John Jones
Penultimate Amazing
Is ESP More Probable Than Advanced Alien Life?
- Thread starter Fudbucker
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Slowvehicle
Membership Drive , Co-Ordinator,, Russell's Antin
...and there go the goal posts. Again...
Your claims only have footing if you are, in fact, (and intentionally) conflating "life" and LAWKI. If CHON is all you will accept, say so.
John Jones
Penultimate Amazing
What has that got to do with the subject title of this thread? We know life exists. We don't know that ESP exists
John Jones
Penultimate Amazing
LOL, just no. This has nothing to do with life as we know it, or carbon based life, or silicon based life.
What are the necessary conditions for ANY kind of alien life? Unknown.
What are the odds of abiogenesis for ANY kind of alien life? Unknown.
Now, if you want to speculate about life in the core of the sun, or life on Pluto, or life on Halley's Comet, be my guest. It doesn't change the point that
A) we have no idea what the odds of alien life existing are, or
B) whether alien life is even physically possible
If the necessary conditions for life are so numerous and exact that only one planet in the universe matches them, then alien life isn't even physically possible.
What are the odds that the necessary conditions are such that only one planet in the universe can support life? Unknown. If someone wants to dispute this, I want to know what the odds are, how the odds were derived, and a list of necessary conditions.
IF the odds of Earth being the only planet capable of supporting life in the universe are unknown, THEN the probability that alien life is physically impossible is also unknown.
PREMISE: If the probability of two events cannot be determined, both events must be considered to be equally likely*
Therefore, since neither the odds of the physical possibility of alien life can be calculated NOR the odds of the physical possibility of ESP can be calculated, the chance of either one being physically possible (or impossible) are the same.
*Support for the premise: You are handed a ten sided die that is weighted for some specific number to come up. Unless you know what the number is, you cannot calculate the probability of any particular number showing up, so you must conclude that all numbers 1-10 are equally likely. This is true.
True, but all events whose probabilities cannot be calculated have to be considered as equally likely.
The real problem is that you're considering alien life as different from life.
One planet in the universe has life. The visible universe has hundreds of billions of stars in each of hundreds of billions of galaxies and we already know the universe is larger than we can see. The universe is uniform, meaning that the laws of physics and chemistry are the same everywhere. If one planet has life, there is nothing at all that says other planets can't have life. To say that other life in the universe is even improbable, is to plead that the Earth is special. There is no evidence of that.
To then claim that the probability of life in the universe is equal to the probability of telepathy is ludicrous.
Daylightstar
Philosopher
It seems to me that you spend a lot of energy attempting to downgrade the probabilities for alien life to get them to match with the probabilities for ESP.
I don't see you spend so much energy on trying to upgrade the probabilities for ESP.
You appear to be trying to define the probabilities for ESP and alien life as equal.
Slowvehicle
Membership Drive , Co-Ordinator,, Russell's Antin
Another "no" here.
Someone is missing the point of the teapot (even so far as referring to it as a teacup) example.
Delvo
Дэлво Δε&#
That's quite obviously false. If advanced alien life were impossible, ours would be impossible. If you want to make a case for one of them even potentially being impossible while the other exists, then you need to produce that fundamental distinction I asked for before between life here and life out there, which you have not produced.
Even changing your statement from "may be physically impossible" to "may just not have happened", that still doesn't help your case much anyway, because the idea that advanced alien life and ESP would be in "the same epistemic spot" is still quite obviously false anyway. "Impossible according to all we know" and "equivalent in every way to something we already know is real" are unmistakably two separate and contradictory "epistemic spots".
Slowvehicle
Membership Drive , Co-Ordinator,, Russell's Antin
Well said, and QFT.
John Jones
Penultimate Amazing
Not necessarily. People are arguing in this thread that, given the existence of life here, the hypothesis that it exists elsewhere is more plausible than the hypothesis that ESP, never reliably observed at all, exists anywhere. I think that's good reasoning; but it implies that we can assign relative probabilities without being able to put a figure on either. We can reasonably deny that they are equally likely, even though the probability of neither can be calculated.
Slowvehicle
Membership Drive , Co-Ordinator,, Russell's Antin
Oh. See, I thought you were claiming that there had to be some as-yet-undiscovered force or carrier particle that would support the claimed effects of "remote viewing", or "telepathy", or "ESP". Carroll's talk addresses that.
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jaydeehess
Penultimate Amazing
No, just, no.
Alien life and advanced alien life have a greater probability than anything that does not have an analog that is proven to exist.
You said earth going round the sun has a very close to 1 probability.
That would be due to the observations that all planets do it including the earth.
Somewhat less probable is that since advanced life has been observed in this universe, it will exist elsewherr.
If life is found elsewhere the probability of it existing in yet other places also goes up as does the probability of advanced life other than on earth.
By your measure if advanced life were found on Europa you would still claim its as likely to exist in another solar system as ESP. If found on a planet near Alpha Centuri you could still claim its as likely to exist in another galaxy as ESP.
Either the question envelops the universe or it doesnt. Your reduction, splitting the universe into two subsets, one miniscule, earth, and the other being everything else, makes little sense to me.
Alien life and advanced alien life have a greater probability than anything that does not have an analog that is proven to exist.
You said earth going round the sun has a very close to 1 probability.
That would be due to the observations that all planets do it including the earth.
Somewhat less probable is that since advanced life has been observed in this universe, it will exist elsewherr.
If life is found elsewhere the probability of it existing in yet other places also goes up as does the probability of advanced life other than on earth.
By your measure if advanced life were found on Europa you would still claim its as likely to exist in another solar system as ESP. If found on a planet near Alpha Centuri you could still claim its as likely to exist in another galaxy as ESP.
Either the question envelops the universe or it doesnt. Your reduction, splitting the universe into two subsets, one miniscule, earth, and the other being everything else, makes little sense to me.
Not at all. It's possible we occupy a unique spot in the universe. That would make alien life physically impossible, while life on Earth would, obviously, still exist.
Why is it "obviously false"?
I'm not saying other life is improbable. I'm saying the probability cannot be calculated.
Earth is already considered to occupy a "special" spot ("habitability zone"). That's why we get excited when we see an exoplanet in a similar spot that the Earth is in.
The question is, how special is Earth? Impossible to tell until we discover alien life. It's possible we occupy a unique place in the universe. The probability cannot be calculated, at this point. If you don't agree, then I want to see your probability calculus for why it's improbable that Earth occupies a unique spot in the universe (as far as the conditions for life are concerned).
Can you give an example of two events whose probabilities cannot be calculated, but where one event is more likely than the other? I already gave an example in support of my premise. I'm curious to see what a counter example would look like.
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Exactly. And life in the universe (on Earth) we know can happen; ESP we have never ever seen. The exact probabilities can not be calculated in detail, but clearly are not the same. We know this much.