Tag: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence

Sightings Friday 18 August 2023

Featured ~ Bryan Sentes ~ 4 Comments

Our radar, this past week, was relatively quiet.

At least the sound and fury of the Grusch Affair is already diminishing, though dismissals and apologia continue to pop up….

A share of a substack article on the Search for Extraterrestrial Life (SETI) served to spin a short discussion thread over at the UFO Updates Facebook Page. Jim Geshke’s is a garden variety survey of the Fermi Paradox (that, given the immensity of the cosmos life should be plentiful, but we have yet to detect any sign of it). What engaged me was the article’s catchline, that great, unexamined premise, “Intelligent life almost certainly exists elsewhere in the universe…”.

Geshke presents the stereotypical argument, that

Plenary numbers would seem to make the probability a near certainty. British rock star physicist Brian Cox recently estimated there are 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe. Those galaxies contain 200 sextillion stars…To calculate the estimated number of planets just add about nine more zeroes. Those numbers are incomprehensible [sic]. Common sense stacks the odds overwhelmingly in E.T.’s favor.

At least Geschke is canny enough to add, in the same breath, that “as physicists and cosmologists will testify, common sense doesn’t really apply to the Universe.” The Drake Equation is brought in, which, again, is admitted only tentatively, as “Drake [had only] strung together a series of educated guesses.” Finally, the article considers the Rare Earth Hypothesis, that life’s arising is a very complex affair, so complex, it may have only occurred on earth. These caveats suggest that “Intelligent life does not necessarily exist elsewhere in the universe.”

That the catchline repeats an idea more complex than is often grasped, readers here will understand; the very idea of “intelligent life” is densely packed. Once I’d communicated those complexities, and after I cleared up the distinction between criticism (probing an argument’s soundness or validity) and critique (revealing a position’s limits, assumptions, and their implications), my interlocutor raised a pertinent question: What are the consequences of scrutinizing that catchline’s claim?

On the one hand, a scrutiny of the idea reveals that SETI, anyway, as a search for technosignatures, is a search for ourselves, and not even “ourselves”, but that culture represented by the SETI researchers themselves, namely that of the world’s so-called “advanced” (“First World”) societies. The anthropocentricism at work here is also ontotheological, i.e., in one regard, arguably, guided by a number of possible metaphysical presuppositions, one of which, the Great Chain of Being, which places humankind at the apex of life on earth, is Abrahamically theological, rooted in the myth that God created Man in His own image. Said ontotheological anthropocentrism blinds those possessed by it to the “intelligence” and, therefore, the value of all the other forms of life on earth, which are reduced to raw materials, mere means to human ends, with glaring, disturbing consequences. And, of course, aside from these strictly cultural determinations, searching for “ourselves” also naturalizes and universalizes the haphazard natural and cultural sequence of events that led to the possiblity of SETI in the first place, i.e., it is “ideological.”

However much these considerations (the heart of the work here at the Skunkworks) do not touch on the truth or validity of thoughts about extraterrestrial, intelligent life, they do have “scientific,” methodological value. I have essayed the thought that even The Drake Equation is guided by the cultural, ideological prejudices outlined above. What values we input into its variables, if not some of the variables themselves, are less than strictly “scientific.” Admittedly, the matter is more complex, but the question stands. Moreover, it’s been proposed that the tests for life carried out by the two Viking landers in the mid 1970s may have in fact killed organisms the test had not considered. Astrobiology and SETI, then, need rethink and recalibrate just what they are looking for….

What journalist Chris Wiley goes looking for in his New Yorker article “The Enticing Mysteries of U.F.O. Photography” is “high-quality photographic proof” of the reality of UFOs. His article is a brief review of the most famous UFO photos. He consults Leslie Kean, who dishes up the famous photo of a Black Triangle taken during the Belgian Wave of ’89-’90 (“The shooter came forward in 2011 and said that he had hoaxed it”), another taken during the Hudson Valley wave of the mid-eighties (“Nobody’s been able to locate and interview the police officer who actually took it”), and the famous Trindade Island photo from 1958, which Kean cannot finally vouch for, either. In the course of his search, Wiley is shown, too, the pair of pictures taken in 1950 in McMinnville, Oregon, by farmer Paul Trent, and the no-less notorious Costa Rica Lake Cote aerial survey photograph from 1971. Finally, the Calvine photo, recently released by David Clarke, is presented for inspection, and Wiley ends with a nod to Billy Meier’s famous pictures and the iconic poster on Fox Mulder’s office wall.

Despite Wiley’s coming up empty handed, what’s touched on here is profound, the epistemic status of the photograph as proof. In the earliest days of the medium, its authority was invoked to prove the reality of psychic phenomena, namely those of the séance, levitations and ectoplasmic manifestations. It was precisely this aura of authority that George Adamski later played on with his famous photos, which he offered as proof of his sightings and, by extension, contacts with Venusians. But even when photos are indistinct or questionable, they invite the amenable viewer to believe. As Mark Pilkington remarks, the Costa Rica Lake Cote photo, for example, is “a classic example of seeing what you want to see—which is the key to the whole U.F.O. story.” Thus, UFO photographs grant insight as much into the psyche of the viewer as provide evidence of advanced earthly aeronautic technology let alone extraterrestrial visitiation.

Indeed, the authoritative aura of the photograph has evaporated in recent years, first, with the advent of CGI, (as film make James Fox tells Wiley, “if you see a photograph of an object with clearly defined edges, it’s probably a fake”), and all the more with, as Wiley writes, “forecasts of an A.I.-fuelled disinformation apocalypse.” But once UFO photos, among so much else, become simulacra with a vengeance (copies without an original), then they can appear in a new light, merely as pictures. Anyone who sat in the darkened theatre and witnessed the spectacle of Close Encounter of the Third Kind (especially at an impressionable age) surely came away impressed by the sheer aesthesis of the phenomenon, its colours, its movement, its sounds, and grandeur. Gazing at UFO photos-as-simulacra with an art historical eye, one might be persuaded one is viewing a kind of Outsider or Folk art (such as that by Charles A. A. Dellschau), perhaps a new genre of religious depiction. Indeed, the aesthetic dimenson of UFO photographs (and related representations) has been appreciated for some time. For example, Barry Blinderman and Bill Conger curated The UFO Show at the University Galleries of Illinois State University in 2000, and art historian John F. Moffitt published a tome studying just this aspect of the phenomenon in 2003, Picturing Extraterrestrials: Alien Images in Modern Mass Culture. Nor is Diana Walsh Pasulka the first to note the religious dimension of such artistic inspiration and devotion….

Sightings Friday 11 August 2023

Featured ~ Bryan Sentes ~ 7 Comments

As in the past weeks, the Grusch Affair continues to send out ripples and froth that obscure the more profound depths of the phenomenon.

Ballester-Olmos, et al, published their relatively down-to-earth review of the recent U.S. National Security Subcommittee’s hearing on UAP:

We don’t know whether to label it as ridiculous or shameful. Under the guise of a bipartisan initiative, the real scenario is a group of mostly Republican politicians seemingly trying to undermine the Democrat administration, using the tenuous pretext of UFOs this time around.Whether they are naive, misinformed, driven by ideology, or simply gullible remains unclear

Nevertheless, the appetite for the matter unsated, The Hill has organized a panel, We Are Not Alone: UFOs & National Security for 17 August 2023, with three of those “Republican politicians” and, finally, someone who knows something, historian Greg Eghigian. The Hill‘s own Marik Von Rennenkampff and Baptiste Friscourt at UAP Check have both recently published articles, more interesting for their logic than their content….

The most turbulent development was the paranoid reaction to The Intercept‘s revealing Grusch’s history of PTSD and related mental health issues, Grusch’s defenders impugning that his records had been leaked as part of a smear campaign (they weren’t: “The records were not confidential, medical, nor leaked. They are publicly available law enforcement records obtained under a routine Virginia FOIA request to the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office and provided by the office’s FOIA coordinator”). Logically, Grusch’s mental health history can hardly be said to discredit his testimony (that would be a very weak ad hominem argument), no more than his being autistic. More concerning is his business affiliation with Gary Nolan’s Sol Foundation, whose director is Chris Mellon, which associates Grusch all the more glaringly with those most prominent in promoting the UFO (rebranded as UAP) mythology post-2017….

Friscourt in his article for UAP Check invokes a common, ufological / astrobiological argument: “Statistical studies show that we can’t be alone;” if we have launched space probes, “others probably did it, as we are statistically unlikely to be special;” “Once you consider the amount of possible life out there, extended over billions of years, statistics make it simple: the existence of [extraterrestrial spaceships piloted by] non-human bodies actually makes sense.”

I have posed here the question as to whether an argument for life on other planets, let alone so-called intelligent life, let alone “technological” life, can be made on purely statistical, probabilistic, mathematical grounds. And it is a question. The further the argument moves from the question of mere life on other planets, it seems to me less compelling. And even if such an argument can be validly made, it can still be asked if it isn’t oriented, guided, or otherwise “determined” by ideology (an unconscious affirmation of the universal naturalness of the social formation of the so-called “advanced” (capitalist) societies) or what I have called “a metaphysical residue,” an inherited idea of “essence” or Eternal Recurrence.

Ideas don’t fall from heaven. At birth, a human being is “thrown” into a time and place not of their choosing, one wherein they take up mostly unconsciously what German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer has called “Tradition”. Human beings’ being historical in this radical sense explains how it is certain notions orient, guide, and otherwise determine their actions, perceptions, and thinking. This “throwness” helps explain, further, in one regard, how ufological and astrobiological thinking can be seen to be guided by distantly-inherited ideas, such as a dim echo of Plato’s Forms.

A recent Big Think article by Prosanta Chakrabarty suggests another such guiding idea: the Great Chain of Being, “still how many people understand (or rather misunderstand) evolution — that is, as a linear process with bacteria and plants at the bottom as ‘primitive’ and a straight line from fish → amphibians → reptiles → mammals and then humans as a distinct category at the top.” The fetishization of instrumental rationality (what is seen as giving us “technology”) let alone human intelligence is a case in point: it surely sets (technoscientific) human intelligence above all others. Moreover, the linearity of the Great Chain harmonizes with the “Platonic” idea that intelligence is measurable on such a linear scale, such that we can imagine aliens or A.I.s “more” intelligent than present-day Homo Sapiens (a linearity that gets in turn extended to technological sophistication, equally supporting, e.g., Maitreya Raël’s fancies about his alien teachers’ being “25,000 years ahead of us,” European explorers’ belief in their superiority to the indigenous peoples of Turtle Island, or even the Kardashev Scale).

That ufological or astrobiological thinking might well be said to be possessed by this scheme is an index of its being ontotheological, an inescapable consequence of its arising within the horizon of modernity, one in the grip of the Platonic-Christian inheritance, that fateful confluence of Greek ontology and Christian theology. It’s only once this “ufological / astrobiological unconscious” is revealed that that grip might begin to be loosened. Perhaps the nascent science of UAP studies (let alone the ufologically-minded) needs undergo a kind of conceptual psychoanalysis to free it from this perverse narrowness of vision before it is mature enough to join the family of full-fledged sciences.

Sightings Friday 4 August 2023

Featured ~ Bryan Sentes ~ 12 Comments

The Grusch Affair continues to suck up the air in ufological space. The usual suspects continue to keep the story spinning (see this “roundtable” with George Knapp, Jeremy Corbell, Ross Coulthart, and Bryce Zabel, for example). In the mass(er) media, News Nation (…) isn’t much better, bringing together “experts” Sean Cahill, Steven Greer, and Avi Loeb for a yack. At least PBS for its part went to a journalist author of a forthcoming book on the matter, Garrett Graff. Even more serious thinkers are scratching their heads: Bernardo Kastrup (in a not very informed or profound manner) and Mike Cifone more scrupulously.

Those who swallow Grusch’s tale do so, it seems, for the most part, because they want to believe or on the grounds of the man’s credentials. Anyone who watched to the end a recent conversation between Mick West and Steven Greenstreet, however, would have been treated to a link that waves five red flags with Grusch’s story. The one that should catch the eye of everyone interested in the topic is that “in accordance with protocols, Grusch provided the Defense Office of Prepublication and Security Review at the Department of Defense with the information he intended to disclose.” Nothing Grusch has said is considered secret by the U.S. Department of Defense. So, is he blowing a whistle, or smoke?…

Some, such as those I’ve noted here earlier, Luke Harrington and Caitlin Johnstone, are able to look awry at the matter to consider its societal implications aside from the question of the factual truth of Grusch’s claims. Günseli Yalcinkaya, too, insightfully raises the point that “In this new and uncharted era of disinformation, it’s easy to see how stories of technologies of unknown origins, non-human intelligence and unexplained phenomena can fan the flames of cover-ups and conspiratorial thinking…” Thus, “it’s hard not to question the motives behind how this information is being fed to us – and why.”

Yalcinkaya is informed enough to recognize that the suspicion of cover-ups goes back to the beginning (however much she points to Roswell as the watershed event…). In fact, it’s in 1950 Frank Scully publishes tha archetypal crash-and-retrieval tale Behind the Flying Saucers; Donald Keyhoe publishes The Flying Saucer Conspiracy five years later, a title that underlines suspicions he’d been voicing from the start, in The Flying Saucers are Real (1950). In this regard, she quotes Mark Pilkington: “This UFO belief is intrinsically tied to notions of a government and military cover-up, and is powerful and pervasive within society,” a society wherein (as Yalcinkaya writes) “social media chips away at any notion of a consensus reality,…which amplifies fringe beliefs and makes it harder to distinguish what’s real or not.” Cannily, she observes that “Even the positioning of UAP sightings as classified information plays into this narrative, with officials capitalising on our collective distrust of mainstream media to uncover hidden truths,” this skepticism toward mainstream media further eroding a shared sense reality. “It’s important to consider why these conversations are entering the mainstream now” she goes on to write, “and it’s not a coincidence that it’s during a time when space tourism is on the rise and conversations around AI and non-human intelligence are reaching their peak and posing very real existential threats.” However much I find there to be more pressing concerns than those Yalcinkaya remarks, we would surely agree that The Grusch Show serves to keep “us distracted from anything more shadowy beneath the surface.”

Aside from distracting from graver problems (I’ve remarked Tim Burchett’s and Anna Paulina Luna’s skepticism about global warming…) and further dissolving consensus reality, the Grusch Affair stirs a deeper, troubling current, a particular, bipartisan suspicion of government. The roots of such distrust go to the very founding of the Republic, and, unsurprisingly, sprout after the Second War, one flower of which is precisely the myth of a UFO cover-up as articulated by Keyhoe. More acutely, “Big government” has been the target of Neoliberal attacks: Ronald Reagan famously stated that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” This overt ideology has been behind the drive to rollback those gains made by working people after the war, particularly in the institutions of the welfare state. The consequences of such thinly-veiled laissez faire capitalism have not been for the best. And, at a time when then nations of the earth need work together over decades to mitigate and adapt to climate change (and other threats to life on earth), such a distrust of public institutions is, to say the least, counterproductive.

There is, morever, a blindness at work in this suspicion. “If there’s not a cover-up, the government and the Pentagon are sure spending a lot of resources to stop us from studying it,” Burchett told The Hill.  His Republican colleague, Luna, adds, “We know that enormous sums of money are being spent on UAP-related activity, whether it’s retrieval/recovery, research and reverse-engineering, or just security for whatever the government is hiding.” This exclusive focus on government is curious, given that Grusch claims that “recoveries of partial fragments through and up to intact vehicles have been made for decades through the present day by the government, its allies, and defense contractors” [my emphasis]. The private sector, therefore, is no less guilty of a cover-up than government. Indeed, corporations have shown themselves no more transparent, when quarterly profits are at stake. Big Tobacco lied about nicotine’s being addictive, Big Oil knew about global warming, Boeing’s cutting corners crashed several 737 Max aircraft, and, more recently, Johnson and Johnson ignored research that linked its talcum powder to cancer. Ironically, it’s only via public institutions, such as the courts, that such corporate malfeasance can be brought to justice (not to mention the role of the much-maligned mainstream media in investigating corporate deceit).

Ideology (in the sense I use the term here) is revealed in such contradictions and omissions. By these same fissures and silences, UFO talk, as a social phenomenon, can’t help but betray, too, the “necessary fictions” that keep in place and reproduce the present order. “Disclosure,” therefore, is a mere distraction, from the true cover-up, of what’s at work in social reality, a reality of which UFOs/UAP are inescapably a part.

Talk of “nonhuman biologics” doubtless to many brings to mind “extraterrestrials” (however much the more informed might as much think of cryptoterrestrials, extradimensionals, or extratemporals). Wade Roush, in the excerpt from his book Extraterrestrials, surveys ideas about “the plurality of worlds” from the ancient Hellenic philsophers Leucippus and Democritus on down to the present day. Leucippus and his student are often credited with founding Atomism, “the belief that the visible universe consists of tiny, indivisible, indestructible atoms, churning in the void without purpose or cause.” Atomism, later, grounds the ethics of Epicurus and orients the great, scientific-epic poem of his follower Lucretius, On the Nature of Things. Roush quotes a telling passage from the poem:

If store of seeds there is
So great that not whole life-times of the living
Can count the tale …
And if their force and nature abide the same,
Able to throw the seeds of things together
Into their places, even as here are thrown
The seeds together in this world of ours,
’Tmust be confessed in other realms there are
Still other worlds, still other breeds of men,
And other generations of the wild.

Surely striking is how much the thinking here resembles that of contemporary astrobiology. The spatiotemporal immensity of the cosmos and the universality of the physical laws that govern it imply a likelihood of “Still other worlds, still other breeds” of life, sapient and “wild.”

I’ve proposed that the line of thought that posits that chemistry gives rise to life, which evolves to awareness and intelligence, which in turn develops technology is metaphysical, Platonic. And the deep, historical roots of the basic astrobiological schema, as evidenced in Lucretius’ poem, suggests, possibly, a no less deep, subterranean inheritance of related ideas in the sciences that are part of today’s Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). One could as well recognize in the thinking at work in Lucretius and SETI a version of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same, that the churning of matter over vast periods of time gives rise to the same patterns, especially if the universe is thought to be in a state of constant creation. The important question, in this regard, is if the thinking here is merely probabilistic or if this strictly statistical thinking is not, at the same time, however unwittingly, determined by a stubborn, metaphysical residue. Interestingly, Henri Poincaré posited that “certain dynamical systems, such as particles of gas in a sealed container, will return infinitely often to a state arbitrarily close to their original state.” Surely a matter for further research…

The conversation with Luis Cayetano continues…

~ Bryan Sentes ~ 1 Comment

Luis Cayetano has again been kind enough to engage me in conversation and give me free reign to improvise further thoughts on a wide range of topics, consciousness, UFOs, technology, society, the Enlightenment, conspiracy theory, and so on and so forth.

It’s a long one, clocking in at just over two-and-a-half hours, and, despite my preparatory efforts, the sound quality of my end was not as clear as could be and should have been. Nevertheless, we were able to orbit, touch on, and dig into a number of interesting topics and questions, including how fictions become truths, the UFO-as-fetish, problems in interpreting the symbolic dimension of the phenomenon, among many others.

Thanks again to Luis Cayetano for producing the interview and its YouTube incarnation. You can hear it, here.

Sightings: Saturday 11 June 2022: We are not alone

~ Bryan Sentes ~ 3 Comments

Today’s synchronicities prompt today’s offering.

First, The Guardian posted a review of Philip Ball’s forthcoming The Book of Minds: How to Understand Ourselves and Other Beings, from Animals to Aliens, which is concerned with expanding the concept of intelligence to include the animal and even plant, a project readers here will recognize. Especially remarkable is the review’s concluding passage:

…most of our fantasies about advanced alien intelligence suppose it to be like us but with better tech. That’s not just a sci-fi trope; the scientific search for extraterrestrial intelligence typically assumes that ET carves nature at the same joints as we do, recognising the same abstract laws of maths and physics. But the more we know about minds, the more we recognise that they conceptualise the world according to the possibilities they possess for sensing and intervening in it; nothing is inevitable. We need to be more imaginative about what minds can be, and less fixated on ours as the default. As the biologist JBS Haldane once said: “The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.” Our only hope of understanding the universe, he said, “is to look at it from as many different points of view as possible.” We may need those other minds.

Like, wow. Has Ball been a visitor, here?

Secondly, the Johns Hopkins University Press kindly shared an article from one of its periodicals, Josh Schuster’s “Critique of Alien Reason: Toward a Critical Interplanetary Humanities”. Schuster’s nod to the title of Kant’s magnum opus; the invocation of critique, as such; and the urge toward an expansion of the purview of the humanities (as per Jeffrey Kripal’s efforts) all echo concerns here at the Skunkworks.

Schuster examines the recursive relation between the potential discovery of an Extraterrestrial Intelligence (ETI) and that discovery’s consequences for our self-understanding and understanding of life on earth in general, but no less (which is important, here), the ways “The science of the search as well as the cultural and civilizational questions embedded in any possible contact event are connected [if not determined] fundamentally to established philosophical positions towards cosmology, alterity, and co-existence.” Among these evolving positions is the growing awareness “that we require a contemporary—and more-than-human—political model for how to share the planet as a whole,” not only with humankind, but all the earth’s other lifeforms, an essential thesis here at the Skunkworks. The urgency of this question is underlined by humanity’s marked, indeed catastrophic, failure to share the earth, either with its own kind or its animal and plant Others. In this regard, Schuster draws the inference—one often drawn here—that “The ironic failure to connect SETI and the search for inhabited exoplanets to habitability crises on Earth…means that SETI research is at risk of continuing to repeat the failure to share the biodiverse [and racially, culturally diverse] Earth.”

Schuster draws our attention to one fundamental flaw in SETI, rooted in its cultural embeddedness: “The long history of treating Black and Indigenous bodies as Other and alien is encoded in historical conceptualizations of extraterrestrial otherness,” a not uncomplicated matter. Shuster draws out the implications of this embeddedness: “The meaningfulness of SETI, in other words, does not depend alone on whether or not there is actual contact with ETIs. What SETI most compellingly offers is a place for public reflection on and enaction of a commitment to planetary sharing and cosmological commons.” Such reflection brings into play the recursiveness Schuster is at pains to illuminate:

Thinking humanistically about the planet, …would include thinking of what can be called the interplanetary humanities in the context of a potential plurality of worlds. SETI research and thinking envisaged thus would play a role in understanding Earth as a planet among planets and in shaping the trajectory of planetary thinking in the environmental humanities. The result is that the scientific and cultural implications of SETI will help inform the humanistic thinking about our planet and vice versa.

Deliciously, in this regard, Schuster lays out Kant’s “rational alienology” as discovered and originally researched by Peter Szendy, not to present it in and for itself but as “an opportunity to sketch out some of the basic conceptualizations that are implicit in what [Schuster discusses] as a chiasmus of Kant’s thinking of SETI and philosophy.” One implication of Kant’s reflections Szendy teases out is the startling insight that “thinking SETI does not necessarily mean actually thinking about aliens, but recognizing methodologically and formally how human consciousness imbricates within itself an alien consciousness. This alien consciousness is ultimately in a paradoxical way deeply intimate yet radically unthinkable at the same time.” Delightfully, “Szendy finds similar implications … in the work of Carl Schmitt, Edmund Husserl, Derrida, and Emmanuel Levinas, each of whom entertains at key moments how the alien point of view from exoplanetary space fundamentally changes conceptualizations of dwelling, cosmopolitanism, and human being on Earth.”

Schuster concludes his study with a reading of Ted Chiang’s “The Great Silence,” which “piercingly reflects on how the desire to look up at the skies and contemplate alien contact frequently corresponds to a refusal to look down and around at the forms of contact among interspecies others on Earth,” a frequent theme addressed here at the Skunkworks. Indeed, Schuster articulates a not uncommon thesis we ourselves has posited here:

The Fermi paradox, embedded in the Anthropocene, may be explained by the irony that the science and technology that allow a civilization to become spacefaring also relies on extractivism, exploitation, and climate-changing processes that undermines that planet’s life. Instead of asking aliens how to escape the bottleneck of the Anthropocene, it would be easier to ask counsel of our animal neighbors. The only way out of this paradox, as Chiang’s parrot recognizes, is that SETI must be folded into multispecies relations and multispecies relations into SETI. [my emphasis]

Here’s to more such chance encounters, not because their authors are likeminded, but because of what they bring and contribute to a shared, urgent body of concern.

Avi Loeb is the worst

~ Bryan Sentes ~ 8 Comments

Well, maybe not the worst, but pretty bad. At least his dumbfoundingly vapid clickbait articles for The Debrief serve to maintain if not swell the site’s advertising revenues.

That being said, as any more-or-less regular reader here will know, Loeb has become something of this site’s bête noire. Since he came into the public eye with his hypothesis concerning ‘Oumuamua, his speculations about extraterrestrial life, civilization, and technology have consistently embodied the ideological tendencies targeted here. Since his starting up The Galileo Project and becoming a regular contributor at The Debrief, his pronouncements have become all the more exasperating. However much I resolved to “whack-a-Loeb“, his latest contribution, which deigns to wax philosophical about ethics, has reached such a nadir of intellectual dereliction I’m persuaded (and hope!) this post will be my last on him.

Loeb titles his article “How Can We Guide Our Life?” (which right away sets the linguistically-attuned mind furiously scribbling questions…). Whatever exactly he might intend by this title, I take it his article begins by posing the question, roughly, of what one should live for. He rejects being concerned with one’s posthumous reputation. Asked for his “opinion about the true mark of human greatness”, his response is, in a word, humility. He, then, shifts his attention from the person to, presumably, the species:  “How does humanity wish to be remembered on the cosmic scene?” Loeb’s answer is arguably the same, as humble, but on a species-wide scale: humanity is best remembered as possessing an “unpresuming culture that sought knowledge-based [sic] on new evidence from interstellar space,” which, having discovered “that there is a smarter culture on the cosmic block” sought “to do better in the future relative to our cosmic neighbors than we did in the past.”

It doesn’t take too much close scrutiny to find the lapses in Loeb’s logic. In terms of how each of us should lead our lives, Loeb would, on the one hand,  have us ignore our personal legacy. For himself, he seems to place little stock in posthumous reputation (he could “care less about what other people say”):  those who follow are unlikely to have much insight into the whole truth of his life nor are they necessarily going to be the most charitable commentators; memorials, such as paintings or statues, communicate “little about…guiding principles or the value of…accomplishments” (assuming that is their raison d’etre…). Shifting to a cosmic perspective, even Einstein is put in his place, as “[m]ost likely, there were smarter scientists on habitable planets around other stars billions of years ago”. From this perspective, that of “the vast scale and splendor implicit in the cosmos” wherein “all humans die within ten billionths of cosmic history,” all individual accomplishments shrink to nothing. However, on the other hand, Loeb confesses he guides his life “so as to have an opportunity to press a button on extraterrestrial technological equipment,” to be the one to discover an unquestionable artifact of alien technology. As the one to make this discovery, Loeb would, by his own account, be the one to “force a sense of modesty and awe in all of us” as we discern our place on, at least, “the cosmic block.” Being the one to put us in our interstellar place, Loeb would imaginably take his place with the likes of Copernicus and Galileo, at least as far as human history is concerned, which would be quite the legacy, one to be proud of….

When it comes to how humanity might be “remembered on the cosmic scene,” deeper problems yawn. One might well ask: remembered by whom? Loeb leaves this question unasked and unanswered. Either homo sapiens will be known by itself or by other forms of extraterrestrial intelligence, which, for Loeb, includes forms of Artificial Intelligence (AI). In the event of our extinction, then, imagines Loeb, “perhaps our technological kids, AI astronauts, will survive,” artifacts best designed to “carry the flame of consciousness” out into distant space and time, and, thereby, into the awareness and memories of other intelligent lifeforms. At the same time, however, Loeb advocates a humility, not only because, as he surmises, other, alien intelligences have, do, and will exceed our own, but, from the point of view of “the vast scale and splendor implicit in the cosmos…all humans die within ten billionths of cosmic history,” extinguishing both their legacy and their narrow-minded, perverse self-importance. From this perspective, whether humankind is proud or humble, whether its traces are one day discovered or not, seems pointless. On the one hand, Loeb posits that humility should guide our life; while, on the other, he, personally, aspires to a historical greatness (guided by the aspiration to be the one who discovers an indisputable extraterrestrial technological artifact); he suggests humankind should culture some kind of memorialized humility or at least leave a more durable legacy in the form of its own technology dispersed throughout the stars, but the vast spatiotemporal scale of the cosmos swallows all such aspirations, reducing them to nothing. Either Loeb’s cosmic ethic must restrict itself to the human scale, which, for Loeb is merely an arrogant, self-centred point-of-view, or it must view things from a cosmic perspective, which dissolves all possible value in its implacable vastness.

Loeb’s thinking is riddled by such ironies or contradictions. He constantly advocates against being narrow-minded and self-centred, but his entire worldview is oriented to just such a perverse self-regard. His “humanity” is hardly all human cultures that have lived or do, but that of the so-called “advanced societies” of what used to be termed “the First World”. This idolatry is evident in the old-fashioned sentiment that “human history advances” and in the technofetishistic fantasy of “our technological kids, AI astronauts” that can act as vessels for “the fire of consciousness.” This squinting focus on the technological is evident in the disdainful yawn he shares with “kids” (presumably students) who pass by the “statues and paintings of distinguished public figures” in University Hall at Harvard University. Paintings and statues, however, aren’t made to communicate accomplishments of those honoured but to memorialize them because of their accomplishments. Loeb, here, betrays, as usual, an instrumental thinking, one that conceives of everything in terms of ends and means and efficiency (“A video message would [be] far more informative in conveying the authentic perspective of these people from our past”), i.e., Loeb’s stance in this regard, despite his philosophical airs, reveals him to be a rank philistine when it comes to matters of general culture. This narrowness is most egregious at its most unconscious. Loeb relates he inscribes a “personal copy of [his] book Extraterrestrial to [his] new postdoc… just arrived at Harvard from the University of Cambridge in the UK” as follows: “although you arrived to the Americas well after they were discovered, you are here just in time for discovering extraterrestrial intelligence and its own new world.” The blithe indifference to the fact that Turtle Island was hardly “discovered” least of all by his post-doc’s European forebears and his oblique referring to it as “the new world” betray an unconscious colonialism.

Taken together these stances reveal the direst irony of Loeb’s incessant invectives against narrow-mindedness and self-centredness. As I have never tired of pointing out, whenever Loeb posits older, more intelligent (or, at least, knowledgeable) extraterrestrials, he doesn’t decentre humankind but centres it all the more securely, taking Western instrumental reason to be characteristic of intelligence-as-such and Western, technoscientific society as the instantiation if not the very universal model of civilization. All these presuppositions, prejudices, and unreflected blindspots taken together coalesce into a black hole around which all Loeb’s conjectures about extraterrestrial intelligence, civilization, and technology orbit, a black hole into which I hereby consign all the man’s thoughts that touch on what concerns us here at the Skunkworks.

Chance Harmonies

~ Bryan Sentes ~ Leave a comment

I wear it as a badge of honour that the perspective I take here at Skunkworks is unique.

I am aware, nevertheless, of at least some whose interests are close. There’s the second, more theoretical, part of M. J. Banias‘ The UFO People: a curious culture (glowingly reviewed by no less than Thomas E. Bullard, here). Gittlitz is, to my knowledge, the only person to reflect on the pertinence of Marxism to ufology (he is presently promoting his new book I Want to Believe: Posadism, UFOs and Apocalypse Communism). Recently, too, I became aware of Luis Cayetano, whose website “Ufology” is corrupt” is concerned more with the social, political, and psychological aspects of ufology than with UFOs themselves, a description that could be applied to what goes on here; however, Cayetano’s stance is much more vehemently skeptical and dismissive (along the lines of what one reads at author Jason Colavito’s blog).

Occasionally, however, I chance across the likeminded. Among these, I was happy to encounter Doug Johnson, who recently published the article “Decolonizing the Search for Extraterrestrials” in Undark. Here, in much the same way that I criticize certain unconscious colonialist strains in ufological discourse, Johnson shines a light on the same orientation in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI).

Johnson’s article is thorough, unmasking the colonialist language of space exploration, the indifference of SETI researchers to Indigenous perspectives, conflicts between SETI research and Indigenous peoples (e.g., the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii), and the speciesism and Eurocentrism that underwrite speculations about “intelligence” and “civilization”, longstanding themes here at the Skunkworks.

You can read the article—which I urge you to do—either by clicking on its title, above, or at the link just under the picture, below.

https://undark.org/2022/04/04/decolonizing-the-search-for-extraterrestrial-life/

Sightings: Sunday 5 December 2021: Why it matters how we think about intelligence and technology

~ Bryan Sentes ~ 6 Comments

Watching a certain kind of article turn up on my news feeds gets a little like binge-watching The Walking Dead or one of its numerous spinoffs: how many times can one watch another zombie shamble into view to be dispatched? Surely, some readers here might justifiably feel the same when the topic of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) or the very notion of an advanced, extraterrestrial civilization is raised and cut down.

Until such time as I can win a forum for my arguments as public as that of a certain Harvard professor of astrophysics I can’t help but persist in the exercise, at least to keep my brain fibres warmed up and limber and my critical machete honed. On (in?) the other hand, it might be time to clarify what my reflections on this topic intend…

Two articles that caught my attention this week and that provide good opportunities in this regard are Joelle Renstrom’s from Wired “Looking for Alien Life? Seek Out Alien Tech” and another from Futurism “Scientists Say There May Be ‘Humans’ All Over the Universe“.

Nanosats

Renstrom’s article collates ideas already addressed here (that SETI might prove more fruitful were it to search for technosignatures rather than signals from extraterrestrial civilizations) along with remarks and reflections from Seth Shostak and Susan Schneider that speculate about the implications for SETI of an extraterrestrial species’ having become post-biological: “Maybe they experienced what many scientists believe is in store for Homo sapiens—the merging of biological beings and machines. Maybe they’ve become nanosats. Maybe they’re data or are part of a digital network that functions like a collective consciousness….”

The critical fissure, however, is right there in that first sentence: “Maybe they experienced what many scientists believe is in store for Homo sapiens”, and even more in the article’s subtitle: “Shifting the search for extraterrestrial life from biological to technological signs could break us out of anthropocentrism and help guide humanity’s future.” Ironically, the “paradigm shift” Renstrom outlines (“shifting the search for extraterrestrial life from biological to technological signs”) is itself anthropocentric, modeled as it is on the self-understanding of one, very recent and by-no-means global, culture of Homo Sapiens. The unconscious narcissism (anthropocentrism) is evident in the way Renstrom outlines his argument:

If we assume that biological life of some sort emerged on other planets, then we can also make some educated assumptions about how that life evolved—namely, that other species also invented technology, such as tools, transport vehicles, factories, and computers. Maybe those species invented artificial intelligence (AI) or virtual worlds. Advanced ET may have reached the “technological singularity,” the point at which AI exceeds human or biological intelligence. Maybe they experienced what many scientists believe is in store for Homo sapiens…

Despite the fact we have yet to determine how life arose on earth and have yet to detect it off-world (provided we could even recognize it when we encountered it…), one would have to be perversely stubborn not to be moved if not convinced by the sheer number of even earth-like planets so far discovered not to grant the assumption that life-as-we-know-it has emerged elsewhere in the cosmos. But note the leap Renstrom makes: “namely, that other species also invented technology, such as tools, transport vehicles, factories, and computers.” Aside from the far-from-unquestionable concept of technology at work here, that equates technology with (or reduces it to) tool-use, how is it an “educated assumption” that life gives rise to technology, especially that exemplified by factories and computers not to mention the complex society and culture that underwrite them? It is, from the available evidence, not only anthropocentric to imagine life develops technology (in a more educated sense), but chauvinistic, in as much as one (perhaps short-lived) inflection of human culture (namely that of the so-called “advanced” societies) is posited as a norm or model. The critical move occurs when a vector of “development” is projected from the present into an imagined future (“what many scientists believe is in store for Homo sapiens…”). If evolution, governed by the laws of nature, is so chance-ridden as to be unrepeatable, how much moreso the story of human culture? That is, “histories” that naturalize cultural patterns, e.g., the advent of technology and its “progress”, are arguably self-serving narratives of the cultures that compose them (i.e., depicting these cultures and their order as somehow necessary or destined to be) let alone of the ruling classes of those cultures whose privilege is premissed on precisely the pretense of their cultures’ being part of the inevitable, natural order of things.

“…human-like evolution has occurred in other locations around the universe”.

But what if those natural laws of physics, chemistry, and biology that govern evolution entailed that the morphology of life were more harmonious if not uniform, such that extraterrestrial, humanoid organisms were well within the realm of possibility? The theory of evolutionary convergence posits, roughly, that similar conditions can and will entail similar evolutionary developments. Mammals and cephalopods both possess eyes, though they do not share a common, eyed ancestor; likewise, birds, bats, insects and pterosaurs all developed flight independently. On these grounds, evolutionary biologists believe that “they can ‘say with reasonable confidence’ that human-like evolution has occurred in other locations around the universe“.

But some evolutionary biologists cannot resist the temptation to take the next step. An example is Ari Kershenbaum, the author of The Zoologist’s Guide to the Galaxy who conjectures:

Some planets are just going to have simple life on them. Many, maybe even most. But let’s assume that we found a planet with something we would call intelligent life. No one gets intelligence just because it would be a cool thing to have; their ancestors must have benefited from that intelligence. If they reached the stage where they can build a radio telescope, then they must have been through the stages where it was advantageous to be curious, where it was advantageous to communicate.

Kershenbaum’s speculation seems offered in a blithe spirit, but it’s precisely its light-heartedness that betrays the shallowness of the thinking at its foundations. First, there is the failure to reflect on “intelligence”; for Kershenbaum, it’s merely what “we would call intelligent life”, apparently an “intelligence” like our own, or, more precisely (and narrowly), like that ability to solve technical problems, instrumental reason, that leads to the construction of radio telescopes. It’s as if, e.g., David Stenhouse hadn’t published his Evolution of Intelligence in 1974 (!) that sought to articulate intelligence as “adaptively variable behavior,” a conception that recently has been applied to research into plant cognition. More gravely is the way Kershenbaum’s conjectures dovetail from evolution (natural selection) to culture, as if the latter were unproblematically reducible to and explainable by the former….

undermining a position…

For the most part, discussions around UFOs, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP), and SETI are divided between “believers” (UFOs are manifestations of the technology of extra-, ultra, or cryptoterrestrials, interdimensionals, or time travelers…) and “skeptics” (UFOs are a purely social or psychological phenomenon). Many who have encountered what I write here at Skunkworks slot it into the latter category, but, in doing so, really misread me.

At the end of the day, the questions posed by, e.g., The Galileo Project, are to be answered empirically. It may be that someday unequivocal evidence of nonhuman technology will be secured. However, at the same time, it is a legitimate question to ask just how such technology will be recognized as technology in the first place, just as it’s a legitimate question how we might recognize intelligent life (let alone life) if and when we encounter it offworld, let alone be recognized by that intelligent Other as its Other. What’s at stake in these questions is not a matter that can be resolved empirically, through observation or experiment; such questions address the concepts that are at the very basis of thinking about extraterrestrial life: What is technology, life, intelligence? As such it falls to philosophy to reflect on the assumptions and implications of the unconscious (assumed) content of these concepts as it is at work in the discourse about UAP and SETI.

The implications of how life, intelligence, technology, and related matters are thought are not merely “academic”, but reveal how the society and culture that deploy these concepts thinks about itself and other forms of life, human and otherwise. Speculations about advanced, extraterrestrial civilizations or the future of our own are more science-fictions than evidence-based predictions, and, as such, function as mirrors that show ourselves to ourselves but in an indirect, distorted or estranged, way; like dreams, they may be said to reveal the unconscious of how we think about the world, and, like the unconscious, such thinking is not, strictly, rational. Indeed, these ideas can be shown to function ideologically, making seem inevitable and natural (and thereby defending and entrenching) a way of life that in fact is contingent and that favours one species or social group. Perhaps in this light what I write above is now more understandable:

It is…not only anthropocentric to imagine life develops technology but chauvinistic, in as much as one (perhaps short-lived) inflection of human culture (namely that of the so-called “advanced” societies) is posited as a norm or model… If evolution, governed by the laws of nature, is so chance-ridden as to be unrepeatable, how much moreso the story of human culture? That is, “histories” that naturalize cultural patterns, e.g., the advent of technology and its “progress”, are arguably self-serving narratives of the cultures that compose them (i.e., depicting these cultures and their order as somehow necessary or destined to be) let alone of the ruling classes of those cultures whose privilege is premissed on precisely the pretense of their cultures’ being part of the inevitable, natural order of things.

Thus, speculations about extraterrestrial life, intelligence, and civilization are in fact inextricable from and revelatory of the most urgent crises facing life on earth, climate change, environmental degradation, extinction, and the role of humankind (or certain of its societies) in this crisis. How we imagine extraterrestrial life is how we think about life on earth, the other species with which we cohabit it, and the ways of living with them that Homo Sapiens has invented over the millennia.

Sightings: Saturday 6 November 2021: Science / Magic, “adaptively variable behavior” and related matters

~ Bryan Sentes ~ Leave a comment

This past week what caught the eye and/or sparked a thought was Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law, Magic, and Science, and an Indigenous confirmation of the views I recently brought to bear against The Galileo Project and the attendant paradoxical implications of Star People….

I don’t often nod to other websites (Skunkworks should have a blog roll…), but a recent post at Curt Collins’ The Saucers That Time Forgot gives me the opportunity to draw attention to some of those I follow.

Collins’ post addresses Arthur C. Clarke’s famous Third Law: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” pointing out how “Almost from inception, the phrase has been used and abused to the point of cliché.” In doing so, Collins not only helps to clear away some of the fuzzy thinking that obscures the UFO phenomenon, but raises another topic of broader if not graver import.

Anyone familiar with the writings of Renaissance scholar Frances Yates will know how entwined magic and science are, mixed together as they are in the foment of Hermeticism and related movements just before the foundations of the Royal Society (the original Invisible College) were being set down. Both seek to control nature and their respective natures are much more closely related than the pedestrian history or philosophy of science would comfortably admit with their story of the triumphant emergence of enlightened, rational natural science from the obscure mysticism of alchemy and its ilk.

Today, Newton’s interests in alchemy, astrology, and labours to interpret Biblical prophecy are better, if not well, known. What is less known (but not to readers of Yates) are Descartes’ and Francis Bacon’s interest if somewhat unclear involvement in Rosicrucianism. This mutual implication of Magic and Science (and, by extension, technology) is happily the topic of serious research, a good primer of which can be found at independent scholar Andreas Sommers’ Forbidden Histories (which can be followed, too, on Facebook). Sommers’ Essential Readings is a small library sufficient to deconstruct in the rigorous sense the Science/Magic (or as Sommers terms it, the Natural Magic / Scientific Naturalism) binary.

Interested parties are also urged to check out the The Renaissance Mathematicus, which regularly and with much gusto takes the piss out of received ideas about the emergence of science from the Humanist dogmas of the Renaissance….

Pursuant to my critique of Loeb and his kind who identify intelligence with human, instrumental reason, the recently-published volume, The Mind of Plants: Narratives of Vegetal Intelligence, was brought to my attention (synchronicitously or otherwise…). Edited by Dennis McKenna, the book collects short essays, narratives and poetry by authors from the humanities, social, and natural sciences on plants and their interaction with humans. YES! Magazine published an excerpt from Robin Wall Kimmerer‘s contribution, “Hearing the Language of Trees”, wherein she writes:

The story of intelligences other than our own is one of continual expansion. I am not aware of a single research study that demonstrates that other beings are dumber than we think. Octopi solve puzzles, chickadees create language, crows make tools, rats feel anxiety, elephants mourn, parrots do calculus, apes read symbols, nematodes navigate, and honeybees dance the results of cost-benefit analysis of sucrose rewards like an economic ballet. Even the slime mold can learn a maze, enduring toxic obstacles to obtain the richest reward. The blinders are coming off, and the definition of intelligence expands every time we ask the question.

The ability to efficiently sense, identify, locate, and capture resources needed in a complex and variable environment requires sophisticated information processing and decision making. Intelligence is today thought of as “adaptively variable behavior,” which changes in response to signals coming from the environment.

Kimmerer’s position here harmonizes sweetly with that taken by my last post and Justin E. Smith’s argument concerning intelligence I condense there.

Kimmerer’s Indigenous perspective is one where “human people are only one manifestation of intelligence in the living world[;] [o]ther beings, from Otters to Ash trees, are understood as persons”, all of whom share “a past in which all beings spoke the same language and life lessons flowed among species”, a worldview at curious odds with that one chronicled by, among others, Ardy Sixkiller Clarke, whose stories relate encounters with humanoid sky gods, giants, little people, and aliens among indigenous people. One is tempted to wonder why a world already inhabited by manifold intelligent creatures, intelligence freed from an anthropomorphic fetish, contains, too, nonhuman but nevertheless all-too anthropomorphic intelligences….

The Xenophobia of Avi Loeb’s Interstellar Xenia

~ Bryan Sentes ~ 7 Comments

Anyone struck by the recent announcement of Christopher Mellon’s and Luis Elizondo’s being appointed research affiliates to Avi Loeb’s Galileo Project may have been curious enough to visit the project’s website, where they may have been tempted to read an article linked there, “Be Kind to Extraterrestrial Guests“, by project head Loeb.

Loeb proposes that “we” (who are we? Homo Sapiens? Americans? Harvard faculty?…) adopt the classical Greek custom of Xenia, the hospitality extended to strangers as typified in the Homeric epics, except in an expanded, “interstellar”, sense: “Interstellar Xenia implies that we should welcome autonomous visitors, even if they embody hardware with artificial and not natural intelligence, which arrive to our vicinity from far away.” Why? “Our technological civilization could benefit greatly from the knowledge it might garner from such encounters.”

A problem with Loeb’s proposal is evident, first, in the example of mundane hospitality he offers and the exosocial implication he draws from it:

On a recent breezy evening, I noticed an unfamiliar visitor standing in front of my home and asked for his identity. He explained that he used to live in my home half a century ago. I welcomed him to our backyard where he noted that his father buried their cat and placed a tombstone engraved with its name. We went there and found the tombstone….

If we find visitors, they might provide us with a new perspective about the history of our back yard. In so doing, they would bring a deeper meaning to our life within the keen historic friendship that we owe them in our shared space.

Loeb’s anecdote is likely chosen as much for its concreteness and emotional appeal as for whatever features it might be said to share with a hypothetical encounter with ET. That being said, the scenario presents the encounter between Homo Sapiens and an extraterrestrial Other as one of immediate (i.e., unproblematic) mutual recognition (like that between Loeb and the “unfamiliar visitor”), which is both telling and fateful.

By what warrant does Loeb assume the unproblematic recognition of or by this Other? Aside from the obvious obstacle, that, while Loeb and his visitor, or the stranger and his host in Bronze Age Greece, share the same culture, which an interstellar visitor would not, consider the scenario depicted in the science-fiction film Europa Report. A team of astronauts is sent to explore the moon of Jupiter named in the film’s title, where it discovers under the ice a bioluminescent creature resembling an earthly squid or octopus. Does the creature use its bioluminescence to hunt or attract prey in the dark oceans under Europa’s ice, or, being “intelligent“, is it its means of communication? And, if the creature were “intelligent”, how would the human astronauts know and how would the creature perceive in the astronauts their “intelligence”? Why would the astronauts, rather than, say, their capsule, even be the focus of the creature’s curiosity? Even so shopworn a science-fiction franchise as Star Trek (in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home) envisioned a technologically-advanced, extraterrestrial species blindly indifferent to all human civilization on earth in the search for its own Cetacean kind.

Even if we set aside the specific case of our encountering extraterrestrial intelligent life, the same problem persists. The Galileo Project’s first focus is the search for near-earth “extraterrestrial equipment“, whether a functioning artificially intelligent probe or piece of detritus. In any case, we must be able to recognize the artifact as an artifact, precisely the point of contention around ‘Oumuamua: was it a natural object or an artificial one, as Loeb et al. argue? Again, science fiction has touched on just this challenge, as the ability to perceive a piece of alien technology as such is pivotal to the plot of Star Trek: the Motion Picture. (Loeb seems more a fan of Carl Sagan’s novel Contact or its film version). The problem becomes even more intractable if we take seriously speculations that the very structures of the cosmos or its laws may be artifacts.

So, whether our interstellar interloper be a piece of technology, “intelligent” or otherwise, or biological, we are a far ways from the easy hospitality Loeb was able to offer his visitor, as we may not even know we are in the presence of a visitor and that stranger may not recognize they are in the presence of a potential host. How is it, then, that Loeb overlooks these grave obstacles to mutual recognition in his advocating Interstellar Xenia? I propose that Loeb, like all those obsessed with, fascinated by, or or otherwise inclined to indulge the idea of extraterrestrial, intelligent life, is on the lookout for an anthropomorphic “intelligence”, failing to recognize, at the same time, that encountering an exo-tic, extraterrestrial life form is an instance of interspecies communication.

One needn’t travel to an imagined Europa to discover the grave flaws in Loeb’s perspective. First, restricting “intelligence” to human intelligence in general or that teleological, problem-solving, technical intelligence, instrumental reason, is demonstrably perverse, de facto and de jure. One need only glance at the growing body of research into animal and plant intelligence to see that Homo Sapiens already inhabits a planet teeming with intelligent, nonhuman life. Philosophical reflection on the concept of intelligence, too, dissolves the identification of intelligence with human, instrumental reason. Justin E. Smith makes this case in both a lively and readable manner that I encourage interested parties to read for themselves; here, I attempt to condense his case…. Smith explains

…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.

Both fact and reason, then, call into serious question the very intelligibility of Loeb’s imagined, hospitable meeting, for there are no grounds to decide just what organism, extraterrestrial or otherwise, would count as an Other for us to greet (and vice versa: on what grounds would Homo Sapiens be picked out of all the other species on earth to be that Other’s Other?). It’s almost as if Loeb has taken his clue from mythology, not only that found in the epic accounts of xenia, but the Biblical Creation story, wherein Man is made in the image of God and given sovereignty over all other creatures, or the myth of Prometheus who gifts humankind fire or inventive ingenuity. Such a metaphysical idea grants Homo Sapiens a special characteristic (“intelligence”), which is then imagined to be possessed by other, similarly “ensouled” and gifted extraterrestrials we hope not merely to encounter but to meet.

This hope, however, is futile, as the only creature that meets the criteria we have set is ourselves. Were the problem grasped in its more thorough-going form, as one of interspecies communication, then we might turn our attention to all those other organisms with whom we share the earth and perhaps reflect on the nature and extent of the hospitality we extend to them and may perhaps be said to owe them. With this thought, the perversity of why we should extend hospitality to “autonomous visitors, even if they embody hardware with artificial and not natural intelligence” is revealed: “Our technological civilization could benefit greatly from the knowledge it might garner from such encounters.” First, Loeb narrows down civilization to its technology (as if technology were somehow meaningfully abstractable from the society and culture that produce it), then he restricts the interaction to what we, the hosts, might gain (“knowledge”), twisting his central idea of xenia out of all resemblance to the Hellenic custom he invokes, which is characterized in the first instance by the generosity of the host.

Loeb’s vision here is, first, narcissistic (i.e., it sees intelligence only as human intelligence, which he in turn seems to restrict to technical ingenuity, at that) and, second, self-centredly grasping (in conceiving of xenia only in terms of what we, the hosts, have to gain from our guests, “knowledge”). The supreme irony of Loeb’s position is revealed by this insistence that the discovery of a technologically-advanced, extraterrestrial civilization would precipitate a “Copernican revolution” that would disabuse humankind of its delusion that it is the only “intelligent” (and, hence, the most intelligent) species in its galactic neighbourhood, inspiring it to adopt instead a “cosmic modesty“, when in fact Loeb has conceived human instrumental reason as “intelligence” itself, the archetypal standard by which any other organism is determined to be intelligent or not, i.e., his stance is fundamentally anthropocentric. The narcissism of this conception entails that we will only ever be able greet and extend hospitality to ourselves. Loeb’s stranger is not strange enough….

“It is hard to see how any other outcome is possible”: The Platonism of S.E.T.I.

~ Bryan Sentes ~ 8 Comments

Regular visitors to these Skunkworks can imagine how our interest was piqued by the headline “Philosopher UFOlogist says humans are not ready to make contact”. The Skunkworks Research Library secured the (self-published) book in question, Adrian Rudnyk’s The Assessment:  The Arrival of Extraterrestrials, and a brief notice of it might be forthcoming, but, here, I want to essay the more profound way that the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) and speculations about intelligent, technologically-advanced extraterrestrial life is more “philosophical” than Rudnyk seems to perceive or SETI and its collaborators would themselves probably be prepared to admit.

A driving thesis of the critical and creative work here is that the very idea of a technologically-advanced extraterrestrial civilization is ideological, i.e, the form of one society and culture of one species on earth is held up as paradigmatic and natural. So-called “advanced” society (that of the so-called “First World”) imagines itself to be, in Francis Fukuyama‘s expression, “the end [the final goal] of history”. This assumption underwrites untroubled speculations about extraterrestrial life, intelligence, and culture: if some life evolves “intelligence” (like that displayed by technologically-advanced terrestrial societies), then that intelligence will likewise develop technologies along lines analogous to the development of earthly technologies, such that it makes sense to speak of these extraterrestrial technologies as being less or more advanced than those possessed by homo sapiens at a given time. The homogeneity of such development is even thought sufficient to be able to speak intelligibly about technologies hundreds, thousands, and even millions upon millions of years “more advanced”…

A most recent example of this kind of “thinking” is that of Avi Loeb. Loeb is best known among SETI and UFO enthusiasts for proposing and arguing that the first known interstellar object to visit our solar system, 1I/2017 U1 ‘Oumuamua was in fact an alien artifact, a “technological relic.” Such astroarchaeological artifacts would be valuable to find, study, and reverse engineer, Loeb argues, because “it might be a way of short-cutting into our future because it would take us many years to develop the same technology, so there are lots of benefits that I can imagine for humanity from just finding technological relics in space.” I’ve addressed Loeb’s views here before, both specifically and more generally. Aside from these criticisms, in light of Arik Kershenbaum’s The Zoologist’s Guide to the Galaxy: What Animals of Earth Reveal About Aliens—and Ourselves, I’m prompted add another, addressed to Loeb’s self-confessed love of philosophy.

Kershenbaum’s book by and large is more level-headed than Loeb’s recent Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth, extrapolating, as it does, what we know about the evolution of life on earth to potential life forms on other planets. Such an exercise does not fall prey to ideological blindness the way that Loeb et al. do, as it assumes only that the laws of physics, chemistry, and biochemistry (and, by extension, evolution) hold throughout the galaxy if not known universe. However, when pushed, Kershenbaum can’t help but fall into the same trap as all those who take the idea of technological, extraterrestrial civilizations “seriously”. In a recent interview with the author, Kermit Pattison relates

Kershenbaum predicts that some aliens will exhibit social cooperation, technology and language… He even posits that aliens will share the quality we hold most dear: intelligence. “We all want to believe in intelligent aliens,” he writes. “It seems inevitable that they will, in fact, exist.”

That such a scenario “seems inevitable” reveals that Kershenbaum and those who think like him are no longer engaged in scientific but metaphysical speculation. Indeed, the idea of this inevitability is arguably grounded in Plato’s theory of Forms, which precedes even the term ‘metaphysics’.

Plato’s theory of Forms or Ideas is arguably as much an invention of Plato’s interpreters as of the author of the dialogues himself. That being said, one can all-to-quickly summarize the theory in its received form as follows:

The world that appears to our senses is in some way defective and filled with error, but there is a more real and perfect realm, populated by entities (called “forms” or “ideas”) that are eternal, changeless, and in some sense paradigmatic for the structure and character of the world presented to our senses.

If we think of these Forms as designs or plans, the temporal connotations of these words suggests just how Kershenbaum’s prediction about extraterrestrial intelligence flowering in technology are in a sense Platonic. It’s as if life were possessed of a potential to develop what we know as STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) that it might actualize to a greater or lesser degree. Some organisms (e.g., Homo Sapiens) fulfill this potential, others (slime mold?) do not, while others “inevitably” actualize it even more than we have. It’s the inevitability of the idea, that we are sure to encounter technologically-advanced extraterrestrial civilizations that essentializes it. It’s part of the essence (Form, Idea…) of life that it has the potential to develop “intelligence” and subsequently “technology”. Homo Sapiens are merely an instantiation of the actualization of this essential potential.

The fetishistic character of this idea that Western civilization is somehow a cosmic norm is revealed all the more starkly when we reflect that the “intelligence” operative in STEM (instrumental, calculative reason) and the technology it produces (and, no less, is, in a sense, produced by) is hardly even the norm among human beings, let alone life on earth. The narrowing down of rationality to technical problem solving is a perversity peculiar to a particular society, very restricted in space and time, ironically, one whose own science undercuts and overturns this blinkered, proud self-regard; at the same time, this very science is itself hardly a universal potential aspect of culture, being but one, and a very new one, among many no less functional “systems of knowledge” that have enabled groups of homo sapiens to survive and flourish.

However much Kerschenbaum, Loeb, and others might protest, that our science is governed by often all-too unconscious metaphysical assumptions is well-known to philosophers, among them, surely, Diane W Pasulka. In her American Cosmic, she invokes Martin Heidegger‘s notion of technology in the course of her argument that technology and that represented by the UFO has taken on a religious aura in recent history. Heidegger is well-known for (among other things) articulating what he called “the History of Being”, i.e., a particular trajectory of the basic question of ontology, “What is ‘being’?” from Plato and Aristotle, who first explicitly posed the question, down to himself, who poses it and recasts it again as “fundamental ontology” in Being and Time. What the history of Being uncovers is that the question received a definitive answer among the ancient Greeks, one that held sway until Heidegger’s resuscitation of the question and “destruction” of the history of ontology to free the inquiry from its sedimented, guiding assumptions. Plato and Aristotle posited that “being is presence”, an answer to the question that was passed down to Christian and Medieval civilization, and inherited as an unspoken presupposition of what became the natural sciences.

Aside from whether one accepts Heidegger’s history of Being, it is surely ironic that, on the one hand, Kershenbaum invokes the precariously chance-ridden process of evolution to imagine life on other worlds, while remaining somehow blind to the even more aleatoric process that leads to any given culture’s having ended up where it is, while, on the other, Loeb would argue that humankind should be humble, because it is not unique! What greater hubris is there than to project one’s own peculiar society as somehow characteristic of life in the cosmos? In this regard, Kershenbaum and Loeb not only unknowingly take up inherited Platonic notions but arguably also in a parody of the Ptolemaic universe place this latest, if not last, moment of Western civilization at the centre of, if not the universe, then its workings, an instance of a norm no less universal than the speed of light.