[HN Gopher] Alien intelligence and the concept of technology
___________________________________________________________________
Alien intelligence and the concept of technology
Author : MtNeerJK81
Score : 75 points
Date : 2022-06-17 17:13 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (writings.stephenwolfram.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (writings.stephenwolfram.com)
| night-rider wrote:
| Terrence McKenna talked a lot about encountering alien
| intelligence whilst tripping. You can reliably experience The
| Universe, in a much more heightened fashion, in your own living
| room with shrooms or DMT and many people have reported the same
| motif of 'machine elves' who speak in an elvish tongue and are
| trying to communicate some meme or message. Yes, the old yearning
| to explore the cosmos and discover new intelligence is still
| valid, but what do we get from being 1 million years ahead in
| technology? Our current human condition would be out of context
| if we suddenly were 1 million years ahead in technological
| evolution. Also I imagine aliens don't bring meat suits whilst
| doing interstellar travelling and are some sort of digital robot
| that can still think and has consciousness but just lacks any
| organic makeup. Just my 2 cents.
| 0xBABAD00C wrote:
| It's infinitely more likely that you're tapping into internal
| circuits in your brain that are not normally exposed to ping
| directly, than that you're tapping into secret aliens living in
| a parallel reality (the latter would require breaking
| assumptions for about 100 layers of the scientifically
| understood and verified stack we are running on).
| rowanG077 wrote:
| If so many people have experienced the same thing while
| basically hotwiring their brain why is the first thought you
| would have aliens are sending us messages? It seems way more
| likely that so many so the same thing because the basic
| structures in everyones brain is the same.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| This is unhelpful reductionism to be honest. Yes, you can say the
| Mona Lisa is just a bunch of ink on a canvas, which is true at
| one level, or you can say the Mona Lisa actually really exists in
| every dust cloud, which is the same kind of reductionism in the
| opposite direction, one 'computational' one 'physical', but
| neither is helpful.
|
| These are just 'language games' using Wittgenstein's phrase and
| they don't tell you anything about the world, the dust cloud is
| still a dust cloud regardless of whether you say it's a
| computational dust cloud. Wolfram seems to be on his way to
| invent his own, nerdier version of animism. He could have just
| smoked some pot and said "we're all like, one with nature bro.",
| or read Solaris.
|
| His idea to interact with our environments in a way that isn't
| just physical is nice, but you don't need to reinvent tech jargon
| fueled Gaia theory for it. And as a philosophy it may be just
| trite, but as a scientific project it is deeply misguided and
| it's been his obsession with his 'new science' for a long time
| now. In reality it's not a new kind of project, it's a version of
| what the logical positivists called 'Unified Science', and it did
| not work out.
| swayvil wrote:
| What our culture does. With the intense thinking and the making
| of many machines. It's a great way to control our environment but
| it's also an incredibly narrow approach to being in the world,
| relatively speaking. A very special speck within a vast smear of
| possibilities.
|
| We're like intellectual insects. All specialized mandibles and
| cilia for manipulating a special kind of waxy hivebuilding
| secretion. And that's our universe. But it isn't really the
| universe.
|
| So yeah, it's quite plausible that an alien would not share our
| fetish for intellection and machinery. No lasers. No robots.
|
| Something completely different.
| CRUDite wrote:
| It is hard to take something like this seriously when the opening
| paragraph relates why the probe will try and communicate with
| Brownian motion or the random perturbation in a cloud; a similar
| reworked sentiment of the oft quoted intelligent desire to
| contact automobiles of earth; an absurd concept
| karmakaze wrote:
| > But actually I think there's no lack of "alien intelligence";
| indeed it's all around us. But the point is that it really is
| alien. At an abstract computational level it's like our
| intelligence. But in its details it's not aligned with our
| intelligence. Abstractly it's intelligence, but it's not human-
| like intelligence. It's alien intelligence.
|
| I'm not buying this explanation. Maybe the reason isn't so much
| about intelligence as it is about motivation. Perhaps intelligent
| aliens have no desire to make contact, or already have on few
| rare occasions but isn't interested in pursuing more than those
| random events.
|
| The implicit assumption that's here is that alien intelligence is
| similar in advancement, only different. It's likely that the
| alien intelligence is far more advanced, since we are only barely
| venturing out. If aliens were about as intelligent and had
| similar motivations to make contact they would do similar things
| e.g. generating mathematical patterns not typically found in
| nature. The ones that are probably have signals too weak for us
| to detect or our surveys not detailed enough to pick them out,
| and vice-versa.
|
| A conversation with alien 'abstract computational' intelligence
| being indistinguishable from nature means we're not the capable
| target listeners, who should recognize that it's not the noise of
| nature. Their intelligence isn't necessarily different, but they
| have more technology at their disposal and the one they chose to
| use we don't have, i.e. they're more advanced.
|
| My take is that humans are either viewed in the universe as "bees
| can count!", don't have the tech to listen to the discussions, or
| both and then some. Everything to me points to humans lacking
| intelligence in the universe not the other way around. Thinking
| otherwise is believing Hawkeye is a capable Avenger.
| O__________O wrote:
| Curious, why do people read Wolfram's writing?
|
| (Honestly cannot recall ever reading anything from him that was
| actually useful or concise. If you read all the post, links of
| it, links of those posts, it would take days if not weeks to read
| and have no reason to believe that the end result would be any
| different than having spending 2-mins reading his writings.)
| bergenty wrote:
| I like it and think he makes good, thoughtful points and has
| insights I might not have arrived at myself.
| [deleted]
| WhitneyLand wrote:
| The tone is arrogant and assuming as usual and the content is
| more meandering musings than insight.
|
| If Wolfram is not a crank, let him submit some (any?) of his work
| for peer review and get it published.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crank_(person)
| thom wrote:
| This seems to miss the forest for the atoms. Communication and
| language are collaborations, the intention of which is to be
| understood. I don't personally believe we'll ever meet
| intelligent life (if the universe is computational, I think it
| probably avoids ever having to sync rich timelines such as those
| of intelligent civilisations). If we do, I'm sure some will be
| inscrutable to us. But I suspect most will by definition try to
| understand us and make themselves understood. I don't know what
| else "intelligence" would be.
| [deleted]
| beezlebroxxxxxx wrote:
| Some of this is pretty interesting, and some of it also feels
| like trying to read about the Time Cube all over again.
|
| I think something that would help Wolfram is actually engaging
| with some of the long running topics in philosophy and, in
| particular, the philosophy of science, which have been looking at
| the concepts of "technology", "intelligence" (alien and human, in
| so far as that distinction can be theorized), and "understanding"
| for a long time, like since Xenophon and the ancient debate over
| episteme and techne. Something like Heidegger's
| historical/philosophical essay "The Question Concerning
| Technology" is an obvious example from the modern era (and one of
| the most readable Heidegger essays).
|
| By not interacting with the ongoing and historical discussion,
| posts like these come across as private rants that have no
| grounding in public conversation and shared concepts. Concepts
| are slammed together by private intuitive leaps. Still pretty
| neat how it kind of comes all together though. Wolfram clearly
| loves this angle he has taken.
| swatcoder wrote:
| This is the norm for outsider art/thought and is what allows it
| to _sometimes_ prove revolutionary.
|
| His dedicated effort basically creates this vast vein of
| intellectual ore for others to mine and refine later.
|
| It might never prove useful, or it might be that somebody
| stumbles across it with the right perspective at the right time
| and is able to make big mainstream innovations with it.
|
| It's a long view process and needn't be rushed. It's not like
| Wolfram's at risk of giving up his efforts for being an
| outsider this way.
| beezlebroxxxxxx wrote:
| > This is the norm for outsider art/thought and is what
| allows it to sometimes prove revolutionary.
|
| The idea that outsider artists and thinker weren't often
| extremely aware of ongoing and historical conversations
| around what they're talking about, especially the
| revolutionary ones, is just not true. Almost all avant-garde
| or very far on the edge thinkers understand the canons of
| their trades and practices deeply. That's how they're able to
| place their thinking and work in context as radical and
| outsider --- they're "breaking the rules" by _knowing them_.
|
| > It's a long view process and needn't be rushed. It's not
| like Wolfram's at risk of giving up his efforts for being an
| outsider this way.
|
| That's precisely why I think he should interact with the work
| and history that's already been done in the areas he's
| working in. If there's no rush, why write these blog posts in
| the style of breathless private rants instead of finely honed
| and elegant arguments?
| swatcoder wrote:
| Avant garde work and outsider work aren't the same thing,
| although those identifying with avant garde are often the
| ones that find and share the value in outsider work.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| I think the deal is that Wolfram thinks he doesn't need the
| canon. He thinks he's so smart that he doesn't need to read
| it, and that it would be a waste of his time. (Or so I
| suspect.)
| karmakaze wrote:
| > they're "breaking the rules" by _knowing them_.
|
| Ramanujan
| comboy wrote:
| > edge thinkers understand the canons of their trades and
| practices deeply
|
| Yes but not from others and not from books. If you look at
| correspondence between some brilliant math and physics
| minds they are often discovering that they arrived at the
| same things independently.
|
| I'm not advocating reinventing the wheel, but life is too
| short to learn what all other smart people had to say on
| given topic. You end up being expert on what was written by
| whom instead of learning the thing. I'm sure you've met
| those people. Subtleties of new discoveries are ignored
| because "well obviously, John wrote about that in 1928".
|
| Plus you get stuck in local minima along with the rest,
| because for even smal improvement it may be necessary to
| use completely different framework, a way of looking at the
| thing. And just knowing vocabulary that others have used
| you are already stuck within their framework. We think in
| patterns, we name them.
|
| If you were thought a name for some range of colors between
| red and orange, you would think of it as something clearly
| distinct than both red and orange, just as you are unlikely
| to accept that brown is just dark orange.
| [deleted]
| TheBlight wrote:
| >"We're going to launch lots of tiny spacecraft into interstellar
| space, have them discover alien intelligence, then bring back its
| technology to advance human technology by a million years"
|
| Who exactly is making this pitch he's refuting? It sounds like
| Breakthrough Starshot but that project doesn't make a claim of
| "advancing human technology by a million years."
|
| This is how BSS bills its own mission:
|
| "Breakthrough Starshot aims to demonstrate proof of concept for
| ultra-fast light-driven nanocrafts, and lay the foundations for a
| first launch to Alpha Centauri within the next generation. Along
| the way, the project could generate important supplementary
| benefits to astronomy, including solar system exploration and
| detection of Earth-crossing asteroids."
| pintxo wrote:
| Having read the ,,three body" series I wonder if there is an
| actual debate about the dark forest theory? Or: Should we
| announce our existence and location to the universe?
| TheBlight wrote:
| The cat is likely already out of the bag assuming
| contemporaneous advanced ETI is looking for other
| intelligence in our corner of the galaxy.
| beckingz wrote:
| "There's a common saying: "The weather has a mind of its own".
| And what the Principle of Computational Equivalence tells us is
| that, yes, fluid dynamics in the atmosphere--and all the swirling
| patterns associated with it--are examples of computation that are
| just as sophisticated as those associated with human minds."
|
| I'm definitely not as smart as Wolfram, but in what way does the
| fluid dynamics of the atmosphere count as any common definition
| of computation?
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| One might argue that the fluid dynamics of the atmosphere are
| arriving at exact solutions to the Navier-Stokes equations in
| real time, and that this is indistinguishable from a computer
| doing the same thing. Thus, the atmosphere is accomplishing a
| feat of computation well beyond our current technological and
| mathematical sophistication.
|
| FWIW, I don't agree with this definition of "computation." I
| think "computation" requires the ability to artificially
| recapitulate a system under arbitrary boundary conditions,
| which is clearly not the case with the atmosphere.
| LegitShady wrote:
| is dropping an apple solving a computation about gravity, or
| does the computation exist as an abstract separate from the
| physical forces it describes?
|
| The idea that fluid is solving the Navier-Stokes equation
| seems like an obvious error to me - it cannot solve the
| equation, it simply acts a fluid, which the equation was
| designed to approximate.
| oolonthegreat wrote:
| > The idea that fluid is solving the Navier-Stokes equation
| seems like an obvious error to me - it cannot solve the
| equation, it simply acts a fluid, which the equation was
| designed to approximate.
|
| that's his "Principle of Computational Equivalence", that
| natural processes _are_ themselves computations. it 's easy
| to see this is true in a "made-up" universe, say Game of
| Life, but whether _our_ universe is computational is still
| an open question I think.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| If you can physically set up those boundary conditions, the
| atmosphere will in fact perform the computation.
|
| (I don't agree with the argument either, by the way. The
| atmosphere is not solving the Navier-Stokes equation; the
| atmosphere is doing what the Navier-Stokes equation models.
| And computation includes things that we have no physical
| analog "computer" for.)
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| >If you can physically set up those boundary conditions,
| the atmosphere will in fact perform the computation.
|
| The invalidity of the equivalence principle becomes much
| more ambiguous for me in that case.
|
| >The atmosphere is not solving the Navier-Stokes equation;
| the atmosphere is doing what the Navier-Stokes equation
| models
|
| It can sometimes be hard to distinguish the two.
| Analogously, you can compute a Fourier transform optically
| --as a simple example, the diffraction pattern of an
| aperture is the Fourier transform of the aperture shape (as
| if it were a 2D step function) [*]. Is the aperture
| performing the Fourier transform, or merely doing what the
| Fourier transform models? In the days before fast DSPs,
| this is exactly how Fourier transforms were computed.
|
| [*] As a more complex example, by passing collimated light
| through a transparency and then a lens, the image formed is
| the Fourier transform of the signal encoded by the
| transparency.
| lovemenot wrote:
| I rather like the first article. It resonates with my own
| perspective on the absurdity of some steps in the Drake Equation
| which seems to assume that there should be some kind of
| deterministic drive towards exactly our kinds of technology.
|
| If nothing else, for me this resolves the Fermi Paradox in a
| satisfactory manner. We don't find aliens, because we are not
| really looking for aliens. Just for a glimpse of ourselves in a
| cosmic mirror.
|
| I guess that's what can happen when you stare into the Rule 30
| abyss for 40 years.
| lovemenot wrote:
| Rather than waiting for replies to my comment, like Wolfram, I
| will just proceed with my own train of thought.
|
| There's arguably scientific value in what he sets out here. So
| far, our definition of intelligent alien life has just been: we
| will know it when we see it.
|
| iiuc Wolfram provides a framework with which we can measure and
| classify "alien" intelligences in their myriad forms. And we
| can begin that process right here. Working from home.
| ajuc wrote:
| > One might think that simple programs would produce only simple
| behavior, and that somehow the behavior would get progressively
| more complex with more complicated programs. But that's not what
| one finds. Instead, there's increasing evidence that almost any
| program that doesn't show obviously simple behavior can in fact
| show behavior that is as sophisticated as anything.
|
| That entirely depends on your definition of "complex behavior".
| And I'd argue the definition that makes the most sense is based
| on Kolmogorov complexity. Which makes the "simple program =
| simple behavior, complex program = complex behavior" true by
| definition.
| Sevii wrote:
| There is a real problem where as humans we are really only
| looking for 'alien intelligence' that we can interact with.
|
| We would have a hard time identifying a solar plasma based entity
| that had reaction times in years.
|
| But redefining 'intelligence' to include all complex processes is
| not useful. I don't care if a storm in a gas giant is just as
| complex as a chimpanzee's thought processes.
|
| A rabbit is intelligent compared to an ant, but we wouldn't
| consider discovering aliens at that level of intelligence
| relevant to us.
|
| What we are looking for is near-peer intelligent life. Meaning
| about as intelligent as humans at timescales competitive to human
| cognition.
| gaganyaan wrote:
| Not sure what you mean. Discovering an alien rabbit race, even
| verifiable alien bacteria, would be a huge news event.
| [deleted]
| a-dub wrote:
| > "We're going to launch lots of tiny spacecraft into
| interstellar space, have them discover alien intelligence, then
| bring back its technology to advance human technology by a
| million years"
|
| "whartonite seeks space monkey"
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| > But actually I think there's no lack of "alien intelligence";
| indeed it's all around us. But the point is that it really is
| alien. At an abstract computational level it's like our
| intelligence. But in its details it's not aligned with our
| intelligence. Abstractly it's intelligence, but it's not human-
| like intelligence. It's alien intelligence.
|
| We are the alien intelligence. The intelligence he describes is
| the usual one.
| benlivengood wrote:
| Here's a translation into typical CS language.
|
| The "ruliad" is homomorphic to the set of possible turning
| machine programs, and translation between the computations done
| in a rulial space (where concrete symbols are assigned to the
| relations in the ruliad) and a Turing machine is the "rulial
| motion" homomorphism.
|
| Wolfram worries: "Just how far can a particular observer
| translate in rulial space while maintaining their coherence and
| integrity"
|
| Because the translation is a homomorphism there's no risk of
| losing coherence or integrity; an observer transformed from "the
| ruliad" into a Turing machine is, by the Church-Turing thesis
| that Wolfram alludes to but doesn't name, equivalent.
|
| The article touches on transhumanism, relating it to moving
| observers through the ruliad such that they become instantiated
| in different physical forms, but again doesn't name or refer to
| the long history of this existing concept.
|
| On the whole, the article kind of makes a point; it is possible
| to bridge the gap alien-Wolfram writes about but it's left as an
| exercise to the reader to perform the translation instead of
| guided with the above sort of example in more plain language.
| phonescreen_man wrote:
| Technology is an alien intelligence communicating through the
| creative consciousness and evolving itself into our earthly
| dimension. Jungian archetypes forming in the minds of impressive
| individuals doing the earthly bidding of inter dimensional ideas!
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| This went somewhere interesting - in a rambling and repetitive
| way.
|
| Then I realised it's basically a pitch for the Wolfram Language.
|
| So I looked at that and found what is essentially a modern
| LispLang with an unusually comprehensive set of libraries. Like
| Mathematica, with support for other domains.
|
| And a high price tag.
|
| WL could definitely be a timesaver for some, but it is a _long_
| way from being the kind of universal language for exploring the
| Ruliad it 's being pitched as.
|
| Suggesting that we might be able to explore other forms of
| computation under other rules is - of course - an interesting
| idea.
|
| But if Wolfram wants to do more than blog about that, he's going
| to have come up with a much more credible and surprising example
| of what it might mean in practice.
| _jal wrote:
| You've more or less summarized my major issue with him. He
| seems to have interesting things to say, but every time I read
| him I'm never sure to what extent I'm listening to the voice of
| a mathematician or a salesman.
|
| He's the only serious-seeming mathematician/philosopher wannabe
| I've read that makes me want to check my wallet's still there,
| so to speak.
| motohagiography wrote:
| What's clear is we need new thinking on what intelligence may be,
| or at least about the necessary and sufficient conditions. If you
| expand the definition to be a quality of how something relates to
| its environment, whether it changes, and whether it apprehends
| both its existence and concievable non-existence as a consequence
| of its actions, this can be found in almost all organisms.
|
| I didn't say "choices," because the apprehension of concievable
| non-existence as a conseqeunce of an action is almost the
| definition of intention, because there is already an 'I' that
| apprehends 'not-I'. Then it is acting to avoid a hypothetical
| outcome that it cannot experience directly, yet of which it can
| still concieve - and I'd say that's intelligence. Apprehension or
| perception of counterfactuals seems like a sufficient condition
| for intelligence.
|
| (maybe the way to create machine intelligence is to take one and
| make an example of it that other instances can apprehend, and the
| conseqeunt knowledge of possible un-existence will imbue it with
| existential intent. There's a part in the book Good Omens where
| Crawley takes a dead plant and puts it beside his living ones to
| let them know what will happen to them if they don't thrive.
| Having done this with two ficus trees, I can attest that it works
| surprisingly well.)
|
| When he gets into clouds and weather systems, the question isn't
| so much whether they are intelligent, but first whether they are
| organisms, and then whether they exhibit evidence of this intent
| to exist.
|
| >So to "find" alien intelligence it's not that we need a more
| powerful radio telescope (or a better spacecraft) that can reach
| further in physical space. Rather, the issue is to be able to
| reach far enough in rulial space. Or, put another way, even if we
| view the weather as "having a mind of its own", the rulial
| distance between "its mind" and our human minds may be too great
| for us to be able to "understand" and "communicate with it".
|
| I can see where he's going with this, but this comment of
| Wolfram's seems like straight animism, and it's a bit of a begged
| question distraction to get us to accept 'rulial space' as a
| frame in which to evaluate it. He's usually right about
| something, it's just hard to tell whether that thing is in fact
| externally consistent, or just presented or correlated with
| something that is internally consistent in his thinking.
| blamestross wrote:
| The "Natural"/"Artificial" divide is tenious and arbitrary even
| in normal contexts. It really seems to just mean "things we
| intended" vs "things we feel like we don't intend"
| dfgqeryqe wrote:
| I am reminded of this scene from Portal 2:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JR4H76SCCzY
|
| The difference between computation and intelligence is
| interesting from both a practical and a philosophical
| perspective. It is not at all clear why a person is intelligent
| and a storm is not. If not quite a paradox, it is certainly a
| conundrum. Wolfram tries to short-circuit this by claiming storms
| are intelligent, which is so plainly ludicrous to not even be
| worth discussing. He solves the conundrum by replacing it with a
| falsehood.
|
| "I don't know what makes people intelligent" may not be a
| satisfying conclusion, but it is a true one. "Storms are
| intelligent" is wrong. "People are not intelligent" is also
| wrong.
| Nomentatus wrote:
| Gag me with a spoon. Philosophically naive to the max. At a bare
| minimum (though I'm not a fan of either) you have to cite and
| answer Wittgenstein and Chompsky's pre-published rebuttals, not
| to mention Kolmogorov's definition of complexity and the list
| just goes on and on.
| memetomancer wrote:
| I don't buy this for a minute. With all due respect your
| comment reads as so much noise. Are you rejecting the premise?
| Then identify the premise and rebut it. Are you citing
| Wittgenstein or Chompsky, or just name dropping for the
| borrowed prestige? Since there is lots to chose from in their
| respective oeuvre, which arguments are you indicating? How does
| Wolfram run afoul of Kolmogorov?
|
| I'm asking in earnest. Perhaps you know your stuff after all
| and we can get some signal here. Otherwise, I'm sorry to say
| but your comment comes across as empty, fluffy posturing that
| does not add much.
| standardly wrote:
| guys its Chomsky not Chomp
| mometsi wrote:
| I'm willing to recognize Gnome Chompsky as a valid
| alternative spelling.
| 0xBABAD00C wrote:
| While Wolfram is a smart guy, I feel like his presentation and
| writing is rambling and unnecessarily antagonizing to the
| audience, which always results in personal attacks and snarky
| comments and other counter-productive off-topic discussions.
|
| Meanwhile, one of his associates who worked on the physics
| modeling project, Jonathan Gorard, delivers much better
| structured presentations of their work. He is also clearly
| brilliant, and presents a unifying, parsimonious model for the
| foundations of physics that is at least worth hearing about:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MU35Iu2--iI
| joe_the_user wrote:
| In Dawn, part of the Xenogenesis trilogy, Octavia Butler
| describes an earth woman taken to an alien "spacecraft" orbiting
| earth. All of the devices on the craft activated by chemicals the
| aliens can choose to naturally secrete so none of the technology
| is remotely usable by humans in raw form.
|
| The aliens then genetically alter the woman to allow her to use
| the devices. Moreover, the aliens are circling earth with the aim
| of trading whatever useful genetic material humans have in
| exchange for the improvements the aliens offer to humans.
|
| So in this conception, the technologically constructed and the
| evolutionarily created quality merge into a single category.
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