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Discord Invitation

25th March 2017

Link

Astronomy magazine - If Aliens Contact Us, We Won't Understand | Astronomy Magazine →

This interesting article by William Herkewitz has a little more substance than most SETI/METI articles on the internet, drawing upon Stanislaw Lem’s novel His Master’s Voice, in order to make a point about difficulty of communication in the event that contact is made with some other intelligent species. Herkewitz makes five points in particular, each of which I will address in turn.

Reason #1: We almost certainly won’t share any of the reference points we rely on for language.

This first point is the point with which I probably have the greatest disagreement, however, my disagreement must be tempered by an observation. Suppose that a range of intelligent agents exist in the universe, and by “range” I mean many different agents of differing capacities and abilities. Only a few of these intelligent agents would be comprehensible to us, and these would be what I call “peer” civilizations. If we limit our attention to peer civilizations, setting aside other possibilities that we could not recognize or conceive, there would be much that we would share. If (once again) we make a special effort to seek out life as we do not know it, non-peer life, then we will have proportionally less in common, but if terrestrial life exemplifies the principle of mediocrity for life in the universe (and we have no reason to suppose otherwise), peer life will represent the bulge of the bell curve, and would be what we would most likely find (or which would find us).  

If the universe were a random place, in which other civilizations popped up randomly, then there would be no reason to think that we would share reference points with another intelligent species, but the universe isn’t random. The more uniformitarian our conception of the universe, the more reference points we will have in common; this is another way of saying that we would possess multiple points of reference in common with peer species.

We accept without hesitation that the laws of physics will be the same here as there, the same now as then, but we hesitate to extrapolate beyond the other sciences because the social sciences have not reached a degree of formalization commensurate with physics. We do, however, commonly recognize that life, whenever and wherever it emerges, will be subject to natural selection, and life subject to natural selection, if it evolves to the point of other intelligent agents, will mean agents subject to the evolutionary psychology that is part and parcel of natural selection. We cannot yet reduce this to equations as in physics, but other intelligent species will be subject to predictable selection pressures, and their cognition will be shaped by these selection pressures, as ours has been so shaped.

Once we get out into the universe and start systematizing our knowledge of other biospheres, we will be able to understanding quite a bit about evolution elsewhere, including the evolution of minds elsewhere. If we recognize that some other intelligent species has the body of a predator, we will understand that it will also have the mind of a predator, and so on (hence the importance of seeing what aliens will actually look like). We will be able to correct for our methods, intentions, and expectations of communication to compensate for these biological and ecological differences, but it certainly couldn’t be said that we would have no points of linguistic reference in common.

Reason #2: An extraterrestrial communication could take a number of different, unintelligible forms.

Peer life implies peer civilization and peer technology. Any other intelligent species that could engage in technologically-facilitated communication would have passed a minimum threshold for scientific and technological sophistication. They would build simple technologies first, just as we built simple technologies first. And because simple technologies come before complex and sophisticated technologies, another species possessing advanced technologies would have earlier passed through stages of possessing simpler technologies and would thus be fully aware of these simpler technologies, even if the technologies had fallen out of general use. All civilizations that become technologically sophisticated will know about radio technology, even if they have stopped using radio technology. In other words, civilization possesses backward-compatibility (as long as knowledge of the development of one’s own civilization is not lost).

Information technologies are subject to the same backward-compatibility. However bizarre and unimaginable the communication may be of some other species, based on its biology, if that species builds computers they will know about the ability to encode any information in digital form. Even if such a species prefers analog computers to digital computers, it would be difficult to imagine a total ignorance of digital signal processing, even if this were not the favored mode of information processing. And the SETI scientists among the members of this other intelligent species would be as acutely aware as we are of the need to keep alternative forms of communication available, so that even if other representatives of the species had little or no interest in marginal forms of encoding and signal processing, these ideas would be kept current by their scientists.

Reason #3: Math will only get us so far.

I agree that mathematics would get us only so far, but I think that this would be quite a bit farther than most people would suspect. Given a situation in which there is some kind of back-and-forth between ourselves and some non-human intelligent agent, we would start out with the basics, but after each species party to the communication tested out the knowledge that the other possesses (which would be a mutually selective process) we would converge upon those portions of mathematics that we have in common, and once a body of advanced mathematics is possessed in common this kind of communication could rapidly progress into something very sophisticated very quickly (sort of like the famous “dueling banjos” scene in the film Deliverance, or the scene in Close Encounters of the Third Kind when the computer has to take over in the musical conversation).  

Moreover, while a given alien species might pursue all manner of formal systems in mathematics, and these formal systems may diverge considerably from those we employ, all the considerations discussed above about science and technology relevant to SETI communication would hold also for the mathematics that underlies the science and technology of SETI communication. While the formal systems of aliens may be very different, their mathematical descriptions of radio waves would be describing the same physical phenomenon, and therefore could be translated into our way of describing the same physical phenomenon. We have have the most pedestrian portions of applied mathematics in common, however far the pure mathematics of both species will have pushed beyond these pedestrian mathematical ideas.  

Reason #4: Our extraterrestrial pen-pals may be fundamentally beyond our intellect.

The discussion above of peer intelligent species covers this as well; we could not understand or communication with a non-peer intelligence who is not a peer to us because they are simply too far beyond our capacity. But the non-random universe in which we live is much more likely to give a other intelligent beings like ourselves than something so far beyond us that we have no point of contact with their minds. They would have evolved on the surface of a planet in a biosphere, as predator or as prey or (like us) as both. Their minds would first of all be attuned to surviving in this environment, and only after that would more cerebral functions be added to their suite of cognitive tools (again, like us).

And the backward-compatibility of mind is parallel to the backward-compatibility of civilization, science, and technology. Another species that had started out much like us, but which had advanced considerably beyond this point, would still retain the memory of their earlier evolutionary stages and so would be able to compensate for the cognitive differences between the two species, if they wanted to communicate. If they didn’t want to communicate with us, they might casually destroy us or ignore us, but SETI would not be on the table, by definition.

Suppose some alien species is far more cognitively advanced than human beings, and they want to communicate with us. If it were to turn out that extraterrestrials would be, “fundamentally beyond our intellect,” they would understand better than we would, and since there is at least a certain degree of backward compatibility. The would seek to compensate for the difference in intelligence, and make themselves understood to us as best they could. All of this is implied by an active desire to communicate.

Suppose the intellectual gap is just too wide. Would communication therefore be fruitless? This depends upon what you view as the desirable outcome of an attempt (even if a failed attempt) at communication. What would be interpreted as the optimal outcome from any exchange that human beings might have with a much more advanced intelligence? Even if we cannot learn directly from them because of the gap between us, the attempt to communicate would be an enormous stimulus. Much would be learned from the effort to communicate, even if the effort was not fully successful. We would, as a result, improve ourselves intellectually, and eventually we might approach the cognitive abilities of our interlocutors, finally reading the message that had earlier eluded us.

Reason #5: The disparity between our civilizations will likely be too great.

What I have written above about peer civilizations and backward compatibility also addresses this gap between civilizations, which is simply an alternative formulation of the idea of an unbridgeable gap between intellects – it is the idea that not only alien minds, but also alien civilizations, are “fundamentally beyond our intellect.”

At the present time, the connection between relativity and quantum theory eludes us, but only an epistemic defeatist would say that the problem is fundamentally beyond the human intellect. Perhaps it is, but that will not stop us from trying to understand this relationship, and the effort to understand involves an expansion of scientific knowledge, however inadequate that expanded knowledge may be to understand something fundamentally beyond our intellect. The effort still has a value.

Merely to know – if we were to discover – that there is another intelligent species out there, and another civilization out there, would be worth knowing and would be an inestimable stimulus for human civilization to strive all the more strongly to transcend our present limitations. What we would learne from a failed attempt to communicate with minds far more advanced than our own might not be what we expected to learn, but we would learn something nevertheless, even if only learn, for the first time, what we are, because we have seen ourselves for the first time through the eyes of an irremediable other.

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Tagged: SETIMETIWilliam HerkewitzStanislaw LemHis Masters Voice