Is ESP More Probable Than Advanced Alien Life?

tsig said:
There's no known mechanism to transfer thoughts from one mind to another. In the real world people don't go around reading others minds this is strong evidence that it doesn't exist.
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There are no known mechanisms for many things. That doesn't mean they don't exist, or don't happen. The double-slit experiment in QM has many different explanations. The lack of consensus for an explanation doesn't mean the result is any less strange. Quite the opposite. The Many Worlds Interpretation (and quantum suicide) is extremely strange.

We don't know that in the real world people don't read each other's minds. We only know that the people we tested (and ourselves) can't do it. That does not mean that it's impossible. In order for that to be true, you would have to assume that everyone who can read someone's mind would A) admit to it or B) allow themselves to be tested. There's no reason to suppose that either one of those are necessarily true.
 
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Fudbucker said:
There are no known mechanisms for many things. That doesn't mean they don't exist, or don't happen. The double-slit experiment in QM has many different explanations.
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The double-slit experiment is observable, measurable, predictable, and reproducible. ESP is not. One is known to exist in a factual sense, the other is completely speculative and hypothetical. I don't think the two phenomenon are at all comparable for that reason.

I'm having a hard time following your argument. In what sense does the factual nature of QM effects have any bearing on whether ESP is a factual phenomenon?
 
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Let's get this straight.
Impossible means probability=0
Possible means probability greater than 0
Existance means probability =1

Discussing what is possible is meaningless if the question is which of two items has greater probability.
All demands for an answer as to whether various things are possible or impossible are irrelevant.
Advanced life does exist in the universe. Conditions for life/advanced life do exist in the universe. Does it exist elsewhere besides locally? There is no logical reason to expect that conditions similar to those here do not exist elsewhere and it follows that there is no reason to expect no advanced life.

ESP cannot be shown to exist anywhere or in anyone.

Therefore, logically, the probability of advanced life other than on Earth is greater than the probability of ESP being real.
 
There is also some disconfirming evidence that advanced alien life exists:
1. SETI's continued silence
2. The lack of large-scale stellar or galaxy based projects.
3. The lack of self-replicating probes
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You are very correct in saying these are weak arguments.
The human race began RF transmission in significant quantity and power less than 100 years ago.
However now there is actually a lessening of powerful RF transmission. Cell phones are weak, satellites need not be as high an output as 30 years ago. A vast amount of information is now silent fiber optic transmission. Terrestrial tv broadcasts are now almost exclusively digital and at 1/10 the peak power of their precursor analog stations. In 100 years we went from squeak to bellow and are now getting quieter again.
There is a good argument for a short window in a society's advancement during which their EM emmissions are detectable.

As for the others, note that our civilisation is 10k years old. Most of the universe is greater than 10k light years away. We are detecting EM that originated hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands years ago. Ok no solar system sized detectable projects on our arm of the Milky Way. Iirc its 27000 light years long and it 50000 light years to the far end of the arm opposite ours.
 
Alien life does not violate the known laws of physics, but we are not currently able to obtain objective evidence for its existence.

ESP does violate the known laws of physics, and objective evidence for its existence should have been easily obtainable for centuries yet none has been found.

Clearly alien life is more likely to exist than ESP.
 
Fudbucker said:
I already did. If X is logically possible, then X possibly exists. X could be anything that's logically coherent. ESP and alien life are logically possible. Therefore, they possibly exist.
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Wrong! One may exist, the other cannot exist.

We don't have any proof of alien life, but what we know about physics and biology suggests that it is possible. And we already have proof that life exists on this planet, so to deny the possibility of alien life is to say that the Earth must somehow be fundamentally different from every other planet in the entire Universe. Perhaps we really are that unique, but considering the observed homogeneity of the Universe and the vast number of planets it must contain, the idea that at least some of them could be similar to us is more logical.

ESP on the other hand, is logically impossible. ESP is a paranormal ability. But the Paranormal does not exist by definition. Therefore ESP does not exist.

per·cep·tion
n. 1. a. The process of perceiving something with the senses​

To perceive something you must be able to sense it. To sense it you must have a sense that responds to it. Perceiving something without having the ability to sense it is a logical impossibility.
 
So, Fudbucker, what is according to you the benefit of believing that anything like fairies, ESP, black holes crossing the solar system and little green elves etc are possible?
 
Fudbucker said:
Because ESP isn't logically contradictory. You can claim that it is, but I would like to see the argument for why, for example, reading someone's mind is logically impossible.
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The problem with your claim is that you appear to define ESP into existence.
ESP has not been demonstrated to exist. ESP currently only consists of claims for ESP.
It therefore is meaningless to claim that ESP is 'not logically contradictory'.
 
Fudbucker said:
I can determine the answer to the question: Yes, it's possible.

Why would you ask if I could determine whether a black hole actually does come near us? Our detection of it has nothing to do with whether it's possible or not.
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What has this even got to do with the question in the subject line?
 
Craig B said:
There is a school of thought which seems to assume that if there is no certainty about two possible answers to a question, then the two answers must be equiprobable.
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The post-modernist notion that all ideas are equally valid?
 
Dessi said:
The double-slit experiment is observable, measurable, predictable, and reproducible. ESP is not. One is known to exist in a factual sense, the other is completely speculative and hypothetical. I don't think the two phenomenon are at all comparable for that reason.
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The causal explanation for the double-slit experiment is unknown. There are many interpretations to explain the results.

My point was that not knowing a casual mechanism is not necessarily a knock on something. Therefore, not knowing the causal mechanism for ESP isn't necessarily a knock against it.

I understand that ESP has never been observed. But then, neither has alien life.
 
Fudbucker said:
Let's assume I was.





OK, so ESP and alien life are possible.

Why do you think one is more probable than the other?
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For ESP to be possible would require the universe to work differently than we know it does. Because we know we exist we know that it us possible for life to exist in the universe. Therefore your question compares the possible to the impossible, since the impossible does not exist the only answer (that uses the evidence we have) to your question is "advanced alien life".
 
Fudbucker said:
The causal explanation for the double-slit experiment is unknown. There are many interpretations to explain the results.

My point was that not knowing a casual mechanism is not necessarily a knock on something. Therefore, not knowing the causal mechanism for ESP isn't necessarily a knock against it.

I understand that ESP has never been observed. But then, neither has alien life.
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Advanced life in the universe has been shown to exist. ESP has not.

All opposed?
 
jaydeehess said:
Let's get this straight.
Impossible means probability=0
Possible means probability greater than 0
Existance means probability =1

Discussing what is possible is meaningless if the question is which of two items has greater probability.
All demands for an answer as to whether various things are possible or impossible are irrelevant.
Advanced life does exist in the universe. Conditions for life/advanced life do exist in the universe. Does it exist elsewhere besides locally? There is no logical reason to expect that conditions similar to those here do not exist elsewhere and it follows that there is no reason to expect no advanced life.

ESP cannot be shown to exist anywhere or in anyone.

Therefore, logically, the probability of advanced life other than on Earth is greater than the probability of ESP being real.
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This really should have gone in the philosophy forum, because it's essentially an epistemology question. I'll go over it briefly:

All claims have a probability value attached to them. Logically impossible claims (non-green green things exist) have 0% chance of being true. Logically certain claims (I'll use math as an example, and yes I know math hasn't been reduced to logic), like 2+2=4 are given a value of 1. All other claims fall between 0 and 1. All inductive claims (i.e., science) fall between 0 and 1.

For example, take the claim "I will win the every lottery in the United States in the next ten years". Since it's logically possible for that to happen, it can't be assigned a 0. Maybe it's .000(hundred zeroes)1, but it's still possible.

Then take the claim "the Earth goes around the sun". It can't be given a 1, because there's nothing logically certain about our observations of the Earth and the Sun, and the inductive conclusions we've derived from those observations, but the claim would have a value of .9999(many 9's).

So then, the claims that ESP exist and alien life exist aren't logically impossible, or logically certain, so they must be assigned a probability to them.

Currently, the claim "alien life exists" can't be assigned a probability value, because there are at least two unknowns that we need to know: how likely is abiogenesis, and how narrow are the conditions that allow life to even be possible. I gave some examples in the opening thread.

So, if you think alien life has a high certainty, I could just a easily argue that it's so rare it probably exists on this one planet. Each of it has the same amount of evidence backing up the claim- none. In order for alien life to have a high probability, you would need to know the likelihood of abiogenesis occurring on a planet like Earth, and also all the factors that need to fall into the right place for life to be possible. Neither of us knows either of those, so we're stuck wondering if there's alien life.

However, as Red Baron pointed out, alien life exists in the set of "life", which we know exists. ESP doesn't exist in a similar set. That's a knock on ESP, because we don't know if paranormal abilities exist at all. Also, we don't know what the casual mechanism would be.

My counter to that is to point out that things we don't suspect exist often turn up existing, and I use Dark Energy and Dark Matter as examples, because they were discovered very recently, and have revolutionized our view of the universe. Before they were discovered, it would have been laughable to suggest we don't know what 95% of the universe is. Now it's taken for granted.

I can also counter by claiming the disconfirming evidence against alien life is stronger than it is, but something like the Fermi Paradox would only count against advanced alien life.

Or I can claim that the set "alien life" doesn't get any confirmation from the set "life on Earth", other than that we know alien life possibly exists, but ESP also possibly exists.
 
Darat said:
For ESP to be possible would require the universe to work differently than we know it does. Because we know we exist we know that it us possible for life to exist in the universe. Therefore your question compares the possible to the impossible, since the impossible does not exist the only answer (that uses the evidence we have) to your question is "advanced alien life".
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You're assuming our knowledge of how the universe works is complete. Again, I bring up dark energy and dark matter, both of which "required the universe to work differently than we know it does" before they were discovered.

And exactly what physical laws are you claiming ESP violates?

Also, is it possible that the conditions for life are so narrow that this is the only planet in the universe where those conditions are met? Yes, that's possible. If that's the case, then alien life would "require the universe to work differently than we know it does".

In other words, there's a hidden assumption in your claim that alien life doesn't contradict how we know the universe works: you're assuming that the habitable zone for life to exist on a given planet is wide enough so that planets other than Earth are in such a zone. You don't know this is true. You're just assuming it's true without any evidence.

I can just as easily assume the habitable zone is extremely narrow, such that only Earth fits the parameters for life to be possible. If my assumption is true, then alien life would be a contradiction to "how the universe works", because if the parameters are that narrow, alien life wouldn't exist.

Your assumption begs an obvious question: if you think the habitable zone is wide enough to include other planets, what is your evidence for this?
 
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