Lost Winston Churchill Essay Reveals His Thoughts On Alien Life (theverge.com) 187
"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 The Verge reports: Livio was "stunned" when he first saw the unpublished, 11-page essay on the existence of alien life, he tells The Verge.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.
Well... (Score:5, Funny)
I don't know if we are *truly* alone in the University, but it sure is empty here in the proof-reading department.
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I don't know if we are *truly* alone in the University, but it sure is empty here in the proof-reading department.
In my student days, there were a lot of alien - or at least strange - beings wandering the campus.
They can't hear you! (Score:2)
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."
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I don't know if we are *truly* alone in the University, but it sure is empty here in the proof-reading department.
I wish the same could be said of the computer rooms. I keep ending up on my iPad cos all the machines are taken.
It's good to be reminded (Score:5, Insightful)
'Intellectual' used to be an admired quality in a leader.
Re:It's good to be reminded (Score:4, Insightful)
But these days - in America at least - intellectuals trained in the same classical tradition as Winston Churchill are derided as beholden to the white male patriarchy. Hell, even figures previously associated with high minded ideals and liberty like Thomas Jefferson are now considered personas non grata. Meanwhile, the typical modern university does its best to train Alinskyite radicals.
Of course intellectuals are disdained. Thought is dead.
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Or, apparently, the rest of the world.
Remember, Romanticism was a rejection of the Age of Enlightenment characterized by its emphasis on emotion and glorification of nature. Sounds a lot like the internet these days.
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But these days - in America at least - intellectuals trained in the same classical tradition as Winston Churchill are derided as beholden to the white male patriarchy.
Strange, because Churchill was actually quite progressive by the standards of the day, in many respects.
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"Of course intellectuals are disdained. Thought is dead."
There's noting new about anti-intellectualism. What is new, and scary, is that it is happening on college campuses.
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Of course intellectuals are disdained. Thought is dead.
And it is post-modern nihilism and relativity (not the quantum kind) that killed it.
Re:It's good to be reminded (Score:5, Informative)
I don't have an opinion on this yet, because the only way it's come to my attention is through a highly biased source (you).
However I see one red flag straight away. Headline "Yale Students Demand English Department Stop Teaching White Male Poets".
Actual quote: "It is unacceptable that a Yale student considering studying English literature might read only white male authors."
You just conflated "ban teaching of white poets" with "we don't want ONLY white poets".
Did you conflate the two on purpose because your arguments are so weak as to only be applicable to straw men, or did you conflate the two because you're stupid and incapable of nuanced thought? Inquiring minds want to know.
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Cultures have been cross-fertilizing each other since the beginning of history, but now the snowflake community has demonized the process. If an older, more dominant culture influences a newer one, it's called "colonialism." If the transfer of culture goes in the other direction, it's called "appropriation."
Re:It's good to be reminded (Score:5, Informative)
They're DEMANDING that "Major English Poets" not be taught at all - by the university English Literature department - because they're white Europeans.
Are you unaware that "Major English Poets" is the name of a series of classes? And that those classes are a requirement for all students? (Citation) [yale.edu]
So they're not demanding the removal of all major English poets as crybaby snowflakes like you seem to think, they just seem to want that series of classes replaced with something more diverse. Something which could include Shakespeare but _also_ non-Europeans. (Or maybe they'd be okay with just eliminating "Major English Poets" as a singular requirement and allowing students to pick from a diverse set of literature classes to fulfill their requirement instead.)
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They are not saying "stop teaching white poets", they are (as the GP said) saying "stop teaching ONLY white poets". And yes, they do teach other poets in other , but the argument here is that having a substantial mandatory core strand dedicated to purely white English men isn't acceptable. It's a valid argument, which is not to say it is correct -- there is equally the valid counterargument that all the major English language poets of that era were white English men, so there really isn't an alternative. Cl
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Idiot.
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People make stupid things all the time. The thing is you are making a huge mistake that are common of all other idiots: think that 1 person with a certain opinion that _you_ associate with X means that all (or at least a significant subset) of X have that opinion. That is bullcrap. Your inference is crap. But that isn't all:
The text you quoted didn't say what you claim. It doesn't even say anything Shakespeare nor that white male poets should be banned.
So you used failed reading comprehension coupled with f
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What Churchill says in his essay is hardly what I call intellectual. He's repeating the kind of stuff plenty of kids fathom out for themselves without any scholarly guidance.
Put it another way, if someone found an essay by Joe Unknown that said exactly the same thing, would they be astonished?
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Ahead of his time (Score:5, Interesting)
"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.
Alien life was once a more accepted concept (Score:2)
Re:Ahead of his time (Score:5)
Yes, but nuclear weapons were not. Don't get me wrong, people were speculating about harnessing the energy of the atom for weapons. H. G. Wells coined the term "atomic bomb" in 1914 in "The World Set Free", but they were like ordinary bombs that continued exploding for days. Heinlein wrote about the development of a nuclear weapon to end World War II 1940 ("Solution Unsatisfactory"), but it was about a dirty bomb. If you have anything from before 1925(*) that's so accurate of a description of what nuclear weapons actually were, I'd like to see it. He got the minimum size wrong, but apart from that, that's pretty prophetic.
(*) - That quote was published in 1929 and written in 1925 [google.is].
BTW, the autopilot invented in 1914 was just a self-leveling system with a compass - it wouldn't be anywhere near accurate enough for guiding flying weapons. Flying weapons "by wireless or other rays", aka remote controlled (passive or active) aircraft is an entirely different thing. Something that actually was done in World War II, but a decade and a half after Churchill wrote that.
This doesn't make him some sort of Nostradamus, but it does mean that he was paying close attention to the technological developments of his time and thinking over their implications with an analytic mind.
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It happens sometimes.
For example a soviet SF book written in the 1920ies described a device that is quite close to a laser weapon (a device that concentrates light in a coherent beam, construction close to a laser resonator), and, in fact, inspired the laser inventor.
A pretty good book by the way, but somewhat difficult to read for a non-native russian speaker because of many obsolete words.
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He got the minimum size wrong, but apart from that, that's pretty prophetic.
He didn't get the size all that wrong. The important parts of a nuke such as one of the ones used on Japan were about the size of a grapefruit-- that is, the size of the plutonium as about as large as a grapefruit... which is only a little larger than an orange.
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A bomb is a lot more than just the fissile material therein.
SIR winston churchill ! (Score:2)
Re:SIR winston churchill ! (Score:5, Insightful)
Tsss, no education!
I, for one, leave off the "sir" nonsense deliberately, as I do not give one whit for who your queen reveres. We got the right to ignore that crap when we kicked British arse.
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I do not give one whit for who your queen reveres
in my case the only queen I know is my girlfriend ...
Re:SIR winston churchill ! (Score:5, Interesting)
If you were writing that hundreds of years ago, that's be a perfectly normal statement. Queen comes from Old English cwen (queen, woman, wife) - having originally been in the context of "wife (of a king)", and only later to refer only specifically to royals. It stems from the proto-germanic kwoeniz (wife), from PIE gwen (woman, wife), cognate of Greek gyne (woman, wife), Gaelic bean (woman), Sanskrit janis (woman), etc.
Lots of words related to women have changed over time, it's sort of weird. In Middle and Old English, woman was wif, which later became wife; the word "woman" comes from "wifman", or "woman-man", in the context of the gender-neutral usage of man that's been steadily dropped from English over the past half century (aka, more like "woman-person"). Wif still exists in English in a context closer to its original meaning in the word "midwife" - "woman who is with" (mid being a cognate of the Old Norse miðr (with), seen today in languages like Icelandic "með", Danish "med", etc)
Even "girl" has changed. "Gyrle" used to refer to babies only (more commonly female, but of either sex). Boys were "knave gyrles" and girls were "gay gyrles" (yeah, the latter term has changed a bit ;) ). The word "boy" existed at the time, but more often referred to a servant or commoner rather than being a generic term for "young male".
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Without fail, every time I read one of your posts I think to myself, "what a wonderful and though-out post displaying an impressive amount of knowledge". At that point I know who wrote it and only look to the author line to verify that it's you. Thanks for posting!
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Thank you kindly :)
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No wonder liberals kicked and screamed when Trump put him back on the mantel at the White House.
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Yes, he was a drunkard, smoked horrible cigars and made many mistakes in his life, but he had a sense of purpose to his life that went far beyond money. It is a shame that there are not more people like him alive today.
Personally, I think the Indians whose families suffered in Churchill's enforced famine during WWII might disagree with that. Or the so-called "savages" he delighted in killing in his earlier years. It's great that he stood up against Hitler, but he too was interested in the notion of the superiority of "the Aryan stock".
Really, there's not much you can say to defend the character of a man who said that Mahatma Gandhi "ought to be lain bound hand and foot at the gates of Delhi, and then trampled on by an en
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I am British and, sir, I do the same, because I didn't get to vote for the queen and I didn't get to vote for the knights.
You dont VOTE for kings
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Tries to be all American badass. Uses British spelling. FAIL
I was just helping the poor confused British people who forgot that they got kicked the fuck out understand what happened. I wanted to speak a language they would understand, and you can't whine in ASCII.
H G Wells (Score:5, Informative)
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/... [wikipedia.org].
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/... [wikipedia.org] 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.
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Is that why it was the US that actually developed it and not the UK?
Re:H G Wells (Score:4, Informative)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
By the time the UK worked out the US would not be sharing back, it was too late. Th UK had given the US most of what it had.
After WW2 the UK had to work on its own projects.
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I don't know why we keep falling for the "special relationship" line, we get screwed every time.
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I don't know why we keep falling for the "special relationship" line, we get screwed every time.
The way I see it, it's propaganda to get the US to do what the UK wants. Churchill was good at managing it, and Thatcher was good at managing it. Tony Blair failed big time.
Also, it drove Bismark crazy. Doesn't matter how skilled Merkel is with diplomacy, the US still isn't joining them in WW3.
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What is really interesting about the Tube Alloys program (joint UK, Canadian) is the price estimates for the various proposed facilities compared to what the Manhattan Project cost the USA. We (in the States) got butt-raped by the private industry involved in construction. Often by costs a few orders of magnitude greater than British R&D costs.
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That allowed the UK to be ready for a nuclear future.
Is that the future where we have to kowtow to the US to (supposedly) defend ourselves?
I wonder just how more expensive Trident will get over the next 4 years, after May has got down on her knees for Donald...?
"Are we alone in the University?" (Score:3)
That's a question I usually ask myself when the holidays kick in. The answer has still to be found.
Maybe he just wanted to shoot them in cold blood? (Score:5, Informative)
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, [theguardian.com] 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" [theguardian.com] was a real knee-slapper, too.
Churchill wasn't opposed to barbarous tranny, as long as it was coming from his own country.
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Do you also pretend
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Extreme poverty is on the decline, though work is ongoing (poverty statistics [worldbank.org], poverty report [worldbank.org]) and it seems like Africa is overall starting to move into Stage 3 of population growth (In a Nutshell - Overpopulation [youtube.com])
So colonialism fucked the place up, things are _generally_ getting better since then, but it's still going to take awhile (and mor
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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 f
Re:Maybe he just wanted to shoot them in cold bloo (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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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.
You even read, AC? (Score:2)
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
And yet no link to the actual essay (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
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That neither link actually leads to the essay.
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-38985425 [bbc.com]
Dr Livio told BBC News that there were no firm plans to publish the article because of issues surrounding the copyright. However, he said the Churchill Museum was working to resolve these so that the historically important essay can eventually see the light of day.
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Well it's the Verge.
Does any one really think this is creditable?
Are we alone in the University [sic]? (Score:2)
It can't be a lost essay (Score:2)
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.
Re: Anthropological principle (Score:3, Funny)
Plus, all those conversations with The Doctor probably stimulated his thinking on the issue.
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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.
Re:Anthropological principle (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Anthropological principle (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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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.
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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. ;-)
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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.
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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,
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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!
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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.
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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 fall
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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
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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
Re:Anthropological principle (Score:5, Interesting)
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.)
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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 doct
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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 lo
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 [wikipedia.org].
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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
You don't exist (Score:2)
"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 swe
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I think it's rather unlikely that you are.
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Also known as perpetual explanation machine.
Bible is quite clear that non-human life exists (Score:2)
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So the very long view was well understood.
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https://www.theguardian.com/co... [theguardian.com]
"Churchill will also have benefited from his reading of Olaf Stapledon’s science-fiction masterpiece, Last and First Men, which was published in 1930."
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The Wikipedia article.
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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 i
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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 li
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We are finding water in enough places just in our solar system that the Follow the Water hypothesis will soon be tested.
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Water is literally the most abundant compound in the universe. It's silly to lo
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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.
An
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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
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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.
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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 req