) to play devil's advocate and give some reason to believe the mediocrity principle (which it seems many scientists do in fact believe) by showing that denying suggests a conclusion that many people don't accept.
I obviously have some flawed arguments, but I still think either you have to believe the mediocrity principle or you have to strongly favor arguments about God. A good rational deist, IMHO, would have good arguments against one who denied both the mediocrity principle and God but believed in most of the things science tells us about our origins. Unfortunately, I am not a good rational deist, so I can't make that argument.
I did a bad job in explaining, and the readers did a bad job in understanding. I was attempting to provide reason to believe the mediocrity principle because doubting it came to what some might consider an unsavory conclusion. That's all.
That I can agree with. I was just trying to argue that if you take his premises to be true then you have to accept his conclusion. Unfortunately, I got a little strung out in my arguments and probably took a few a bit too far and for that, and I apologize.
I totally agree though, if you have reason to doubt the premises then you have reason to disbelieve him. If you believe his premises, however, the conclusion seems (at least to me) to follow.
Personally, I think that I have no way of knowing (as you pointed out) whether his premises are true or not (or at least the one you alluded to), and frankly I don't care because ultimately I have enough to worry about with life on this planet without aliens, thank them very much.
Okay, that makes sense. Somehow this whole discussion got way out of hand. I'm just trying to get these people to actually argue against Fermi, instead of randomly claiming that he is an idiot without attacking his actual argument. Also, your argument about my incorrect use of ~p => ~q is well said. I was more trying to point out that the guy I was replying to is pulling implications out of thin air without actually providing argumentation for them.
The main drive of the necessary being talk is that if he wants to argue about who made God exist, he isn't talking about the classical God of the Judeo-Christian tradition. That particular God is a necessary being, which is in effect the explanation for his existence.
Back to your comment that this is an actual reply to: I think I meant not the probability that we evolved the way we did in fact evolve, but the probability that it would have occurred in the first place. Similarly a coin having been flipped to heads still had equal probability at the time of being flipped to tails. I think I wasn't clear ron what I meant, but I don't even remember anymore.
Ultimately all I was trying to argue for was that Fermi has a good point, if you accept his premises (or the premises of the argument as written on wikipedia, maybe not necessarily Fermi's actual premises) it seems to logically follow.
"That's a load of shit. What makes you think we aren't the most advanced, or that the most advanced civilisations have barely just begun to colonise neighbouring planets?"
You are saying the same thing I am, and thus missing my point. I am saying that in order for the argument (Fermi's argument) to work, you HAVE TO SUBSCRIBE to the mediocrity principle. If you think that we are the most advanced civilization then you DO NOT SUBSCRIBE to the mediocrity principle, and hence you can rationally say Fermi is wrong. Many people, however, believe the mediocrity principle, including most evolutionary biologists (with good reason), and they have to contend with Fermi. If you don't believe it, fine, Fermi isn't arguing with you. He is arguing with the people that do believe it.
Maybe the principle is a "load of shit". That is one way of denying the Fermi argument. Without that principle as a presupposition the argument OF COURSE doesn't work, for reasons that you alluded to.
It comes down to how probable you think it is. If it is probable that we should have evolved the way we did, then you need to argue with Fermi, not me. Read his argument. He says, if you think it is probable, then here is an implication. If you think it is highly unprobable then you already think it is unlikely for other such civilizations to exist.
Look people, I'm not arguing against evolution. I'm saying that I agree with Fermi that there aren't the MULTITUDES of advanced civilizations out there that have been posited by certain people. I'm not saying there can't be others. I'm not saying that we didn't evolve. I'm saying that Fermi is right, and defending his arguments. I have yet to see an argument against any of his premises here, and since the argument seems perfectly valid, that is the only way to refute it.
"if the universe is really damn big, we should be the opposite of surprised if and when we finally encounter another intelligent civilisation"
Ultimately it is going to come down to how probable you think life is verse how many possible life bearing planets are in the universe. Since there are finitely many planets in the universe.
I don't think this destroys Fermi's argument at all however. If you take the rare earth view, then it is highly unlikely that there are other advanced civilizations out there. If you take the opposite of the rare earth view, the mediocrity principle, then you have to contend with Fermi, who says you should still be surprised.
Dude. Give me an argument with true premises and a valid form that shows that the improbability of life equates to the improbability of a God. I personally believe in evolution, though not materialistic evolution, and I don't subscribe to the mediocrity principle either.
Anyway, look at the converse of your argument. You are saying that the likelihood of intelligent life is equated with the likelihood of there being a God? That means that if we have a high likelihood of intelligent life, there is a high likelihood of God.
Also, God as a philosophically necessary being does not require an argument for his existence. Philosophical necessity means that it is impossible that he not exist, but this is outside of the point. I'm not saying science can even talk about that type of issue. I'm just saying that the lower the probability of life being in the universe is, the more surprised we should be to find it.
Still, since you brought it up. If there is a necessary being (and who cares about a God who isn't a necessary being, in that case what does God even mean?) then the question is not removed to how he exists, he exists necessarily, end of story. If there isn't a necessary being, then we should still be uber surprised that we exist at all. I haven't heard many people arguing for some god who is not a necessary being.
I addressed this in another post, but I like your line of argument here. I think Fermi, however, would say that he doesn't care about that possibility. What he is giving is a scientific argument. Science goes hand in hand with expiremental verifiability. What Fermi is saying is that the very best science can tell us (or put differently, if you are only going to believe the observations of science what you must believe) is that there are not as many intelligent civilizations as most scientists are assuming. As soon as you start talking about things that are unverifiable by science (at least unverifiable to with our current methods) you are giving a philosophical and not a scientific argument. Personally I'm not going to say that that is a bad thing, but it is arguing past Fermi, not against him.
In fact, I think you can reasonably hold both Fermi to be true, and that there are many other intelligent civilizations. You just have to believe that shortcomings exist in science that don't allow us to get at all possible truth.
Oh, and if nothing else, the start of life is random. Amino acids floating in the primordial soup have to be struck by lightning in just the right way to give rise to protiens or something along those lines, right? So regardless about whether once life gets started is it random, the actual start requires random events to occur. Or do you think that all possible universes with our particular brand of chemistry and physics will necessarily have life? If not, then it is, at least in some sense, random.
I'll admit that I could be woefully incomplete in my understanding of evolution as I am not a biologist, but can you explain that statement? I believe that the idea is that random genetic changes occur and the ones that give rise to better survival stick. If so then there is still the random changes part of the process.
Evolution in some sense requires the mediocrity principle. Humans are merely chance events in the universe and we should expect to find many other similar intelligent species around the universe. If humans were the only such outcome of evolution then the chance involved gets smaller and smaller. The smaller the chance that evolution could have occurred the more surprised we should be for finding that it has occurred. The more surprised we are that it has occurred, the more it seems to make sense that some necessary being (we can call him "God") is conducting things, possibly in ways we don't understand.
For tradional materialistic evolution to work correctly we have to be just another chance occurrence with a "nothing to see here, move right along" sign tacked to our foreheads.
I said this in another post, but I'll say it again. I think that Fermi here is giving a scientific argument. This means that expiremental verifiability is important. If you are saying that WE are the aliens, then evolutionary biology seems to have a body of evidence that we happened by chance, and to argue against it you need to posit some untestable hypothesis like (aliens struck the lighting into the primordial soup in just the right way as to create life that they knew would lead to intelligent beings eventually.) If you are saying that they are here but we can't detect them, then you are making claims also outside the realm of science since we have no expiremental faculty to test your hypothesis. Either way Fermi is going to say that he is arguing that if we take science to be the only way we humans can reliably come to know truth, then we must conclude that there is not a sufficient number of intelligent civilizations in the galaxy. It is merely an argument from what we can reliably believe given our science. Now you can say that this is a weak point in science's ability to come to truth. Which I would agree with you. But you need to recognize that this same hole also allows for arguments to the existence of God and a mariad of other things that cannot be verified by science but may be believed to be true none-the-less.
If you want to believe in undetectable aliens, then fine, but you have to realize that you are now asking a question of philosophy and not of science. Fermi is not saying that he has proven there can't be aliens, he is saying that the VERY BEST SCIENCE CAN DO, is tell us that there are countably few intelligent civilizations.
I'm also a Christian, but not a "Creationist" in the sense you are referring to. But I can tell you that the Bible is wholly concerned with this planet and this species. It makes no claims about life on other worlds. Creationism has no bearing whatsoever on this debate. You are making a leap from "God created man" to "God created man and no other intelligent species". This may be a strange example but every creationist believes in angels which I tend to think of as intelligent, although I suppose the use of species here could be debated. So we have at least one other intelligent creation. If you look at C. S. Lewis's space trilogy you have a view (albeit fictional) of life on infinitely many other planets, all created by God that has no incoherence with a belief in creationalism.
When I said "I see the Fermi paradox as saying that, the best conclusion we can reach through science is that there are no other life forms," I mean that I see the Fermi paradox as saying that the best conclusion we can reach through science is that there are precious few other possible advanced civilizations. (I don't think he meant there can be none, or that humans are the only ones or something like that, so don't get hung up on it.)
"Another possibility: aliens have visited us but have not revealed themselves to us. If their technology is so far superior to ours that it allows for space travel over great distances, it is also possible that they have managed to evade our attempts at detecting them."
The problem here is that science deals with what we can verify expirementally or empirically. Now you have a belief system that is untestable. You are out of the realm of science. Your question now is no different than "Is there a God?" because it is purely a product of your philosophy and not expirementally testable.
I see the Fermi paradox as saying that, the best conclusion we can reach through science is that there are no other life forms, because if the basic tenents of science are true, then we should have seen them by now. If you want to argue about unrevealed aliens, you aren't arguing against Fermi, because he only wants to talk science, not philosophy.
"We've also had 10 billion years to visit them. Since we haven't done so yet, does that imply that we don't exist?"
The argument requires the mediocrity principle which implies that if there are many other intelligent civilizations many of them would be far more advanced then we are. Given that it doesn't matter that we've had 10 billion years to visit them-we are the less advanced civilization.
"Even if there are a million advanced civilizations in this galaxy, that doesn't mean that we'd know about them."
Maybe, but if this is true you need to argue against one of the premises in the Fermi paradox. The argument itself seems to be valid, so you need to argue against it's soundness. Which premise is wrong then? It seems to follow logically from its premises.
Take it to be:
Premise: Mediocrity principle. Thus we are not special and as such if there are many civilizations many of them are more advanced then we are.
Premise: Life has a tendency to overcome scarcity and colonize new habitats.
Premise: Earth has been around long enough for a sufficiently advanced civilization to have densly colonized the area.
Assume for the sake of reductio ad absurdum that there are many other civilizations. Then because of the previous premises we would expect to see sufficient evidence of them in the galaxy. We do not see sufficient evidence of them in the galaxy, so we have a contradiction. So we conclude that there are not many other civilizations.
Notice this doesn't say there are NO other civilizations. This is merely an argument that if there are as many as people want to say there are (tons and tons of habited worlds with intelligent life beginning far before and far after ours) we should see them by now. Since we don't there can't be as many as people say. There could be some, just not a multitude.