From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Tue Jul 13 1999 - 03:42:13 MDT
"amiel fernandez" <chinte21@hotmail.com> writes:
> Personally, the thought that human beings are the most intelligent beings in
> the whole universe sounds so inane and frightening that I remember thinking
> "There HAS got to be something smarter than us!"
Maybe that is a common reaction, but it is a logical non sequitor.
> To think that human beings
> are the highest intelligence around seems to be the highest sort of
> arrogance and as there is a countless range of intelligent power beneath
> human beings, there would seem to be the same range above us.
This is the old "Great Chain of Being" idea, originally from Christian
theology. But it is not obvious that one can use the mediocrity
principle to deduce that we are in the middle in the spectrum of
intelligences; we are obviously at the top here on Earth and have no
information about the distribution in the rest of the universe.
Just because we currently are limited and stupid doesn't mean we
always have to be - what if you extend your reasoning in the temporal
domain?
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension!
asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/
GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 15:04:28 MST