Tag: nonhuman intelligence

On the Latest Crest of “the Psychic Tide”

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Things have been quiet here at the Skunkworks, not because of any decline in research (Bernard Stiegler’s three-volume Techics and Time just arrived, I’ve been chewing over and savouring Matteo Pasquinelli’s revelatory social history of AI The Eye of the Master—essential reading!—, and Gary Lachman’s biography of Madame Blavatsky has served as bed- and leisure time reading…), nor has there been a pause in reflection, but, rather, recent “developments” have been prima facie eye-rollingly silly (e.g., UAP as being demonic…) or demanding more probing scrutiny to disclose their cultural roots, conceptual foundations, and ideological investments; here, I’m thinking of, among other things, Dr. Kimberly S. Engels’ online course on the phenomenology of UAP and the recent Sol Foundation symposium.

Among those books that prompt today’s reflections areYeats and the Occult (ed. George Mills Harper, 1975) and Demetres Tryphonopoulos’ The Celestial Tradition: A Study of Ezra Pound’s The Cantos (1992). In the former it is Kathleen Raine’s “Hades Wrapped in a Cloud” with its discussion of Yeats’ Neoplatonic interests and research into what Evans-Wetz termed “the fairy faith in celtic countries” that reveals the deeper roots of our post-2017, Skinwalker-Ranch-haunted talk around UAP and related matters. And Tryphonopoulos’ exemplary chapter on “The Occult Tradition” in its late Nineteenth-, early Twentieth-Century manifestation could be as much about the present.

A telling case-in-point is Jeffrey Kripal’s talk delivered at the aforementioned Sol Foundation Symposium. Despite his characteristic, conversational, cagey delivery (an endemically American style of academic presentation that warrants a study all its own) one can—charitably—distil a number of positions, if not, strictly speaking, theses. One of these concerns is “what our sciences are and can do and what they aren’t and cannot do.” Kripal’s position seems in line with that resistance to the growing hegemony of the natural sciences in the Nineteenth century, that upsurge in interest in “the occult” in response to the ebbing of religious orthodoxy. As Tryphonopolous writes: “It is an axiom of the occult [as he uses the term] that presently mysterious phenomena may be understood or explained in the future. However, there are other phenomena, said to be intrinsically occult, inherently unknowable to scientific reason, but still accessible to occult modes of cognition…” (25). These unknowable phenomena Kripal tends to term “impossible,” which includes “the physics of mystics,” levitation, bilocation, clairvoyance, and, imaginably, other parapsychological phenomena (which are sometimes reported to accompany UFO or UFO entity encounters), such as telepathy, poltergeist activity, Out-of-Body experiences, and UAP and encounter experiences themselves. Such impossible phenomena Kripal posits mark a limit for at least our present, physicalist (“materialist”) sciences, just as was maintained by those occultists of more than a century ago.

Other statements by Kripal strongly suggest his position is motivated by that desire to preserve a “religious,” “metaphysical” domain of experience and reality, much in line with his Victorian and Edwardian forebears. His argument is a “comparative argument,” grounded in his background as a Religious Studies scholar. He readily conflates our modern UFOs and ufonauts with all those tales of gods, angels, and demons and their interactions with humankind: as he says “This thing has been around as far as we can see back.” Here, Kripal might be said to twine two threads of that earlier iteration of “the occult.” On the one hand, this fusing UAP and related phenomena with the global religious tradition arguably takes up that project to preserve certain religious beliefs (the separability if not immortality of the soul or reincarnation, for example, or the reality of what Kripal and cadre term “Nonhuman Intelligences,” traditionally gods, angels, and demons). On the other, his position might be said to imply (though this is a shakier proposal), in its positing a perennial, global, transhistorical phenomenon, an affirmation of a perennial philosophy, occult knowledge, or gnosis concerning such matters, another characteristic of that “psychic tide” of over a century ago, as set forth most famously perhaps in Helena-Petrovna Blavatsky’s Theosophy (among others), an essential fiction of such movements at least since the translation of the Corpus Hermeticum in the Fifteenth century.

Aside from Kripal’s talk, at least two other examples come to mind. Joshua Cutchin, an “amateur” scholar to be respected, will be giving a course The Near-Death Experience under the auspices of the Kosmos Institute (whose self-description as concerning “mythology, esotericism, archetypes” seems to include it in the kind of discourse here under discussion). The course description suggests it develops matters addressed in Cutchins’ recent Ecology of Souls: A New Mythology of Death and the Paranormal (2022). It is not immaterial that this work references both Yeats and Evans-Wentz, for the former had already formulated a kind of General Theory of Apparitions, drawing from the Neoplatonist Porphyry, identifying Fairies and their ilk and the souls of the dead materialized during séances, both made of “soul stuff,” a manner of “subtle body” (remarked, also, by Kripal), the substance, by extension, of our ufonauts, indeed, of all those “nonhuman intelligences” that present themselves in different forms throughout human history, or so our modern occultists’ story goes. (That is, perhaps we are not dealing with a variety of entities but with one Other that manifests in this variety of ways…). Nor is it any less accidental that Jacques Vallée, too, references Evans-Wentz in his Passport to Magonia (which, too, proposes a deeper root shared by so-called “Nonhuman intelligences” said to interact with human beings) and, though I cannot find the title indexed in any of his published volumes, I swear I’ve read him refer to Lodovico Maria Sinistrari’s De Daemonialitate, et Incubis et Succubis, a volume familiar to those occultists a century or so past, both in North America and England; nor is Vallée’s “Rosicrucianism” unknown (Rosicrucianism an inflection of the occult tradition examined by Tryphonopoulos, which, he reminds us, finds its origins in a Seventeenth century hoax (what today we would term a “psyop”)). Nor should one overlook the influence of Whitley Strieber (a collaborator of Jeffrey Kripal’s) in this regard, a self-confessed adherent of Gurdjieff, another figure in the earlier occult foment discussed by Tryphonopoulos.

Believers in the views put forth by Kripal, Cutchin, Vallée, Strieber and others will likely see the case I make here as a vindication of those views, as if they were the most recent inflection of a perennial, universal story of human interaction with the supernatural. My contention, however, is more critical. For, however “comparative” the studies of Kripal and Cutchin (and Diana Walsh Pasulka…), for example, they strike me, as far as I can determine, remarkably blind to history, or, more precisely, historicity. What I mean is that comparative studies always demand a moment of philological labour and scrutiny sensitive to how temporally- and culturally-distant artefacts can be understood, a sensitivity to the insurmountable difference of the Other (which, at the same time hardly precludes the possibility of what Hans-Georg Gadamer termed “the fusion of horizons”), a case I have often made here. Kripal et al. who maintain “the phenomenon has always been with us” hardly represent an unbroken line of gnosis (as if that claim would not be unproblematic in itself!), but rather, again, articulate an “absolutely modern” response to modernity, the epoch determined by the advent of the natural sciences, enlightenment, and technoscience, which themselves are more profoundly determined by the rise of capitalism, within whose horizon “all that is solid melts into air.” Little surprise, then, that we should witness a repetition (which is always different) of ideas that were themselves a reaction to an earlier iteration of the same circumstances. As things stand, this position that “the phenomenon has always been with us” rests on little more than comparative folklore, mythology, or religion, comparisons that, in turn, rest upon a semiotic and hermeneutic naivety at least.

That being said, I need, at the same time, remark a funnily apropos synchronicity. The morning I would finish this post, I sat down with my breakfast and turned on our television, which, somewhat mysteriously (I couldn’t’ discover the channel that was broadcasting it on the channel guide) was tuned to Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method, his film about Jung and Freud, precisely the scene linked here:

Another not an Other

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A friend recently shared this meme of “What-the-Dalai-Lama-told-John-Mack” (which I haven’t fact-checked), which, along with the recent publication of Diana Pasulka’s Encounters: Experiences with Nonhuman Intelligences prompts this post.

As readers here will know, one engine of thought here at the Skunkworks is the thesis that the very idea of technologically-advanced, extraterrestrial civilizations is ideological, that is, treating a profoundly contingent cultural formation (namely, that of the earth’s so-called “advanced” societies) as if it were somehow natural or universal. The Extraterrestrial Hypothesis (ETH) for the origin of UFOs/AUP merely projects “First World” humanity as a paradigm of “intelligence” and “technology” onto the cosmos.

However, recent reflections on “the Phenomenon,” taking their cue, arguably, from Jacques Vallée’s Passport to Magonia combined, sometimes, with more recent, original research, depart from the conjecture that UFOs/UAP hail from an extrasolar civilization. Following Vallée, it is proposed that the mind-boggling variety of entities encountered in relation to flying saucers, UFOs, and UAP are part of a broader, human tradition of interaction with nonhuman intelligences. As Pasulka writes in the introduction to her new book (in her characteristically breezy style): “Traditional religions, including Christianity, Islam and Judaism, as well as Buddhism, and Hinduism, in addition to Indigenous communities, include some recognition, in parts of their histories and traditions, either acknowledging or pondering the existence of extraterrestrials or nonhuman intelligence, or do not discount it” (8).

In this notion of “nonhuman intelligence” there seems something unreflected, and that is the very (reported) fact of human/nonhuman interaction, an interaction that is more like human-to-human interaction than that between different species. If these entities are not of the family Homo (and even within that family mutual recognition is restricted), then the grounds of the mutual recognition between human and nonhuman beings is mysterious (if not downright mystical). I have argued this point with regards to intelligent extraterrestrials: there is no obvious reason why They should recogize Us as their technologically-advanced, intelligent Other. The same reasoning is arguably applicable to the nonhuman intelligences posited by Vallée, Pasulka, et al.

Within the context of the Abrahamic religions, the interaction between humankind, angels, and demons is not suprising, however, given that they all spring from the same Creator, Man being made in His image. Just how an analogous thinking is operative in the traditions Pasulka lists above, she—the religious studies scholar—would know better than I, but my hunch is this analogue is present in one inflection or other in them all. It follows, then, that myths, traditions, stories, or reports of “face-to-face” interaction with nonhuman intelligences, at least within the context of a Darwinian understanding of life, intelligence, and consciousness, betray an anthropomorphism if not an anthropocentrism. In our average-everyday reality, human-to-human interaction differs from interspecies interaction, and interaction between human and nonhuman “intelligent” beings would be an instance of the latter, not the former.

This reflection reveals a deeper, unquestionable anthropocentrism. The very idea of “nonhuman intelligence,” as it is deployed in talk about “the Phenomenon,” excludes out of hand the “intelligence” of all other forms of life on earth (which is ironic given the way that non-Abrahamic traditions—“Buddhism, and Hinduism, in addition to Indigenous communities”—think of nonhuman beings in ways markedly more empathetic). As I have argued, there’s no such thing as intelligence. That is, the concept of “intelligence” denotes not some quality or characteristic in-itself, but is a piece in some language game (e.g., that of various fields of psychology, artifical intelligence research, etc.) possessed of significance only relative to its particular use. Just as the concept of technology is unreflectively inflated and projected onto the cosmos by the thinking that goes on in the ETH and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, too often in ufological talk, even in this latest inflection, “intelligence” appears blindly applied only to human, all-too-human (so-called) Others.

Ground Zero of the Real: a note on “ontological shock”

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In my most recent “Sightings” post, I remark Ed Simon’s “We’re About to Find Out What We Really Know About UFOs,” which repeats a well-worn thesis about “First Contact” between humankind and a (more) technologically-advanced, extraterrestrial civilization:

The moment of “first contact” between humans and extraterrestrials has been extensively imagined in science fiction and in entertainment (and, of course, among UFO enthusiasts who claim such events have already occurred). Central to the depiction of an auspicious meeting between two radically different cultures or species is the sense of mass disorientation, collective anxiety, and “ontological shock” (a term coined by philosopher and theologian Paul Tillich to describe what happens when one’s entire sense of reality is disrupted)….

This ontological shock would be different from mere discovery or invention; it’s not even synonymous with what the philosopher Thomas Kuhn called a “paradigm shift,” when scientific consensus is amended by some revolutionary new theory. Rather it’s an apocalypse—in the sense of the word’s original Greek meaning of “unveiling”—whereby the true nature of reality is radically altered. 

I noted the not-unproblematic, too-easy conflation at work in depictions “of an auspicious meeting between two radically different cultures or species,” a disjunction that calls for circumspection. “A meeting of two, radically-different cultures” describes well that between, e.g., Europeans and the indigenous peoples of what the former termed the “New World;” the science-fictional First Encounter scenario would be between two, radically-different species (however much the alien species might be imagined to possess a culture—and it would have to (however much the notion of “culture” here occludes the material formations of the society at the foundation of that alien species’ technological sophistication…)).

Simon’s too-easy conflation passes over the problem of mutual recognition I note in my previous post and elsewhere: one can as easily imagine that even if the alien Other is “technological” it may well fail to perceive Homo Sapiens as its alien Other. To say too much too quickly (though I have argued this point extensively), what underwrites the believability of the science-fictional, First Contact scenario, what makes it easy for us to entertain, is that the alien Other is a fun-house mirror-image of ourselves, and not even, strictly, of Homo Sapiens, but one, recent and far-from-global societal inflection of Homo Sapiens….

But what I want to probe here is the notion of “ontological shock” invoked by Simon and most others with regard to the First Contact scenario. First, I would recast if not update Tillich’s “ontological shock”. Philosopher Slavoj Žižek is instructive in this regard, in his work on the 9/11 attacks and related matters, Welcome to the Desert of the Real. There, he contrasts “everyday social [lower-case ‘r’] reality” with that “Real” that explodes our expectations concerning that “average everydayness”, such as the 9/11 attacks or Ernst Jünger’s experience as a storm trooper in the Great War of “face-to-face combat as the authentic intersubjective encounter.” In general, the irruption or intrusion of the Real recasts, redefines, and reconfigures what we had taken for normal or possible or “real”.

There is a small but growing bookshelf of works concerned with the sociocultural implications of the unquestioned discovery of extraterrestrial life, among them Steven J. Dick’s edited collections The Impact of Discovering Life beyond Earth and Astrobiology, Discovery, and Societal Impact, as well as Extraterrestrial Intelligence: Academic and Societal Implications edited by Andresen and Torres. That being said, one wonders just how much of an “ontological shock” such a real discovery or encounter would be, the putative Reality of such an event’s being, as noted above, merely (“mirrorly”) a distorted real. That is, the condition of possibility of our recognizing this Other as an Other is not its Otherness but its resemblance to ourselves. There is thus an ineluctable dialectic if not paradox in the very possibility of such an encounter: to encounter the alien is possible ony insofar as the alien is familiar or recognizable.

Moreover, the possible alienness of the Other is, at this point, somewhat worn and, imaginably if not arguably, blunted. The Eurocentric cultures have lived in a context of First Contact in their imaginary for millennia. The idea and problematic of the Plurality of Worlds is perennial, from Lucian’s A True Story (Second Century CE) to the astral travels of Swedenborg down to our own science fiction and the ubiquitious image of the Grey. Indeed, this thematic is so much part of the cultural air we breathe, ufologists have long suspected in the modern, post-1947 era, that such science-fictional material, especially the tele-cinematic, has been part of a program of slow Disclosure. More generally, nearly if not all cultures have stories about our cohabitating with nonhuman others. We need not take these stories literally, but, in light of the prevalence of this thematic, as History’s Ancient Aliens says, it’s not too far off the mark to admit that, in a very real sense (i.e., in our everyday reality…) “We have never been alone.” In light of the logic of First Contact (the Other’s needing to be recognizable) and the empirical fact that, at least in the Symbolic order, we have already undergone First Contact long ago, it seems not illegitimate to wonder how “Real” the news of First Contact would turn out to be. The recent film Don’t Look Up is instructive: if humankind is nonplussed about the very real, unprecedented threat of climate change to organized society if not human survival (in the most pessimistic scenarios), how much less would be the shock of learning “we are not alone”, an idea which has been in the air for as good as forever?

A recent, actual “ontological shock” was supplied by the theory of evolution, for which Homo Sapiens are only one species among others. Darwin’s work, preceded by the geological discoveries that suggested earth was much older than 6,000 years, deeply disrupted the real of Nineteenth Century societies, in a way which seems now remarkably forgotten, at least for the most part. The shockwaves, however, continue, in research into animal and plant intelligence and the consequent call for animal rights (from the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals founded in 1824 to the work of philosopher Peter Singer) and the granting of legal rights to rivers and lakes, for example. These developments in real interspecies relations constitute arguably an irruption of the Reality of other species into the real, wherein they are presently brutalized instrumentalized. It is no accident that this re-orientation is one from Eurocentric (Abrahamicapitalist) worldviews to values present in more traditional, indigenous ones, this latter too-often no less repressed, oppressed, and murderously abused than the Nature with which they were often identified (as, for example, in the doctrine of Terrus Nullius).

Despite the recent journalistic and governmental surge of interest in UAP and nonhuman intelligences, the UFO/UAP is possessed of a relevance to culture and society more profound than the cynical, deceptive ploys at work since, most notably, 2017. The very idea of these technologically-advanced, nonhuman intelligences, whether in the fevered comments, posts, and podcasts of the ufomaniacal or the more rational research protocols of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, rises from the unconscious (ideology) of earth’s “advanced” societies. An analysis of these societies’ imaginary unmasks a narcissistic, self-serving (-preserving) idolatry that blinds their members to the possibility of a Real, progressively real encounter with those Other lives that have always lived with us, those species of life whose Reality we have perverted and domesticated into a comfortable, abusive reality.

There’s no such thing as intelligence

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As my professional corrupting-the-youth wound down, I had been inclined to essay a few thoughts on the Ultra/Cryptoterrestrial-as-ecological-ideal, but, given the recent hysteria around and about Artificial Intelligence (AI), General (AGI) and otherwise, and now the latest tempest-in-the-ufological-teapot, David Grusch’s “revelations” about “The Program”, its baker’s dozen of captured nonhuman vehicles and some of their pilots (…), it seems more urgent to address, again, the concept of intelligence with regards both to artificial “intelligence” and speculations about extraterrestrial, nonhuman intelligences, since a perverse notion of “intelligence” determines both.

Today’s concerns over AI and AGI are an illuminating index of an idea of “intelligence” at work in society-at-large (which society? which groups within it, exactly?…). There is strong warrant for maintaining that AI and AGI are not in any concrete, robust sense “intelligent” at all; while, in the same breath, one cannot merely brush aside the very real, operative (if however poorly-reflected and unconscious) understanding of “intelligence” guiding AI/AGI research and development and the no-less real and admittedly-concernful implications this technology holds for the future, near and far.

Geoffrey Hinton, who recently left Google’s AI labs is, at the moment, the loudest voice in this room, and a good example. Consider the following, from recent conversations Hinton conducted with The Guardian. First, from the article linked above:

At the core of his concern was the fact that the new machines were much better – and faster – learners than humans. “Back propagation may be a much better learning algorithm than what we’ve got. That’s scary … We have digital computers that can learn more things more quickly and they can instantly teach it to each other. It’s like if people in the room could instantly transfer into my head what they have in theirs.”

And, from another, recent article:

“You need to imagine something more intelligent than us by the same difference that we’re more intelligent than a frog. And it’s going to learn from the web, it’s going to have read every single book that’s ever been written on how to manipulate people, and also seen it in practice.”

Notice the too-easy conflation of information technology and the human brain (where’s the human being?). The new machines are better and faster at learning than humans, because the machines operate according to “a much better learning algorithm than we’ve got.” (I pass over the egregiously mistaken belief that the internet contains “every single book that’s ever been written on how to manipulate people” and that an AI can “see” (understand) such manipulation “in practice”…). Can a machine, strictly (i.e., in the sense we apply this word to a human being or an another organism, for that matter), be said “to learn”, and does the human brain or being learn in an algorithmically-governed way?

Hinton’s thinking comes out of his research background. A cognitive psychologist and computer scientist by training, he “for the last 50 years,” as he says, has “been trying to make computer models that can learn stuff a bit like the way the brain learns it, in order to understand better how the brain is learning things.” As with too many contemporaries, Hinton’s thinking drifts from trying to model the workings of the brain via computer to conceiving the brain as a computer: “A ‘biological intelligence’ such as ours, he says, has advantages. It runs at low power, ‘just 30 watts, even when you’re thinking‘.” What results is a too-easy, default equating of machine and brain (let alone mind). This not very deeply or rigorously reflected identification by virtue of which the brain is conceived as a machine by the same token warrants speaking of machines as if they were brains or minds, learning, discerning, or otherwise displaying “intelligence” if not self-awareness. No computer “remembers” or, by extension, “learns”, or “recognizes” or “thinks”: such expressions are all anthropomorphic shorthand, grasped at by cyberneticists out of necessity (lacking a vocabulary specific to the functioning of the calculations of what Victorians termed a “difference engine”) that have since gone on to bestow an illusion of humanity on the nonhuman, let alone nonliving. Much of the anxiety about AGI finds its source in linguistic confusion.

One could say more: that “intelligence” evolved (…); that it is embodied (that it’s not just a property or faculty of a brain); that it is ecological (it is relation between an organism and its environment, the driver for its evolution); and, at least in Homo Sapiens, social or cultural (articulated in symbolic systems, such as natural language). For these (and other) reasons, Large Language Models, such as ChatGPT, do not write, speak, or mean, as the software does not exist in a world the way human beings do, a situation which grounds intention and reference, in a word, meaning. ChatGPT is an example of what theorists Julia Kristeva and Roland Barthes termed “intertext”, “the already written”, precisely the sample ChatGPT statistically analyzes for syntactical patterns to reproduce….

So, if AIs are not, strictly, “intelligent,” what, then, of those technologically-advanced aliens imagined by the ufologically-inclined who adhere to the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis (ETH) regarding the origin of UFOs or that more sobre concept at work in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI)? What’s at work in both is undoubtedly complex. In one regard, there is the supposition that, where conditions are right (as they were on earth), natural processes produce life, life evolves awareness/consciousness/sentience and intelligence, and intelligence produces technology, which advances in sophistication and power. However, we do not know how or which natural processes produce life, nor the material/biological bases for consciousness. And, as readers of the Skunkworks will know, that conjunction of intelligence and technology is itself not unproblematic.

Indeed, the very conjunction of the two is obscure. At times, it seems technology is the sign or symptom or, logically, the sufficient condition of/for intelligence (as in SETI’s search for technosignatures, whether signals or traces of industrial processes in an exoplanet’s atmosphere or the dimming of a star caused by a Dyson Sphere); in the same breath, intelligence (of a certain order) is thought to imply the development of technology. Thus, intelligence and technology are assumed to be mutually implicated. However, the “intelligence” that invents what we now experience as technology (which is distinct from mere tool use) is not general intelligence (let alone “consciousness”) but instrumental reason, its teleological and calculative use. More profoundly, technology-as-we-know-it in this industrial/post-industrial sense is more the product of social, material processes than some ideal/mental/spiritual March of Progress. As such, it is profoundly historical, in a manner even more contingent and aleatoric than that process of evolution that supposedly gave rise to consciousness and intelligence. Indeed, the more closely the concrete history of the advent of today’s “advanced societies” is scrutinized the more complex and contingent the relation between “intelligence” and “technology” becomes. The search for extraterrestrial, technological civilizations comes to appear as little more than the laughable and futile search for some exoplanetary version not even of “ourselves” but of what has been termed “the First World” (or some science-fictional projection thereof).

Both the ETH and SETI are skewed by their identifying “intelligence” and “technology” with the example of a small minority of one species on one planet, an identification which serves more to reinforce and reproduce a certain social formation of that species that to illuminate not only life on other worlds but life on this one. Indeed, the more animal and even plant “intelligence” is researched, freed from ontotheological, anthropocentric blinders, the more intelligence is seen to transcend mere instrumental reason. In this regard, philosopher Justin E Smith-Ruiu’s “Against Intelligence” makes a lively, eloquent case for a radical expansion of the concept of intelligence, which I summarize, here:

…the only idea we are in fact able to conjure of what intelligent beings elsewhere may be like is one that we extrapolate directly from our idea of our own intelligence. And what’s worse, in this case the scientists are generally no more sophisticated than the folk….

One obstacle to opening up our idea of what might count as intelligence to beings or systems that do not or cannot “pass our tests” is that, with this criterion abandoned, intelligence very quickly comes to look troublingly similar to adaptation, which in turn always seems to threaten tautology. That is, an intelligent arrangement of things would seem simply to be the one that best facilitates the continued existence of the thing in question; so, whatever exists is intelligent….

it may in fact be useful to construe intelligence in just this way: every existing life-form is equally intelligent, because equally well-adapted to the challenges the world throws its way. This sounds audacious, but the only other possible construal of intelligence I can see is the one that makes it out to be “similarity to us”…

Ubiquitous living systems on Earth, that is —plants, fungi, bacteria, and of course animals—, manifest essentially the same capacities of adaptation, of interweaving themselves into the natural environment in order to facilitate their continued existence, that in ourselves we are prepared to recognize as intelligence….

There is in sum no good reason to think that evolutionary “progress” must involve the production of artifices, whether in external tools or in representational art. In fact such productions might just as easily be seen as compensations for a given life form’s inadequacies in facing challenges its environment throws at it. An evolutionally “advanced” life form might well be the one that, being so well adapted, or so well blended into its environment, simply has no need of technology at all.

But such a life form will also be one that has no inclination to display its ability to ace our block-stacking tests or whatever other proxies of intelligence we strain to devise. Such life forms are, I contend, all around us, all the time. Once we convince ourselves this is the situation here on Earth, moreover, the presumption that our first encounter with non-terrestrial life forms will be an encounter with spaceship-steering technologists comes to appear as a risible caricature.

In this light, there is such “thing” as intelligence (just as, as Fichte argued so long ago, there is no such “thing” as consciousness). “Intelligence” is a concept, a construct, variously articulated and put to various uses throughout its history. Thus, the concept calls for vigilant scrutiny whenever and wherever it is deployed to wrest it of its apparent, reflexive naturalness and reveal its limits and more importantly the purposes to which it is being put. Indeed, how better to enable ourselves to be able to recognize a truly Other instance of “intelligence” than freeing the concept from the human-all-too-human version that masquerades as intelligence-itself?

Excursus

The problematic broached here is one that demands an entire research program. With regards to “intelligence”, what is demanded is a “destruktive” history of the concept that would desediment and dissolve its apparent univocity and naturalness. At the very least, such a study would splinter that apparent unity into the various ways the concept has been developed and debated in the psychological literature.

In terms of the conjunction of intelligence and technology in SETI, at least one dilemma presents itself. Is the conjuction “Platonic” (let alone ideological) or it possible to argue for a real possibility of an extraterrestrial, technologically-advanced civilization on purely statistical, probabilistic grounds? (My intuition is that even this latter argument, however valid, is motivated by a certain, covert Platonism….).

First Rumour of Limina’s Inaugural Symposium

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While readers here breathlessly wait for my forthcoming post on the Inaugural Symposium for Limina: The Journal of UAP Studies, they might be interested in this interview with some of the participants conducted by German journalist Robert Fleischer, viewable here.

I observe in passing Fleischer’s guests might skew a viewer’s impression of the orientation of the symposium and Limina with regard to the matter if not problem or question of UAP, given that three of Fleischer’s guests and Fleischer himself are all members of ICER, the International Coalition for Extraterrestrial Research, whose official position on “contact” is that “Contact and interaction between humans and extraterrestrial/non-human intelligences (NHIs) on a global scale, [sic] is a reality.” Francisco Mourão Corrêa, for example, is the founder of Exopolitics Portugal. Prof. Tim Murithi’s proposals align themselves with those of Stephen Bassett’s Paradigm Research Group whose stated objective is “to advocate in all ways possible for an end to a government imposed truth embargo of the facts surrounding an extraterrestrial presence engaging the human race – Disclosure.” Fleischer’s two other guests, Prof. Erling Strand from Project Hessdalen in Norway and Dr. Beatriz Villaroel from the Nordic Institute of Theoretical Physics in Sweden, represent less-invested perspectives, focussed on empirical research that has yet to come to any conclusions regarding the nature of UAP let alone their relation to NHIs, despite Strand’s being a member and representative of ICER.

That being said (or remarked), Corrêa does make clear that part of his team’s presentation at the symposium concerned Project Stellar, an inter- or multidisciplinary research initiative that marshals both the hard (natural) and social sciences (including some humanistic disciplines, e.g. philosophy) to study UAP, a project whose putative approach suggests a less invested stance to the phenomenon. Likewise, Dr. Beatriz Villaroel’s Vasco Project searches for potential evidence of probes of extraterrestrial origin, somewhat along the lines of the likely better-known Galileo Project. Which is all to say that the general tenor of the symposium was more akin to the tentative approach articulated in this interview by Prof. Strand than the persuaded if not convinced stance adopted here by his interlocutors. More, forthcoming!

Human, all-too-human, nonhuman species…

~ Bryan Sentes ~ 12 Comments

Regular visitors here may have been puzzled or concerned about this site’s recent silence. Matters on the domestic and poetic fronts have been more pressing of late, and the recent unfolding of the myth of things seen in the sky hasn’t been very inspiring. Luis Elizondo, Chris Mellon, & Co. continue to embarass themselves with their wince-inducing ignorance of UFO history, and the recent kerfuffle around the Calvine photograph raises the same old dust, nor does Jeffrey Kripal’s newest book touch any nerves of mine (though that may change on closer scrutiny…).

But, then, as chance would have it, a perennially-irritating confusion comes again into view. Greg Bishop, the admin for the Radio Misterioso FB page, shared an article from The Guardian via George Knapp, “Talking to whales: can AI bridge the chasm between our consciousness and other animals?”, with the comment “If this group is successful in achieving communication with whales, it may be wonderful, or frightening, or both. It may also teach us how to look for signatures of nonhuman life by using insights to an alien species that shares the same planet with us.”

It’s that second sentence that caught my attention. At first, even the grammar had me flummoxed. I take Bishop to mean that the work of the groups mentioned in The Guardian article “may also teach us how to look for signatures of nonhuman life by applying its insights to an alien species that shares the same planet with us.” And there’s the rub: the thinking seemingly at work here about “nonhuman life” and that “alien species that shares the same planet with us.”

That alien species is, I surmise (given George Knapp’s being in on the conversation), the one that pilots what today are termed Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP). These are almost invariably humanoid, not just morphologically, but, to some extent, culturally (and arguably socially), being technological, even if that technology transcends our present understanding. Even if UAP and alien-encounter events are staged (a la Vallée), that staging is still imagined to be carried out technologically. My point here is that this putative alien species (Mac Tonnies’ Crytpoterrestrials?) is only marginally nonhuman. Not only its form but its “form of life” (a la Wittgenstein: ‘a background common to humankind, “shared human behavior” which is “the system of reference by means of which we interpret an unknown language”’) are human, all-too-human.

One might justifiably ask by what warrant I venture to propose that these crypoterrestials might share a background of shared behaviour, a form of life close enough to that of some Homo Sapiens that would underwrite our more readily understanding these Others than those other, exoteric nonhuman species with which we cohabit the earth. What’s at work I argue in imagining that these terrestrial, alien species are both radically Other and technological is a conceptualization of technology that abstracts it from the social conditions of its actual coming-to-be. This impoverished notion of technology enables both its conflation with tool-use (so that even sharpened stones are “technology”) and its inflation to a kind of telos (essential goal) of intelligence that inspires fantasies about nonhuman, extraterrestrial, technologically-advanced civilizations, a hobby-horse (if not a bugbear) here at the Skunkworks. As I have explained (however cursorily) in an earlier post: “science and technology…are woven from the fabric of the society within which they appear and operate; they are cultural phenomena through and through.” Technology, thought concretely, is bound up with a form of life, such that, any other parahuman, technological species would already be close enough to technological Homo Sapiens that attempting to understand them would be more akin to that which occurs between different human groups than that between humans and other animals.

What’s at stake in these reflections is not so much the reality of these crypoterrestrial Others (attentive readers will have noticed nothing I have written denies outright their possible being) but how we understand and relate to those unquestionably real, nonhuman Others with whom we cohabit the earth. In seeing the promise for communicating with imagined creatures who mirror us in research into interspecies communication one oversells the strangeness of these putative Others and undersells the undeniable Otherness of really-existing animal (and plant) life. That more concerned parties are not struck by how much more alien actually-existing nonhuman life forms on earth are, compared to those “alien” beings that inhabit the ufological universe increasingly puzzles and saddens me. The fascination with crypto- or extraterrestrials betrays a narcissistic longing to encounter some version of ourselves instead of the unquestionable Otherness of our plant and animal kin whose profound difference provides a broader and deeper insight into the abyssal mystery of our creature-being.

Zooming in on the Archives of the Impossible Conference: Day Two (4 March 2022): Whitley Strieber, “Them”

~ Bryan Sentes ~ 14 Comments

Here, I continue my commentary on the plenary sessions of Rice University’s Archives of the Impossible conference. My notes on Jeffrey Kripal’s opening remarks and Jacques Vallée’s keynote address can be read, here, while those on Diana Pasulka’s plenary address are viewable, here.

Friday, I missed Leslie Kean’s plenary talk, “Physical Impossibilities: From UFOs to Materializations”, but I was eager to catch Whitley Strieber’s, not only because of his reputation, but moreso because he has co-authored a book with Jeffrey Kripal, The Super Natural.

Strieber, being a writer, delivered a relatively eloquent talk, in a mellifluous, cadenced voice. He began, after a series of gracious, thoughtful acknowledgements, confirming the notion Jeffrey Kripal laid out yesterday, that the paranormal is a unified field, underlining the unity of the Visitor experience and the mystery of death, stressing the phenomenon demands to be approached “holistically” and interdisciplinarily.

The body of his discourse was the presentation and analysis of one of the many letters he and his wife received in the wake of Strieber’s publishing Communion, a large number of which are now housed in the Archives of the Impossible. Strieber proposed to read the story the letter related according to the myth of Ariadne, Theseus, and the Minotaur: the role of Theseus is played by the family who experience an encounter with the Visitors; the Labyrinth is our dark, confused world; the Minotaur is fear and anger; Ariadne is the consciousness behind and controlling the Visitor experience; and the thread, the process of human perception, the way it domesticates the wildly strange, tempering fear with curiosity. He managed to unfold the letter’s account according to his proposed schema in an easy to follow manner, however unconvincing….

What struck me was Strieber’s stressing how the Visitor experience “is a communication of a kind”, related to the myths of all cultures. Indeed, it’s because Strieber perceives this link between the experience and myths that he ventures to read the letter the way he does, going as far as to claim that an acquaintance with myth is necessary to understand Contact and “the grammar of Communion.” In this regard, Strieber seems to echo Vallée’s contention in his keynote address, that the phenomenon “is not a system but a metasystem”. Someone not unfamiliar with the developments of last century’s literary theory might say it is a language (myth).

Ironically, however much Strieber is at pains to stress the pertinence of our mythological inheritance in understanding Contact, his own acquaintance with the myth he deploys is weak. It’s not the case that Ariadne saves Theseus from the Minotaur by guiding him out of the Labyrinth with her thread, but that her thread enables him to navigate the Labyrinth in order to slay the Minotaur and emerge again. Strieber is correct that Theseus abandons Ariadne after his exploit, but says that she weds Dionysus “the god of joy” and thereby becomes holy, a becoming holy (whole, complete), Strieber maintains, being the “inner aim of Contact”. But by what warrant does Strieber identify Dionysus/Bacchus with “joy”?…

Not only does he betray only a loose acquaintance with the myth he would employ, but, I would argue, he confuses myth with myths. That is, if the Visitor/Contact phenomenon operates at a mythological level, from the point of view of structural mythology, it is not because of how its various narratives might echo other narratives, but because of its structure, which is that of myth. Myth, like language, is a form not a substance. He does seem to unconsciously grasp this approach, when he draws attention to various actions in the letter he analyzes (and, no!, he does not “deconstruct” it!) when he remarks various actions that occur along the vertical axis: one Visitor leaps from a water silo, they appear in the trees, the family ascends to the second story of their home to get a better view of the beings, etc., an observation typical of a structural analysis of myth or narrative. Strieber’s exegesis of the letter is illuminating but, ironically, despite the allegorical machinery he brings to bear….

One must wonder, too, if he were present during Vallée’s presentation and his warnings concerning the truths intelligence agencies relate, as Strieber at one point emphasized how the U.S. government recently admitted that the leaked Tic-Tac and Gimbal videos depicted vehicles of unknown origin….

So, like Jacques Vallée’s keynote address, Whitley Strieber’s contribution, though smoothly delivered and containing some provocative insights, fails to persuade because of, ironically, its weak grasp of essential aspects of its own argument, here the very myth he would use to construct his discourse, if not mythology as such itself….

Sighting: Sunday 25 April 2021: Justin E. Smith’s “Against Intelligence”

~ Bryan Sentes ~ 1 Comment

I don’t know how he does it. Philosopher Justin E. Smith, very much my contemporary, and even once a faculty member of my alma mater here in Montreal, not only functions as an academic in a French university, teaching, researching, and writing articles and books, but he maintains a Substack account where he posts juicy essays weekly. With regards just to that writing, he tells us

In case you’re curious, I spend roughly six hours writing each week’s Substack post, taking the better part of each Saturday to do it. This follows a week of reflection, of jotting notes about points I would like to include, and of course it follows many years of reading a million books, allowing them to go to work on me and colonize my inner life nearly totally.

At any rate, his latest offering harmonizes sweetly with our own obsessive critique of anthropocentric conceptions of intelligence. You can read his thoughts on the matter, here.