From: hal@finney.org
Date: Sat Jul 10 1999 - 11:14:12 MDT
I have two disagreements with the critique of SETI.
The first is the claim that superintelligences (SIs) would not want
to talk to us because we don't want to talk to nemotodes. I argued
previously in another context that this is a false analogy (I used the
example of insects). We don't talk to insects because they can't talk.
They don't talk to each other, either.
To make the analogy valid, we have to look at the modes of communications
that lower animals use, and ask whether we interact with them at that
level. This would correspond to SIs who talk to us at our level, even
though they communicate amongst themselves in more sophisticated ways.
I suggest that we do interact with lower animals at the level that they
interact with themselves. An insect has a simple model of the world,
adequate to find food, avoid predators, mate and survive. We do interact
with insects at this level. Insects are able to survive and even thrive
around humans. We are part of the same physical universe and from the
insects' point of view we are interacting and communicating with them
just like other parts of the universe.
As our technologies improve and we learn more about insects, we will
become even better at communicating with them in their own terms. We will
learn to use chemical messengers and other methods to interact with them.
This would be closely analogous to an SI speaking to us in our own
terms.
Even though we are not capable of understanding all of what SIs say to
each other, it is still plausible that they might choose to communicate
with us at our level. Our own experiences with lower animals suggest
that there are many motivations for higher animals to communicate with
lower ones.
The second point is that it does not seem productive to imagine that
the universe is heavily engineered by active SIs. Throughout history,
we have succeeded by assuming the opposite, that there is no higher
intelligence or higher power behind the observations that we make.
In fact much of our scientific progress is due directly to discarding
this notion that Thor makes the thunder and Apollo drags the sun across
the sky and God created the animal species.
Why should we decide, now, that when there is a mystery in our
observations, that intelligence is probably behind it? It's never been
true before. We face a solar neutrino discrepancy now. Maybe SIs are
engineering the sun? We have a missing mass problem. Maybe SIs are hiding
mass? We don't have a good model for how life started. Maybe SIs brought
life to earth?
Such "answers" are the end to inquiry. Sufficiently advanced technologies
are magical and there is little we can say about them.
The weakest part of this theory is the assumption that although the
universe is full of SIs they are not here in the solar system. It seems
very implausible that they would have left our solar system untouched for
all time. This means that we must reconsider the possibility of divine
intervention throughout history. This is an historically unproductive
tactic but it is the inescapable consequence of considering that we live
in a universe fully populated with superintelligences.
I suggest reading Robin Hanson's article which takes at face value
the absence of stellar engineering, and draws conclusions from it:
http://hanson.berkeley.edu/greatfilter.html.
Hal
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