How about shielding? — tim wood

Sure, that's an important problem. What about magnetic shields?

Dreaming up the starship Enterprise is a long way from building it. At the moment it is impossible, even in principle. — tim wood

A starship, yes. But we already do have a couple spacecraft leaving the solar system. They're pretty crude compared to what should be possible in another century. And there are some proposals for how a warp drive might work.

Our technology is primitive compared to what's possible, if we stick around long enough and continue developing. The point of advanced ETs is that they've been around a long time.

Still, the Fermi Paradox remains, so maybe even advanced aliens find it impractical to travel to other star systems. That's what Frank Drake proposes as a solution. And maybe that's why there's no galactic civilization in the Milky Way or anywhere near us.

Perhaps that boy would think in terms of images? — Thinking

It took me a goodly amount of time (I don't know how long, precisly or approximately) to realize others think in language. — god must be atheist

Do you think in images, then? Or is there just no internal conversation? Do you have to always use an external medium? I tend to work with people who need visuals to understand. It drives me a little bit insane, as I'm not a very visual person.

I need to do some more research. — frank

Yeah, it's a bit dense and obscure. I'll try to do more research as well. It sounds interesting, though.

In short, the desire to contact aliens is born at a stage in a civilization that has, on balance, a friendly disposition. So, the idea that we should be wary of aliens, though sensible in some respects, may not be completely accurate. — TheMadFool

That might be true. It's pretty much what the SETI researchers believe. Jill Tartar said there's no real threat from advanced aliens, because they have no need to come here to exploit us, since they are advanced enough to make anything they want in their own system. You have to be pretty advanced to undertake travel between stars.

However, in Liu Cixin's novels, the aliens inhabited a system that was about to be consumed by it's unstable ternary sun system. So they needed to find a new home.

So I think she argues that information is about conserving a small set of possibility space that's useful for life processes. We've taken that and developed communication, math and science and computation.

art from the question of whether we have good reason to have confidence that human resourcefulness will find ways to colonize the planets, resourcefulness requires adequate resources as well as ingenuity, and in a world of diminishing resources there seems to be little reason to believe that we have adequate resources to exercise our resourcefulness such as to be able to sustain our growing population and economy, let alone colonize the planets. — Janus

If we successfully make it through this century with civilization reasonably intact, then we should have the resources and time to do things on a larger scale. As you pointed out, the sun has plenty of resources, which we can make use of. So do other planets and moons, in terms of raw minerals and gases.

Sagan suggested that other ETs go through the same adolescent stage we are going through. If a civilization makes it, then who knows whats ultimately possible. Maybe we stick to our solar system and setup a long term radio transmitter to let any aliens listening know we're here in case they wish to communicate. Or maybe our machine ancestors take to the stars.

is truly the irrationally imaginative stuff of science fiction; a kind of religiously adhered to fantasy. — Janus

There is a field called astrobiology and SETI is staffed by scientists. It's not just fiction writers who imagine aliens or that we'll become advanced enough to colonize other planets.

Elon Musk even has a company committed to that project, and NASA is now on board with setting up a moon base to facilitate going to Mars. Of course terraforming it is a very difficult, long term project, but given how much the world has changed in the last 500 years, who knows what might happen by 2520.

For advanced civilizations, if they exist out there, our timescales are puny. They would have had many millenia to figure things out.

Could you explain about information in physics? Is it related to information theory? Or is it a whole different thing? — frank

My understanding is that Dr. Walker is proposing an additional physics for what she calls information, but is open to it being something else. Basically something that would explain the emergence of life from chemistry (abiogenesis), and provide a better definition for life.

What I understood is she thinks that this is the result of life preserving/reproducing a small subset of complex chemical chains and reactions from the vast possibilities of molecules that could form. I need to go see if she explains her views elsewhere.

But the thing that stood out to me was the idea that information was strongly emergent because our understanding of physics is the result of biological emergence, which is not included in the physics.

I think that was basically Carl Sagan's view. In the movie version of Contact, Jody Foster's character is told by her alien-in-dad form that humanity was taking it's first step and would take another one in time after her brief visit with the wormhole machine. Maybe once we overcame our juvenile destructive tendencies.

You just need a source of ongoing propulsion like a nuclear reactor, lasers from space mirrors, or ramjet. If you don't have to propel a massive colony ship, then it's easier to get up to a faction of the speed of light. Send a swarm of small, intelligent self-replicating probes.

I can't find the YT video now, but there was a talk where the presenter discussed setting up an automated factory on Mercury to produce mirrors in orbit around the sun and swarms of spacecraft that could be propelled by the mirrors. He calculated that using only half of Mercury would allow us to spam every star system in every galaxy reachable by accelerating the probes to between 50% and 90% the speed of light.

Related topics and tangents tend to crop up in these discussions. I find the lion quote interesting, because we do have a shared world with other animals, but we also have some difficulty in understanding them.

When a philosopher makes such a claim, I would think bringing up anthropology, linguistics and zoology would be appropriate. Reading over your OP, I see you were making a connection to ethics vis Witt's language use and pain. And that he wasn't really talking about lions, but was exploring what we understand of the other? I don't entirely follow.

I confess to sometimes glancing at a thread I haven't read from the beginning and wanting to respond to a particular post someone makes.

SO what counts as language use? my suggestion, from the previous thread already mentioned, is that it contain names, groups of things and connectives; that is, first order predicate logic. And determining this of course involves translation. — Banno

Sounds reasonable. Maybe the fact that we haven't succeeded in translating dolphin-talk is reason to be skeptical that they are using language.

Humans have been able to successfully learn languages upon encountering new language communities. Maybe our common biology makes that easier than with other animals.

Sean thinks the universe is mathematical (from the Tegmark podcast), so naturally he thinks emergentism is weak, since all macro properties could in principle be computed in advance, given everything is math in his and Tegmark’s view.

Sara’s views are a bit more complicated. It helps to take into account her views on information and life’s emergence earlier in the podcast. I think math being an emergent abstraction is more believable that some of Tegmark’s views.

iven that our knowledge and understanding of brains is in the form of conscious visual models, if our minds are illusions, then so is our understanding of brains. — Harry Hindu

We agree on that. I don't understand what your position is, though. You think it's information all the way down. What sort of metaphysics is that?

Also, would be curious to get your feedback on the thread I created about information being a strongly emergent physics, as proposed by one physicist and researcher into life's origins.

If you're open to neuroscience explaining these things then whence the resistance? Are there some explanations you find particularly unpalatable? — Isaac

Because the explanations are just replacing phenomenological terms with statistical ones. That's not an explanation. It's equivocation.

What I'm looking for is how the color sensation is generated, not how the hard problem can be avoided using other terms. I see a colored-in world, and somehow brain processes are responsible. That needs to be explained.

Actually he does (to an extent). I'm fairly certain he used almost those exact words in a lecture. — Isaac

I listened to the podcast and he didn't say there was no hard problem, only presented a research program for approaching it. I don't know about the video as I just found it and skipped ahead to where he presents the hard problem, assuming it would be similar to the podcast. But maybe he says something different on there.

People can and do change their minds so ...

don't know what consciousness is, but thinking, intentionality and desire can all be reduced to behavior. — Harry Hindu

Here I'm going to say a hard no we can't. That's why behaviorism fell out of favor. Cognitive science has made more inroads on those, but I don't believe intentiionality has been solved. I do know Chalmers thinks it can be, unlike consciousness.

Then how do you know that minds or images don't literally exist in computers? — Harry Hindu

Similar question to panpsychism. I don't have certainty, but I doubt they do, since we can explain computer functionality just fine without consciousness. But we can't do that for ourselves. Or at least I'm not a p-zombie.

Its only a hard problem if you're a dualist. — Harry Hindu

Sure, but doesn't change the fact that consciousness is difficult to account for if one also accepts physical reality. Are you some sort of information idealist?

It really depends on where one is convinced to bite a philosophical bullet. But we all do.

Thats just rephrasing your statement that images are in minds. What does it mean for a mind to produce images? — Harry Hindu

If i knew, I'd be famous. Assuming I could explain it to the rest of you bullet-biting p-zombies.

Well, that was my question: how do minds exist "inside" brains? — Harry Hindu

It's a hard problem. But maybe we'll know in another century.

But then I think you need to also explain how images are "in" minds, too. — Harry Hindu

Produced by minds, part of the makeup of minds, however you wish to phrase it. Mind being a word for consciousness, thinking, intentionality, desire and anything that's difficult to reduce to neurons firing and chemicals flowing.

I don't think so. The idea of sensation being filtered through Bayesian models is expounded in great detail in the various papers on the subject. Not everyone agrees that it's a good or even accurate way of modelling cognition, — Isaac

Why would sensations be cognitive? Not everything the brain does is cognitive. A red sensation doesn't have cognitive content until it's put into language.

You know Anil has categorically said there's no hard problem of consciousness, right? — Isaac

Yeah, but he doesn't dismiss the problem as just a philosophical misuse of language. Rather, it's a topic for neuroscience to resolve. I'm open to that if it actually explains how colors and pains arise from brain processes.

How do images "literally" exist inside brains? — Harry Hindu

I don't know. The exist in our minds, though, and arguably nowhere else.

Yep, images and sounds don't literally exist inside computers. They're encoded as information for output devices that create sound and light waves for our eyes and ears.

@Isaac@fdrake
I did start a thread a year or so ago where neuroscientists Anil Seth discussed in a podcast his research into consciousness and marking progress on the hard problem.

https://philosophybites.com/2017/07/anil-seth-on-the-real-problem-of-consciousness.html

And:



Starting at 6:57:

How can the structure and dynamics of the brain, in connection with the body and environment, account for the subjective phenomenological properties of consciousness. — anil seth

So not just a few misguided philosophers.

After Davidson, if we are able to recognise that the lion is indeed speaking, then by that very fact we must be able to recognise some of what it is saying. Otherwise we would have no reason to think it was not humming to itself, or the equivalent. — Banno

We do have this problem with dolphins. They are clearly communicating, but are they using language? Might we figure it out and be able to say something to them?

Lions just roar and growl, so for one to speak it would actually have to be using human language. But some animals like certain birds and cetaceans have make sophisticated enough sounds to one another that it may be a form of language, or on the border. I saw a video about a year ago where one researcher was convinced dolphins have names (special sound an individual dolphin will recognize itself by).

We should talk about multiple realizability. That's the stuff that hammers home that some aspects of consciousness have to be emergent. More later.. — frank

That's what makes me wonder about functionalism.

'Experience' is no less slippery a term unless pinned down. Equivocation is the weapon of choice for most woo-merchants. — Isaac

But one could say the same thing for using words like model for sensation.

I discussed this previously here. Cartesian dualism has no practical application in everyday life or in scientific inquiry. Concepts like qualia, p-zombies and the hard problem are purely philosophical inventions that derive from Cartesian dualism. — Andrew M

That's not entirely true, since ancient skepticism and idealism proposed similar issues based on the problem of perception.

or at lest spooky emergentism. I recently listened to a podcast where a physicist explained why she thought information strongly emerged. But it was fundamental to understanding life:

An alternative one could take is that the model puts one in direct access with the hidden state. Not sure how tenable that is, but if you wanted to ground scientific discovery in direct perception, that's a way to do it.

The hidden state of some part of the external world. — Isaac

Alright, so does cognitive science have a proposal for how this model is generated?

I have a hard time believing that sensations being models is the majority view. What is red a model of? And what do neuroscientists have to say?

Then I think you've either had little experience of the scientific community in my field or you've misunderstood my position. It's quite the most common view among my colleagues and those whose work I generally follow. — Isaac

That color and pain are models?

So, where does that (physicalism plus abstracts) then take us? — jorndoe

To the stars?

I don't know what that means any more than Tegmark's mathematical universe. But then who knows what the hell fundamental reality is. I'm partial to quantum fields.

This is all just more information. — Harry Hindu

It's shivering all the way down.

Stuff that doesn't shiver qualia.

More seriously, the fundamental stuff of physics like fields, energy, matter, forces, spacetime and all the stuff that's logically entailed by that.

If Banno at the start of the Big Bang could simulate the rest of the history of the universe, apparently colors, pains and dreams would be part of the outcome. As would these non-terminating philosophical discussions.

Is information physical?

For one thing, scientists don't mostly run the world. Politicians, lawyers, generals and the rich do. For another, technology is a double-edge sword. Humans choose how they use it.

As near as I can tell dreams are just like real life; I'm immersed in a world, only it's often a much more bizarre world. I certainly don't experience them, just as I don't with movies, as being "in the mind". It's more like I'm in the movie. — Janus

Okay yeah, but it's not an experience of a world outside the body, so ...

One could say the brain is generating a very immersive (but weird) VR-like experience when dreaming.