Alien?

[duendy]

i actually went to see 2001 Space Oddity at a cinema in London, trippin outta my head on good LSD when 15. i can rememberit well....at points in this film i became MORE interested in thwe AUDIENCE watching the film....

you know, formany many people the deeper part of themselves is 'alien'..!!!

 

[Hipparchia]

"there are stranger things in life that could be ever imagined in your dreams." (i cannot nail down the similar quote

)

Could it be Shakespeare's Hamlet -
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamed of in your philosophy”


This seemed kind of apt:

"The four points of the compass are logic, knowledge, wisdom, and the unknown. Some do bow in that final direction. Others advance upon it. To bow before the one is to lose sight of the three. I may submit to the unknown, but never to the unknowable."​

Roger Zelazny
Lord of Light

 

[Gustav]

duendy

heh
like the rastafarian's "i and i"

but of course, until someone nails down the neural correlates for consciousness, i am gonna go with the "knowledge" that i am distinct and ultimately separate from this biological mass i seemingly inhabit. what i am, i havent a real clue, just various philosophical speculations

there can be no other way (i think)
cos i aint no fucking zombie

 

[Gustav]

Could it be Shakespeare's Hamlet -
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamed of in your philosophy”


This seemed kind of apt:

"The four points of the compass are logic, knowledge, wisdom, and the unknown. Some do bow in that final direction. Others advance upon it. To bow before the one is to lose sight of the three. I may submit to the unknown, but never to the unknowable."​

Roger Zelazny
Lord of Light

beautiful and spot on

ps: i focus on the......"I may submit to the unknown, but never to the unknowable." (zelazny), ignoring the other pronouncements as thinking is hard work

 

[Gustav]

hmm
zelazny's "aptness" could possibly be debunked.

 

[Hipparchia]

hmm
zelazny's "aptness" could possibly be debunked.

Probably. It's just meant to be more 'feel' than 'fact'.

 

[Gustav]

dont know what you mean by the 'CURRENT' tree of life?
the ancient motif of the Tree of Life includes, Underworld, this Earth, and Cosmos......ALL connected!

yes you do
you also know that one is factual while the other is speculative
go on
acknowledge the monkey's context

 

[duendy]

duendy

heh
like the rastafarian's "i and i"

mee))))no. cause they them read the maccabee biBIL and i dont agree wid it mon. they mean their idea of 'God' as 'I'. i am not meaning that, but more 'theunconcsious' ala Lancelot Whyte type ting

but of course, until someone nails down the neural correlates for consciousness, i am gonna go with the "knowledge" that i am distinct and ultimately separate from this biological mass i seemingly inhabit. what i am, i havent a real clue, just various philosophical speculations

me))))good to know

there can be no other way (i think)
cos i aint no fucking zombie

not namin names.................
hmmmmwhat IS tis 'other' ...? to the racist it's the 'Black' the 'Jew' etc......

 

[Gustav]

mee))))no. cause they them read the maccabee biBIL and i dont agree wid it mon. they mean their idea of 'God' as 'I'. i am not meaning that, but more 'theunconcsious' ala Lancelot Whyte type ting

i think you are right with the rasta def. i guess i held it to refer to the mind/body dichotomy

 

[Gustav]

look at that, duendy
we are actually conversing

/cackle

 

[duendy]

look at that, duendy
we are actually conversing

/cackle

hehehe i knooow

 

[Cottontop3000]

LOL. Nice.

 

[Mr Anonymous]

hmm
"there are stranger things in life that could be ever imagined in your dreams." (i cannot nail down the similar quote)

so far, the term alien has been mostly(?) negatively characterized aka what it is not. is it fair on us humans to keep an actual definition out of reach. for instance at the moment of conceptualization, it ceases to be alien? perhaps fallacious reasoning here? a trap of our own making?

is that what is going on?

Kind of gets impossible to make that kind of determination - in order to actually know, you'd need the point of comparison to hand - an alien. Without which all one has is speculation of the human variety. The good, the bad, the crashingly awful. Problem being, without the actual point of comparison by which to weigh ones speculations against, an alien, one can't know whether or not ones speculations are either in the ball park, close or not even worth making the pitch.

It's why I leave the topic open to ones own personal interpretation of what the word means. There fundamentally aren't any right or wrong answers. Just what people think.

 

[duendy]

put it thisa way....are not all planets. stars, moons of a spherical shape?....dont they have massively powerful telescopes that show this? and we have gallaxies, diverse but still forming spirals etc

so what i mean is is that say we didn't have tis technology, we COULDimagine planets shaped different tan sphere, and gallaxies different etc

well, these formations create themaelves for the best possibole way of being for what is needed to be

so likewise our humanoid and animal forms also .....?

 

[Silas]

As LilLightFoot succinctly put it, lifeforms from outwith our eco-system.*

you lie. that was not how he put it. he said "...something from outside of the earth's ecosystem."

Well, calling Ophiolite a liar for a semantic difference is a little extreme, I think.

1. It is probable that, as on the Earth, most lifeforms will be microscopic.
2. In consequence most alien lifeforms will be neither sapient or sentient.

an assumption that could only be made in the fog of confusion and mindless arrogance

Not really - surely it's a basically patently obvious fact. If we look at the Universe as a whole, the population of a particular type of object is inversely proportional to its relative size, so that there are uncounted trillions of grains of sand/dust, but only a few thousand supergiant stars. Looking at life on Earth, the same is seen to apply - trillions of invisible-to-the-naked-eye lifeforms, but only a few elephants, or trillions of species of microscopic lifeforms, but only three or four very large land mammals - elephant, rhino, hippo. There's no reason whatsoever to believe that that rule would be different for alien life. But it was possibly a pedantic point to make, yes, the vast majority of lifeforms in the Universe as a whole are not sapient.

3. Our ability to recognise lifeforms may be hampered by terracentrism.

the height of idiocy. terracentrism does not imply that we do not recognize lifeforms. it is just that we accord them a secondary or inferior status. it is the criteria that is used to define life that is in question. take away the requirement of autonomous replication and a virus could then, said to be alive

I think you completely misunderstood what Ophiolite was saying at this point, and that in fact you probably would find you and he agree on this point. Terracentrism would hamper us from seeing a non-carbon lifeform, a non-water based lifeform, a non-DNA based lifeform, if their mode of life was so substantially different from our own. Arthur C. Clarke (I'm sorry, Mr. Anonymous, but I absolutely cannot join you on the side of thinking Clarke to be somewhat meh, his explorations of the cosmos have always been amongst the most imaginative) postulated a lifeform consisting of coherent energy that lived in the atmosphere of the Sun. Not recognising that as a lifeform would be "terracentrism" of the almost natural form of only thinking about sapient life with respect to planets that consist of solid rock, oceans of liquid water and an atmosphere of volatiles. Maybe there are aliens only 93 million miles away!

5. Since external form has only a passing relationship to genetic heritage we may expect some analogs of terrrestrial creatures amongst any metazoans.

garbage spouted out in a excellent example of pseudoscientific quackery. muddled verbiage that could only result from a mediocre and addled thought process aka random firings of neurons being put into words

See, now you just insult for the hell of it, so I'll stop commenting on this particular post.

 

[Laika]

Gustav,

garbage spouted out in a excellent example of pseudoscientific quackery. muddled verbiage that could only result from a mediocre and addled thought process aka random firings of neurons being put into words

You seem to be an intelligent person so I assume the ignorance displayed in your post is deliberate. Ophiolite said:

5. Since external form has only a passing relationship to genetic heritage we may expect some analogs of terrrestrial creatures amongst any metazoans.

I believe that he is referring to the phenomenon of convergent evolution, exemplified nicely by the shared body morphology of dolphins, sharks and ichthyosaurs. I also believe that you knew this and that you were just trying to score points. Am I right?

 

[Gustav]

laika

appearances can deceive and i have large gaps my knowledge; convergent evolution being one of them. reading up on it briefly puts oafy's post in a new light.

an alien may look like a human while having different insides etc

the first point is a good one. moving on to the latter half..."analogs of terrrestrial creatures amongst any metazoans. (ophiolite)" care to explain that? in a post titled "alien lifeforms?"

are not some terrestrial (earth based) creatures, metazoan? a classification that was created to catergorize certain organisms of this planet that evolved from a single ancestor, again from this planet?

so if a terrestrial creature is a monkey, that monkey is analogous to a metazoan that is a monkey. it is redundant

perhaps he meant to say alien rather than metazoan?

 

[Gustav]

i am aghast if i am responsible for the..."disenchanted former member" thing.
i must make amends.
i think

 

[Gustav]

I think you completely misunderstood what Ophiolite was saying at this point, and that in fact you probably would find you and he agree on this point. Terracentrism would hamper us from seeing a non-carbon lifeform, a non-water based lifeform, a non-DNA based lifeform, if their mode of life was so substantially different from our own.

cite your definition of the term please

Well, calling Ophiolite a liar for a semantic difference is a little extreme, I think.

well, of course it is.

Not really -

i think the terms sapient and sentience, what constitutes them and to whom or what they are ascribed to are still being debated philosophically. there could be at least some form of sentience in these microorganisms tho sapience does seem very unlikely

therefor oafy is being a bit arrogant tho most probably correct in his assessment

 

[Mr Anonymous]

put it thisa way....are not all planets. stars, moons of a spherical shape?....dont they have massively powerful telescopes that show this? and we have gallaxies, diverse but still forming spirals etc

so what i mean is is that say we didn't have tis technology, we COULDimagine planets shaped different tan sphere, and gallaxies different etc

well, these formations create themaelves for the best possibole way of being for what is needed to be

so likewise our humanoid and animal forms also .....?

As I said d, we can imagine all sorts of things, and often we do. But to know you're right you need the point in comparison, the alien, to know you're right. The example you give is a perfect example of this - the cosmos as we understand it today doesn't appear at all as previous generations presumed it would - they imagined other solar systems with planets orbiting their respective stars long before anyone ever so much as detected a single one - perfectly true. But what astronomers actually discovered confounded prediction - no one expected to find Jupiter class planets for example orbiting in close proximity to their respective stars. Pegasus 51, one of the first such extra solar system planets to be detected proved to be this exact case - and that threw everyone. No one expected it. Nothing in the make-up of this solar system dictated that the discovery made would infact prove to be the case.

That's the essential difference between imagination, speculation and what actually is - things very often don't actually conform to expectation and without ascertaining an actual point in comparison we'd still be assuming solar systems the galaxy over give rise to replications along the lines of our particular neck of the woods rather than actually being their own thing.

How they actually are, not how we thought them.

(I'm sorry, Mr. Anonymous, but I absolutely cannot join you on the side of thinking Clarke to be somewhat meh, his explorations of the cosmos have always been amongst the most imaginative)

... Its a fair comment Silas, ones own choice of reading material should remain ones own personal choice and there remains neither right nor wrong about it. Personally, I much prefer ponderers such as John Wyndham, hell even HP Lovecraft if we're talking fiction - it's just as an author, Clarke for me I find a tad ponderous, a tad "Ooooo, I never saw that coming" , y'know? Cleaver chap and all that, perhaps if he simply allowed himself think outside the box more often I'd like him more often. His sociological musings I often find perfectly bang on the mark but the whole thing with being "The Father of Modern Telecommunications", etc heaps a shit load of baggage on the man as an author he could possible do with the odd day off from.

Literature, personal taste. What can y'do.... (shrug)