o; Fermi doesn't assert anything. The point of the paradox is to point out what we don't know, and let us try to figure out through discussion and investigation why we don't see evidence of ETs. — Mijin

Also, Fermi wasn't thinking in terms of radio astronomy. He was wondering why the aliens weren't already here (and everywhere else), given the age of the universe and how it would only take millions of years to colonize a galaxy.

That's where Barbieri claims that the emergence of codes - RNA and DNA in particular - is genuinely novel, and can't be predicted on the basis of physical or chemical laws alone. — Wayfarer

That's interesting. My question is what to make of strong emergence. Something completely unpredictable and novel comes into existence when the right conditions obtain for the fist time?

I agree that modern physics has rendered traditional materialism obsolete. And John Wheeler is one physicist who's proposed an It from Bit view. But I don't know what it means for information to be fundamental, as opposed to fields or particles or spacetime.

Information seems to me to have something to do with repeatable patterns that emerge from the fundamental physics.

Let's get back to brass tacks: I'm in agonizing pain. Is this pain an illusion, and if so, what's the difference if the illusion is also painful? — Mijin

Imagine being burned at the stake as you keep telling yourself the pain is an illusion.

At least when he's finally out of office on Jan 20th, everyone can stop talking about him non-stop. The NY Times should send him flowers and thank card for all the business Trump gained them the past four years.

I can't believe a philosophy forum spent 483 pages talking about Donald Trump.

Is there a kind of life that wouldn't be pessimistic and was worth living? Can you define that? Some of the stuff you listed can feel worth it at times, and make life seem enjoyable. Whether it adds up to a meaningful life worth living depends on the individual. Antinatalists seem to think people are fooling themselves.

I see it both ways, just depending on my mood.

So I went back and listened to Anil Seth's podcast on Philosphy Bites. He contrasts the real problem of consciousness with the hard problem. He explains that the real problem is one of mapping all the correlations between brain processes and phenomenology as a way forward to possibly explaining consciousness someday. And when they do cover the statistical inference of perception, conscious experience is still the end result of that which needs to be explained.

So although Anil is not pessimistic like Chalmers or McGinn about the problem being truly hard, he does not dismiss phenomonlogy by replacing with with neurological or statistical terms, as you do. Instead, he says we are conscious and it is strongly correlated with brain activity, so let's continue investigating the link between the two and see where that leads.

No, I'm saying warp drives and wormholes are not ruled out. It might be possible to construct them for use in travel.

In the Sara podcast at 57:36, Sean says we know that Standard Model of particle physics and asks whether that isn't enough. He says he thinks that's where they're going to diverge in their opinions, and expresses surprise that she thinks the Standard Model wouldn't be enough to explain life.

Do your really think the core theory, the Standard Model of physics is not up to the task of explaining life? — Sean Carol"

Sounds pretty reductionist. At 59:00 he mentions the Mark Bedau paper on weak versus strong emergence based on being able in principle to simulate higher level properties in advance. Sean Carol is the one who brings that up. And then he said he was a big believer in weak emergence. So he's using Mark Bedau's criteria for emergence in contrast to Sara's view.

It's not really any different from logical supervenience where the microphysics necessarily entails any emergent pheneomena. There are no surprises given perfect knowledge in advance.

Anything that comports with the laws of physics - that is not pure fantasy? — tim wood

No. A perpetual motion machine is, as would time travel to the past where you kill your grandfather. But wormholes or warp drives might be possible. An advanced civilization that sticks around long enough is going to be able tot explore the possibility space of what physics allows.

It's speculative, but not pure fantasy. It would be weird to think we're close to the pinnacle of technological advancement, given how much has occurred in the last several centuries. Surely a thousand more years would yield far more advances. Of course it might not happen for humans, but it could have happened for some aliens.

he's a strong proponent of Hume, — ChatteringMonkey

Yeah, I just listened to his podcast with Ned Hall on laws of nature and possible worlds. Sean identified as a Humean in challenging the anti-humean position Hall was explaining. But more to elicit a clear understanding of causation. It was an interesting discussion. However, it raised more questions than it answered. It does seem like Carol prefers the simpler explanation, which is physics is describing regularities and patterns in nature, not some additional causal force.

I think when he agreed with Tegmark on our universe being mathematical, he meant it could be fully described by math without leaving anything out. Which means it can be simulated in principle by a full understanding of the microphysics.

You underestimate Siri. — TheMadFool

What human has been tricked by Siri into thinking it was a person? I find Siri to be a useful assistant for certain things, but a lousy conversationalist in general.

The point is it's not the character of the awareness that's important, it's awareness, by itself, alone, that's the key to consciousness. — TheMadFool

Awareness of colored objects which make sounds and have smells/tastes. But also can be painful when you mishandle them. Those objects don't have those properties. That's just how our biology interacts with the world in order to survive.

Desktops don't feel pain, and the data computers store about images is encoded. The encoding only has meaning as an image, because that's how we've programmed computers to handle such bit patterns, and output them for us in a form we see as an image.

So #3 it is.

ook, the fundamental issue, the basic problem, whatever, is that all modern science - big statement! - relies on objectification. Newton, Galileo, Descartes, et al, perfected the method for mathematisation of statements about objective phenomena. It is the universal science, in that it can cope with any kind of object. But mind is not an object. I — Wayfarer

Makes me wonder how Tegmark thinks the mind fits into math. He's fond of arguing that everything that exist is mathematical, and all mathematical objects exist.

The notion of consciousness is, at its heart, claiming there's a difference between mental images and camera-images but we know there's none. Ergo, consciousness - the purported difference in identicals - can't be real. Consciousness is an illusion. — TheMadFool

Even if we say this is the case for vision, it doesn't work for pain and other conscious sensations. The massive focus on vision in these discussions can be misleading. Consciousness is more than seeing a red apple.

Tegmark was on Carroll's podcast, but I don't think Carroll has endorsed his idea. Carroll is a good interviewer, in that he is receptive to all ideas and tries to get his interviewees to make their strongest case. But that doesn't mean that he agrees with everything they say. — SophistiCat

Not everything, but he agreed with Tegmark on our universe being mathematical. Agreed that he's a good host.

Anyway, I don't see much of a connection between mathematical universe and weak emergence. — SophistiCat

In Sara's podcast, Carol mentioned Bedau's paper on emergence, where weark emergence is anything that could in principle be simulated before it emerges. A mathematical universe would be computable, so that would make any phenomena weakly emergent. Sara says she doesn't think life can be simulated.

But I've looked at her publications; she has a number of papers on top-down causation in biology, some with Paul Davies, who has also been interested in this topic. That would probably speak to "strong emergence." — SophistiCat

She does mention that a little bit in the podcast about how our gaining knowledge of physics allows us to develop technologies that would not have otherwise come into existence. Downward causation would be the other part of strong emergence. Causation though is it's own controversial subject.

She explored this theme here: The Descent of Math. — SophistiCat

Thanks for the link.

But panspermia would just mean abiogeniss happened somewhere else. Maybe under different conditions than early Earth. Would make discovering the origins of life harder.

Makes sense to me, but strong emergence is still spooky. However, her explanation sounded like it was an epistemological problem, not a metaphysical one. In that it's our understandiing of the natural world which is incomplete. But I could be wrong and Dr. Walker thinks it's a new ontological addition to the universe once there is chemistry.

I'll have to read the Barbeiri paper and see what he says about it.

What problem?

Neurology is a discipline that tells us much about how conscious experience happens. — creativesoul

Yeah, but as Luke in this thread (and Chalmers elsewhere) have pointed out, it doesn't explain why any physical system would be conscious. Our understanding of physics would not predict this if we weren't already conscious. A nervous system wouldn't fundamentally be different than a computer with input devices, in that regard.

Why do we see colors and feel pain when no other physical system does this, far as we can tell? What would it take for a robot to do so? Did Noonien Soong sliip a qualia chip into Data's positronic brain?

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.