What Are They?
The hypothesis of advanced machine intelligence severely weakens one of the main skeptical arguments against UFOs. This is that an advanced technological civilization is not thought to have much durability. Skeptics see our own technological civilization so rapidly spinning out of control and extrapolate this feature to intelligent life elsewhere. Now, advanced technology wielded by biological entities may indeed be inherently unstable. But it is not so clear that such a condition applies equally to advanced machine intelligence. If not, the extraterrestrial hypothesis becomes much more tenable as a way to explain UFOs.
I've harbored similar ideas, even attempting to interest a publisher in a book to be titled "The Postbiological Cosmos." (The publisher declined on the grounds that the concept wasn't interesting enough.)
9 comments:
After suffering extreme frustration trying to converse over the phone with an automated, supposedly "intelligent" voice-recognition system (and a smart-ass one to boot, that was utterly convinced of its ability to "help" me), I am less convinced than ever that we are nowhere CLOSE to genuine "strong" AI. Add that experience to the endemic mind-brain misidentification fallacy that one encounters everywhere in articles on the subject, and I'm starting to think that the Singularity has about as much chance of coming to pass as the Rapture....
--W.M. Bear
That should read: "I am MORE convinced than ever," etc....
--WMB
That said, Dolan does provide an interesting explanation for the purported experiments with the "genetic material" of abductees and for possible human-alien hybrids. Advanced machine intelligence might still need "biological units" as "boots on the ground" so to speak for actual exploration/exploitation of planetary resources. And what better bio-units to use that those native to the planet you're exploring/exploiting -- or at any rate, DERIVED from native DNA?...
--WMB
I have posited this theory myself as Mac knows well. The more one looks at this, the more sense it makes, especially looking at this from a historical perspective.
Why do these entities seem to change form and shape according to cultural content, or time period?
I know of fellow bloggers who still believe that these creatures are demons and fallen angels sent to fool and deceive human beings instead of "aliens".
To me, the very idea of Earth having been/being studied by a post-Singularity intelligence is very credible as an application of Clarke's Third Law, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
Mac,
Have you given some thought to the notion that this might be a form of consciousness that manifests on the liminal interface of wet and sticky matter (life) and the "non-living" elements that comprise life?
This could be a zone that does not have differentiated biological/post-biological strata; and the precise definition of the intelligence we seem to be bumping up against remains inscrutable for the time being...?
We cannot help considering the possibilities and ideas about non-human or machine intelligence from an anthropocentric, human basis, as we are human.
But I think we should keep the category of "other" or "none of the above" open and under consideration, as while we may suspect, think, or believe there have been instances of displays or contact with non-human intelligence or consciousness, that is based on our inevitable need to define and interpret such incidents from our anthropocentric perspective.
Perhaps, as Vallee has posited, ufos represent a form or aspect of the universe itself, from anywhere from the quantum level to the cosmological, and which we are some part of also, without being able to really understand or conceptualize accurately.
Keep the "other" category in mind when attempting to think about the nature of non-human intelligence and possible encounters with and incidents of same.
We can always speculate this, or that, like machine intelligence, etc., but we should also try to keep in mind we may be wrong or bound by our primate heritage and relatively limited conceptual and intellectual capacities.
Just a thought, in order to try to be truly objective, as I keep coming back to the old J.B.S. Haldane chestnut that, to paraphrase, "the universe is not only stranger than we know, but stranger than we _can_ know..."
I think Clarke's Law ought to be revised to read: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from hallucination."
--WMB
This could be a zone that does not have differentiated biological/post-biological strata; and the precise definition of the intelligence we seem to be bumping up against remains inscrutable for the time being...?
Hi Elan. I *think* I know where you're coming from, but I'm not sure. Do you mean that "biological" and "artificial" are essentially just clumsy words with which we seek to address the truly alien? If so, I'd tend to agree; we might not have a proper vocabulary to address this phenomenon. The "aliens" might be pushing us away from syntax as we know it; conversely, they could be trying to hack or "syntactical database."
(Sorry is this sounds like warmed-over McKenna!)
At this point in my understanding of the phenomenon, I am convinced that we lack the vocabulary needed to posit what may be going on...
Picking up on dr.x, Vallee should be re-read by one and all as a reminder that the regimented paradigms of current UFOlogy are a failure of instrumentation - in this case, yes, a failure of language. There are simply too many diverse phenomena that intersect with UFO encounters - Vallee never shied away from the messy and absurd iterations of the research.
Mac, something is being hacked. If could very well be the invisible syntactical backbone of our consciousness.
Post a Comment