Is ESP More Probable Than Advanced Alien Life?

Fudbucker said:
Why is it "obviously false"?
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Because of there very next sentence after that, which you quoted but did not respond to. "Impossible according to all we know" and "functionally identical to something we already know is real" are unmistakably two separate and contradictory "epistemic spots".

Fudbucker said:
Those are not analagous. Gods have a poor track record of manifesting themselves. Parents don't.
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That makes them exactly the perfect analogy. ESP has "a poor track record". Advanced life doesn't.

Fudbucker said:
For probabilistic concepts like these, it's better to stick to concrete statistical examples:
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Not when you can't see or refuse to acknowledge the differences between them that influence their different outcomes. Then all that attempts at analogies can do is bog you down in what's right & wrong with the analogies themselves. They're a distraction.

Fudbucker said:
I give you a deck of loaded cards. All 52 cards are all the same card (52 jacks), but you don't know this. I throw them upside down so that no cards are revealed. Since you don't know that I loaded the deck for jacks, you must assign an equal probability for any specific card to appear (jack of hearts, ace of spades, 2 of diamonds... they are all equally likely, from your point of view). Assigning higher odds to any specific card, in the absence of knowledge about the loaded deck, is special pleading.
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The analogy would only be valid if ESP and advanced (alien) life both belonged in the same deck in the first place. They don't. One belongs in the deck of "things we've seen before nearby, just not ridiculously far away where we wouldn't see them yet even if they were there". The other belongs in the deck of "things people have imagined but there's never been any evidence for and there is strong evidence against". By acting as if they belonged together in the same deck, you're begging the question: "begging" us to go along with the conclusion you want by hiding it among the premises. (It's also a form of circular logic: the validity of the analogy depends on what it's trying to prove, but it can't prove it unless the analogy's already valid.)

Fudbucker said:
Since you cannot calculate the odds of any particular card being revealed, all possibilities are treated as equally likely (i.e., any particular card is as likely to turn up 52 times as any other particular card). This is trivially true and can be demonstrated in a thousand different ways- coin tosses, die rolls, cards, etc. Therefore, my claim is true: in cases where it's impossible to determine the odds of two events occurring, both events are considered to be equally probable.
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Non-sequitur. The idea of treating all "unknown" entities as equally likely does not follow from the fact that they are unknown. Even if it's a good idea itself, it must be supported some other way, not from this.

"Unknown" things can and do come in different levels of indicators of likelihood. The fact that they can be called "unknown" does not make "evidently impossible" the same thing as "already observed in some instances but not others".

Fudbucker said:
Again, this is trivially true, and shouldn't be disputed by anyone with a passing knowledge of epistemology.
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Maybe the "passing" part is the problem.

Fudbucker said:
there's no reason I should still be arguing the validity of my claim after 6 pages... It's not my job to educate people on basic probability theory.
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Indeed, you should not do either of those things: the former because you should see what's wrong by now, and the latter because someone who can't see the difference between "evidently impossible" and "known to happen in some circumstances but not others" is clearly nowhere near qualified for that job.
 
ehcks said:
Bad example. I already know those are a deck of cards and I know what 52 possible cards there normally are. I also know what's not in a deck of cards.

ESP is not, as per the example, a valid card. For your OP, you threw down a deck of cards and are suddenly believing that there are equal odds between picking up an ace and drawing a chicken. It's not possible. It's not even slightly similar.
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This is an excellent example!

To detail it a bit more for Fudbucker: Let's even say that someone made up a 52 card deck from cards from other decks of standard playing cards (think of molecules from the standard chemistry of the Universe). I would not know if they included no aces in the 52 card deck, four, or all the cards were aces. So I don't really know my extract probability of picking an ace from the assembled 52 card deck: it might be anywhere from 0 through 1/13 to 1 (chemistry forming life on another planet). But I would know that my chance of picking a ace, even if ill-defined, would be much greater than picking a 42 of spades card. Yes, there might be a 42 of spades card in a deck due to some error in printing or something else very unlikely. I don't know the precise odds of that, either. I've never seen a 42 of spades in a standard deck of cards, but I would not state that it was impossible: just never seen before, violating the rules of card printing as we understand them, and therefore highly improbable as a result. Thus, I can state that it is more likely that I will select an ace than a 42 of spades, even without knowing the precise odds of either, or even knowing if there was indeed an ace in the deck at all.

Not all unknown values have equal chances of occurring. Some are more likely, based on the precedent of knowing that they can occur and having no reason to think that they would not occur again, than others which are not known to have ever occurred and which would require a complete revolution in our understanding, This is true even if the exact probability can not be calculated.
 
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Fudbucker said:
You're assuming our knowledge of how the universe works is complete...snip..
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Absolutely I am not assuming that, we are still a long long time from that (caveat unless something like the singularity happens) . However at certain scales we do know how reality works, and at those scales there is no gap for ESP to hide in. (Never mind the fact that ESP has only ever "existed" in fiction.)

Out of curiosity what probability do you give an invisible pink unicorn existing in my garage? Is it 0 or some figure larger than zero? And the same question about the probability of Gandalf existing outside of fiction: zero or more than zero?
 
Aridas said:
As a minor correction, simply incomplete and mostly correct with a couple errors are also viable options alongside dead wrong, if ESP is the case, depending on the nature of the mechanism(s) involved.
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There is no doubt that our understanding is mostly correct but incomplete with a couple of errors, but for ESP to exist we need more than a small revision of our physics model, because in order to influence our brains it needs to be a huge force working at normal temperatures, and any such force has completely slipped under our radar.
 
John Jones said:
Black tea for me, straight-up. None of that Earl Grey stuff. Be right over.
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I'll put on the kettle.

Likely there's some gingerbread left, and a chocolate/chocolate chip/oatmeal cookie or two.

Mind the snow once you get off the highway--the unpaved bits haven't been plowed yet.

We can wait for credible evidence (for that matter, any evidence at all) of ESP to be presented.
 
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zengirl said:
Esp does not exist only in fiction...many people have experienced it...
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I, for one, suspect that I know what zengirl is thinking about "her" posts in the Forum. But, being only an illusion myself, how could I know for certain? It boggles the mind, doesn't it?
 
steenkh said:
Furthermore, we know life is possible within physics as we know it, and ESP is impossible within known physics, so you are really asking us to evaluate the probability that our understanding of physics is dead wrong.
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Has someone spelled out a definition of ESP? Not sure how it can be declared "impossible with known physics" (or maybe I'm missing some definition of physics local to this thread).
 
RecoveringYuppy said:
Has someone spelled out a definition of ESP? Not sure how it can be declared "impossible with known physics" (or maybe I'm missing some definition of physics local to this thread).
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I've been assuming that means the literal and most popular translation of ESP: Extra- Sensory Perception. That sort of self-defines ESP as being beyond known physics, and certainly cannot be applied to clues obtained by seeing body language or hearing faint voicings.

It gets a bit ambiguous if we also include senses that have not yet been discovered and which may not exist all. For example: reading the electrical impulses of a brain by the ability of another brain to tune in the faint electromagnetic impulses caused by the first. Even this would violate much of what we think we know about the physics of the strength and propagation of these electromagnetic signals, as well as what we think we know as to the biology: that we only have 5 senses, and that we can't understand how a brain can sense these very weak signals (and to decode them as a thought in the face of the huge number of similar signals coming from the many neurons in the signaling brain). It certainly flies in the face of the results of well-designed tests that have been used to evaluate the ability of brains to detect ESP, or brains to detect even even simple electromagnetic signals.

Again, I hate to use the word impossible (there may be a pink unicorn in my crawl space after all), but I would say that ESP is not compatible with our current understandings of biology/physics, which generally view people as having 5 senses and which do not have a known mechanism by which a thought could be propagated by one brain and received by another. ESP would therefore require a major scientific rethink if it was ever discovered.
 
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Aridas said:
False. What is the exact probability that a person on Earth will greet at least one of their parents in the next 24 hours? It is unknown, frankly, given that we don't have all the relevant data to calculate it properly, but estimates can be made on rough data. It's probably not negligible, though. What is the probability that a god will manifest itself on Earth or advanced aliens announce themselves openly to us in the next 24 hours, on the other hand? It is unknown, frankly, but reasonable estimates can be made and the probability is probably negligible. Considering the two as equally likely based on the fact that we are unable to calculate their exact probability is, quite frankly, unreasonable and fallacious.
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Nowhere did I talk about "exact probability".

A Bayesian calculus can be used to calculate the rough probability of the visit of a parent: such an event would either be surprising or not surprising (based on particular circumstances). In my case, a Bayesian calculus would determine the event to be "not surprising". If an event IS surprising, then it could be determined as to how surprising it would be. If both parents are dead, it would be extremely surprising if they showed up. If they live in another state, it might be very surprising.

A Bayesian calculus of a god showing up would show that such an event would be extremely surprising. In other words Pr(living parent visit) > Pr(god visit).

So your example did not disprove my premise, because a bayesian calculus can be performed for both events, showing that one event is extremely more likely than the other.

For two events for which no probability calculus can be performed, they are both equally likely. And I'll go even further: for any two events, if the probability of one event cannot be calculated, then no comparison can be made between the probabilities of the two events, and therefore one cannot be considered more or less likely than the other.

Example: The probability that the Goldbach conjecture will be solved in the next ten years is unknown. The probability that I will see a shooting star tonight is somewhat low, but not outlandishly so. Without knowing the probability of the Goldbach conjecture being solved in the next ten years, I cannot compare it to the probability of seeing a shooting star. Any determination would result in a case of special pleading. If I think the shooting star event is more probable, I would have to assign a low value to the Goldbach conjecture being solved (and vice-versa). In both cases, I can't assign a value to the Goldbach conjecture without special pleading. Indeed, I cannot compare the solving of the Goldbach Conjecture to the probability of being visited by aliens tonight. I would need to know whether the Goldbach Conjecture is solvable, which I don't know.

Another example: I put you in a dark room and tell you to find a penny on the floor. The probability of you finding a penny can't be determined because it's unknown if I actually put one in the room. Maybe I put 500, maybe I didn't put any. Therefore, the probability of finding a penny in the dark room cannot be compared to any known probabilities.

The parallels to the case of alien life existing VS. ESP are obvious. No calculus exists for the probability that alien life will be discovered. There are too many unknown variables. A Bayesian calculus for the surprisingness of the existence of alien life can return any result you want, and all results would be equally invalid, since we lack the necessary knowledge to assign probabilities to key pieces of knowledge: the number of necessary conditions for life to be possible and the odds of abiogenesis occurring.

And yes, if we inhabit a unique spot in the universe, the existence of alien life could be considered a physical impossibility. It depends on your view of the laws of nature:

"The difference is, perhaps, highlighted most strongly in Necessitarians saying that the Laws of Nature govern the world; while Regularists insist that Laws of Nature do no more or less than correctly describe the world."
http://www.iep.utm.edu/lawofnat/

I believe the laws of nature describe the world. If the we find out we inhabit the only spot in the universe for life to exist, then it would be a law of nature that life only exists on Earth, and life existing anywhere else would be a violation of a law of nature, and therefore physically impossible.
 
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