From: Daniel J. Boone (djboone@romea.com)
Date: Thu Jul 08 1999 - 15:17:51 MDT
-----Original Message-----
From: Sasha Chislenko <sasha1@netcom.com>
To: extropians@extropy.com <extropians@extropy.com>
Date: Thursday, July 08, 1999 12:15 PM
Subject: Re: seti@home and scientists
<snip Kuhn quote>
>If scientists - the people who are supposed to be best in subjecting
>theories to rational unbiased scrutiny - are guilty of that, what can you
>expect from the rest of humans?
No more, no less. Most people are stuck in their ruts, scientists or not.
<snip>
>The value of science is also in choosing the most promising theories to
>pursue. The idea of God is also plausible, it just seems to be not
>sufficiently probable, given available evidence, and thus not good
>for investigation.
But choosing promising theories is, ultimately, a guess, guided by intuition
as well as by the existing body of knowledge. If the Seti@home folks have
chosen a theory that seems less promising than another theory dear to
extropians, we may think them misguided in their assessment of
probabilities, but we really don't know they have chosen poorly until they
do their experiment and someone else does the one extroprians deem more
promising. Refusing to waste one's effort on their seeming folly is one
thing; deriding it as utterly pointless is quite another, more apparently
arrogant thing.
>Why don't they support transhumanism if they want to understand what the
>advanced intelligence may be, instead of looking for something they are
>not likely to find, and not interested in understanding.
Couldn't tell you. Perhaps they dunno transhumanism from transisters? It's
not exactly a fully-entrenched meme, plus it seems to suffer from a lunatic
fringe that gets more attention than the serious transhumanist thinkers.
Seriously, I would guess the experimental design of most SETI projects is
constrained by the Proxmirish "these looneys are looking for Bug-Eyed
Monsters!" reaction they always get in the press. Traditional SETI has a
well-developed set of answers to this sort of sensationalist reporting. A
SETI program informed by the conclusions of transhumanism would, to the
general populace not so informed, seem even more loony, and would find it
harder to attract and keep the attention of "serious" (i.e., leery of
association with the unusual) scientists.
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