Once upon a time, people believed that there were Martians wanting to contact us. The NYTimes article today about 1924 fervor about that is darling, yet implicitly dramatizes how fast our technological resourcefulness is evolving, given what scientists are doing now.
Below is a comment I posted today at the article. Around the time of the Opposition fervor, Edwin Hubble opened a “Copernican” revolution by discovering that all the stars we had seen were merely part of one galaxy—or that most of those “stars” were other galaxies.
So, all of that was a background to what became of philosophy in the 20th century—especially "the question of being" (Heidegger, _Being and Time_, 1927)
We are so early in our evolution of intelligent apprehension.
Luis Elizondo, former head of the U.S. government’s investigation into UFO reports (now: U.A.P.s: unidentified aerial phenomena) will have a book about it all, August 20, titled Imminent. Yesterday, the New York Times posted an article about the upcoming book.
Following is a letter I sent to the Times today, quoting from the article. If Mr. Elizondo, author of Imminent, knew dangerously more than he can say, his life would be in danger—his security, not national security.
It’s more likely that the “left” hand of DARPA [Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency] needed a cover program which the “right” hand (Elizondo’s unwitting distractive management) didn’t know about, e.g., how to make non-existent phenomena appear on radar.
“Human-level” “understanding” is not merely a range from “content generation to reasoning” (which A.I. pioneers misconceive). That is, human understanding is not merely cognitive, because intentionality and identification with preferred value (feeling) are integral to any human conception of interested action.
The following is from an email to a well-known scholar of Heidegger’s thinking, which I now realize could be a preface for earlier postings here, given that people face blog listings in reverse chronological order.
Astrobiology is realizing more and more (not less and less) that life begins easily, and our solar system is relatively young. Intelligent life becomes recursively evolutionary because that's what Our post-natural "second-nature" (Nobelist Gerald Edelman) intelligence does; and it has been there (somewhere) for thousands of millennia. Humans became minimally technical 50 millennia ago, technological merely one millennium ago, hyper-tech 0.05 millennium ago, i.e., middle of the last century. Earthly capability a millennium forward is inconceivable. A thousand millennia: a planetary Singularity that became post-biological long ago?
An accident of nature put Stephen Hawking into a life of perpetual contemplation (given the cottage industry of supports that kept him productive).
High capability for reverie can be a rapturous way of life (if one can afford it).
Perhaps reveries of leading minds in mathematics are anticipating Absolute Others, millions of years of evolution beyond us.
As You stay silent to We Earthans, I assume You can understand Us—so, me here speaking, writing as one of Us among You, uncomprehending how being among You goes.
Given Your silence, We here can only believe that intelligibility in itself comprehends Itself no better than We’re doing—or evolving to do, as if we’re the first form of life in the region to possibly understand being
a form of life in the region evolving to express intelligibility in Itself.
PBS Nova has finished broadcasting its new 5-episode series titled “Universe Revealed,” which uses superb graphics to convey for a general audience how recent astrophysical strides in revealing the universe through satellite telescopes leave us ultimately facing wondrous mystery. Much of it involves young astrophysicists enthusiastically talking to the camera about recent discoveries—which is really inspiring. It complements the video animations well.
The last word, literally, of the last episode is by young Grant Tremblay, stationed at the Harvard Center for Astrophysics. I was so intrigued by what he said that I sent him an email today, which I’ll share here.
He noted, “We are going to be but a sentence in the Book of the Universe. And so, I think it’s incumbent upon us to write the best possible sentence that we can. I cannot wait for what is to come.”
