UFO Conjectures: A short reality check…

Tuesday, July 10, 2018

A short reality check…

My two pals, poet-philosopher Bryan Sentes and academic Zoam Chomsky, take issue with the posting right below this one. (See their comments.)

Bryan thinks – and acts it out on Facebook and in life – that life and personal, everyday activity are significant, really significant.

Zoam, who thinks UFOs do not exist, as all, anywhere in reality, wrote that among all the obnoxious explanations for the phenomenon, the ETH, remote as it is, is more acceptable to him than the idea(s) that UFOs sneak in from other universes or dimensions or time.

Let me straighten these two guys out:

In the long history and pre-history of mankind, Bryan, me, you, and everyone else now extant or long dead are insignificant, no matter what accomplishments they have achieved or what greatness they seem to have or had.

They and we, all humans, pass on to the eternal darkness of death, where nothing – not fame, greatness, achievement, wealth – matters.

In the context of the cosmos, as I answered Bryan’s comment, we humans are nothing, no matter how hard it is to accept that. It’s the objective reality.

In the here and now, we are inconsequential; how much more so in the evolutionary scale of things?

Zoam, who praises science rather often, seems inclined to distrust the suggestions of science’s practitioners that there appears to be alternative dimensions, multiverses, and even the possibility of time-travel.

That non-existent UFOs may sneak in from those alternative realities makes more sense to me than the idea some advanced alien species is cavorting around Earth in rather massive numbers, and has been doing so for millennia.

Alternative realities exist – ask a semi-coherent schizophrenic or Jung acolyte.

Ask a sane man, looking into the night sky, and seeing our galactic Milky Way if he feels significant and you’ll have your answer, about how we count in the great scheme of things.

I love these two guys, I really do. But they are both giddy with human madness. That’s the real reality.

17 Comments:

Rich, how you understood my comment on the previous blog post the way you did mystifies me.

My aim was merely to clarify on what ground _you_ claim as you often do "Earth is insignificant".

I asked, well, just what _would_ count as significant, then? That is, I have never known you to state on what grounds or according to what standard something might be said to be significant or not. You _seem_ to adopt a perspective sub specie aeternitatis, a point of view in which nothing, not this universe, nor the whole multiverse, is significant. And where nothing is significant nothing can be said to be insignificant, either. Even the Good Lord has counted the hairs on your head and notes every sparrow who falls, eh.

I counter, significance cannot be thought absolutely, but only relatively. In this respect, the earth, for every sentient being that can think of earth as its home habitat, is very significant. Why an alien race, following the ETH, (which I don't, as you know) might find earth significant, can be answered only speculatively. Maybe they're fascinated by worlds with broadband slower than 10G.

By Bryan Sentes, at Tuesday, July 10, 2018
Hahahaha.....Do you get fast Broadband there in the northern climes?

I'm using Frontier and it runs at a turtle's pace.

As for significance, I'm using this as my premise:

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ecclesiastes+1&version=NIV

RR

By RRRGroup, at Tuesday, July 10, 2018
{Knew I shouldn't have quoted the Bible, even in jest...)

But quoting Ecclesiastes gets us nowhere, unless you state how you understand the purpose of the passage and its meaning. Or meaninglessess.

Is it a kind of metaphysical statement intending to inculcate a kind of Stoic ataraxia or Buddhist nonattachment (that would make sense)? Or a highly articulate sigh expressing a sentiment probably everyone feels in a way as momentary as the impermanent phenomena it lists?

On the other hand, it seems to imply that only what might be said to endure is of value, namely the Lord, maybe?

But, of course, there is a logical problem. "All determination is negation": you can only determine something to be meaningless or insignificant if you have a sense of what it means for something to be meaningful or significant.

At the end of the day, clearly the compilers of the Bible found Ecclesiastes sufficiently meaningful to preserve it as long as possible!

By Bryan Sentes, at Tuesday, July 10, 2018
The key word in your comment, Bryan, is "endure."

What endures? Nothing, not even the Universe or God perhaps.

You make the most of each day, each moment as far as I can tell, no matter how transitory a moment might be.

I have experienced nothing that lasts, and in creation's time-line I can think of nothing that endures and consequently is insignificant thereby.

You, a poet, live via gossamer, how can one get through to a poet? Poets are immersed in a kind of nuttiness that is akin to outright madness. But you know that.

In the psychoanalytic world I inhabit, I agree with Freud: the discipline can deal with, work with, neuroses, but outright psychopathology? Nope.

And poets are psychopathic, in the creative sense, are they not, so I throw up my hands and ask Ecclesiastes to make my case.

RR

By RRRGroup, at Tuesday, July 10, 2018
I don't know, I keep running into research suggesting human neural networks are optical and emit and absorb and share biophotonic information. Sounds like plants but fancier. Of course, no one would ever know if the odd parts are natural to the timeline or introduced.

I guess that would be a long term yet mortal investigation. Or shape shifting and entropy and time shifts.

Someone should write it down for the course.

By neal, at Tuesday, July 10, 2018
Well, feeling just psycho enough to kick this can a little further.

The moral of the passage you cite seems to be the futility of human endeavour.

How one moves from the impermanence of all things and the consequent futility of life to the earth's being "too insignificant" for ETs to visit eludes me.

Unless you believe with some theologians that God will have intervened in the histories of all those created in His own image on their respective planets such that even ET will have had its own version of E, which would have dispirited their attempts at interstellar flight as futile....

By Bryan Sentes, at Tuesday, July 10, 2018
An advaned species - advanced the operative word - would know about the impermanence of existence, and realize that spending scads of time reconnoitering our puny planet is a futile activity. But that is not my point.

My point is that thinking Earth is significant and human life and activity also makes one think that an alien species would think likewise, that is, they too would see Earth and its actvities as significant.

That's madness salted by human hubris.

In the context of the cosmos, we are molecules. (Teilhard tells us that.)

You continue to think that Earth and its inhabitants and their activities are significant.

They aren't.

Why are you pressing the idea that we are something special?

You are the smartest person visiting this blog.

Pressing the idea that we humans and our planet are special in some significant way makes me think you have fallen into a mental funk.

Again, step outside tonight and take a look at the night sky, then tell me this planet and we are special, outside of our immediate reality.

And explain why?

RR

By RRRGroup, at Tuesday, July 10, 2018
Significant or insignificant, can only be meaningful, to a sentient mind.

Are we significent to oneanother? if not, why are there over 7 billion of us?

Is God significant or insignificant, to us? "If neither" then the first question applies, and we might stand on a few ants, that are insignificant to us.........

By Daniel, at Tuesday, July 10, 2018
Daniel:

I'm getting the idea from my pal Bryan, who teaches college folk in Canada, that he's been affected by the doctrines of the Far East, Buddhism and Hinduism, where all life, even that of gnats, is significant.

And if such life, including our own, is significant, why does it end? Or is it significant because it does end?

The matter is philosophical. and Bryan is the best able person to address it then.

But he's also a poet....and a bit dotty sometimes. So I try to hold his feet to the academic fire. But ill-equipped to actually contend with him, I have to defer to his thinking most times.

But in this argument, it seems he has placed an importance on things that do not, in reality, have any importance, and I keep trying to get him to persuade me that some of the things, including human activity, are significant.

I defer to Ayn Rand who told us that each and every human being is a significant, special creation and should be treated accordingly.

My premise of insignificance opens the door to dictatorial ruthlessness that Hannah Arendt and Rand both deplored: Fascism and Russian Communism, a perversion of Marx.

And my Catholic Faith disallows me to accept abortion, because all life is sacred, from conception forward.

But even the Church has been cavalier and often ruthless about life.

And what about God, and the flood or His absence when his chosen people were slaughtered in the Holocaust?

You see, when push comes to shove, it turns out that life and human activity are actually insignificant, even though persons such as Bryan would wish it to be otherwise.

But he's a poet so I forgive him his waywardness. Verse for him is sacred and significant when, in fact, it isn't.

RR

By RRRGroup, at Tuesday, July 10, 2018
-> And my Catholic Faith disallows me to accept abortion, because all life is sacred, from conception forward.

But even the Church has been cavalier and often ruthless about life.<-

*

Yes, this is something that I have never understould within Gods ten commandments.

(Though shalt not Kill)

Yet, we go to war, and do just that! or be killed, if we don't.

How insignificant would that be......

By Daniel, at Tuesday, July 10, 2018
Rich, some logical gaps here.

If I criticize the view that everything is insignificant in the grand scheme of things (to all too peremptorily summarize Rich's Insignificance Thesis (RIT)), it doesn't follow that I hold that anything is significant in the grand scheme of things. My point is the very notion of significance is senseless, meaningless, sub species aeternitatis; only _relative_ to someone who has certain concerns is something significant.

To apply this point to the ETH: to argue Earth is insignificant to some imagined ET race must assume some knowledge of the concerns of said race, which can only ever be speculative. In the remake of _The Day the Earth Stood Still_ Klaatu explains humankind must die so the earth can live, because it is one of those rare planets where life exists. In this imagined scenario, earth is significant.

You keep invoking scale to make your point. "We are molecules" you quote (what, then are molecules?!), or you post a picture showing how small earth is in the cosmic scale. So? By your line of argument, no planet or star or nebula or other heavenly body is significant. But then we need ask _you_ what then is significant? If nothing is significant, then nothing is insignificant, because you have left behind all and any scale in which questions of significance can be posed.

You ask me to step outside and regard the night sky. I understand your point: considering the earth in the scale of things impresses us with its relative puniness. The same impression was left on humankind as it was slowly decentred from the cosmos by Copernicus, the realization of the age of the world, and Darwin. So, within "the view from nowhere" human beings are nothing special; they are only another organism, which are just biophysical events, in an mind-bogglingy vast spacetime ocean of such events. Sure, considered _from this point of view_ the insignificance of earth and humankind follows. But then the scientist leaves the lab or lecture hall, goes to the pub, where he sees his soccer team get eliminated from the World Cup, and his mood is soured for the evening. And let's not imagine how significant it is when he arrives home a little drunk and depressed to find his wife in the arms of his lab partner. Is he "mad" or has the _relative scale of significance_ changed?

So to summarize. I am not espousing some premodern cosmic significance for the earth or humankind (as articulated in Matthew 10: 28-30, re God, sparrows, and the hairs on your head). What I am arguing is that significance is _relative to a scale of significance_: one can take up a perspective sub species aeternitatis, a "view from nowhere", sure, but one doesn't live there all the time, so what is significant varies, is relative, as the scales change. Nor, would I argue, is any scale pre-eminen, that view from nowhere, for example, because it arises only within the context of a host of other worldly significances (a point made by Husserl, et al. regarding the scientific viewpoint and the lifeworld).

All of which is besides the point when it comes to the ETH: I can't claim that earth is any more insignificant than any other heavenly body without claiming to know the scale of significance that ET uses.

I hope I've made myself clear.

By Bryan Sentes, at Wednesday, July 11, 2018
Rich confuses science and science-fiction with the word "dimension." Let me help.

"Zoam, who praises science rather often, seems inclined to distrust the suggestions of science’s practitioners that there appears to be alternative dimensions, multiverses, and even the possibility of time-travel."

No, it's just that none of those mere IDEAS have anything at all to do with why people make "UFO" reports. They're the most bizarre and impossible, utterly discountable, dismissible fantasies--not even worthy of consideration--as the stimuli for "UFO" reports.

"That non-existent UFOs may sneak in from those alternative realities makes more sense to me than the idea some advanced alien species is cavorting around Earth in rather massive numbers, and has been doing so for millennia."

Rich; As I've explained many times: In unified string theory, M-theory, other physical dimensions exist only at the ultramicroscopic and ultramacroscopic levels.

At the ultramicroscopic level, loops and strings, vibrate at the speed of light to form subatomic particles. The very same particles that ultimately compose us and our Universe. These dimensions are us, the are here, there is no there, no other reality.

The idea that there are fully functioning worlds or realities parallel to ours is an old science-fiction trope--and nothing to do with modern physics. You're confusing a silly sci-fi trope with 21st century physics.

At the ultramacroscopic level our Universe and others exist on a background of immense moving energetic curtains, branes, an inaccessible higher-dimensional realm that is the ultimate fabric of spacetime.

Do we really need to appeal to the ultimate fabric of spacetime to explain why people make "UFO" reports out of ambiguous lights in the sky? I don't think so.

"Alternative realities exist – ask a semi-coherent schizophrenic or Jung acolyte."

Not in physics or philosophy, they don't.

So you see, dear Rich, that these pseudo-scientific rationales are worthless.

By zoamchomsky, at Wednesday, July 11, 2018
Zoam:

I have a dozen books, from physicists, that detail multiverses, time-travel possibilities, extra-dimensions, and all kind of other sci-fi like ideas.

Do I need to list them here, again, so you can get a few?

(You must have been snoozing when I put them online earlier, and often.)

RR

By RRRGroup, at Wednesday, July 11, 2018
Bryan, buddy...you wrote:

"So, within "the view from nowhere" human beings are nothing special; they are only another organism, which are just biophysical events, in an mind-bogglingy vast spacetime ocean of such events. Sure, considered _from this point of view_ the insignificance of earth and humankind follows."

That's it, in a nutshell.

There has to be, if common sense prevails, a plethora of truly astounding things in the cosmos, the whole universe, hidden and visible -- the infinite universe.

An advanced [sic] species would know this or think it to be so.

Thus, why would they be visiting us, in the numbers that UFO reports indicate?

It's ridiculous, on its face.

That's always been my point.

Earth, as special as it is to you (or even me), is without, creative cachet.

But should it be a unique, special creation, how would alien civilizations know that?

Earth is so puny in the cosmic context they would have had to stumble upon it and now keep coming back to see us, over and over again, perhaps telling other species about this great planet and its diversity and great cultural artifacts.

But that seems improbable to me, not impossible, but improbable. That's all I'm saying.

RR

By RRRGroup, at Wednesday, July 11, 2018
Sure, Rich!

I just don't believe that any of them, if they are real practicing physicists, endorse such misconceived science-fiction tropes as having any ground whatsoever in real physics--and certainly NOT as rationales for belief in some "UFO" reality.

Other dimensions in real physics exist in this one world, one reality, as the super-contracted ultramicroscopic remnants of the Big Bang. The energetic bits, shards, loops or strings that exist in these curled-up dimensions compose our world, our reality.

So there is no other there--in physics--from which others (UFOs) might emerge.

I've described real physics' time-travel possibilities before as well. One might travel into the future ever so slightly as he's disintegrated into a stream of particles when being pulled into a back hole. So not a very promising time-travel possibility; and travel to the past is just not described (allowed) by physics.

A time machine constructed to our best understanding would most probably do nothing or might blow up, because there is some fundamental prohibition to time travel, according to both Hawking and Thorne. And I described how the idea of a traditional time machine is fundamentally misconceived: How would a box or saucer manipulate all of spacetime outside of it? Even if it could work, it would only be inside!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-theory

By zoamchomsky, at Wednesday, July 11, 2018
Hm. I also wrote any statement as to what ET would find interesting about earth is pure speculation.

You ask "why would they be visiting us, in the numbers that UFO reports indicate?" which echoes the first of Vallee's Five Arguments Against the ETH (1990), which I find not unpersuasive, as well.

(Readers of this blog have likely read Vallee's paper. If not, it might save a lot of time if they did, here: http://jacquesvallee.net/bookdocs/arguments.pdf )

I'm glad we could come to some understanding.

By Bryan Sentes, at Wednesday, July 11, 2018
Phew...

For a moment Zoam, pal of mine, I thought you hadn't seen or read any of the extant books, from bona fide physicists, that provide grist for my obtuse musings.

RR

By RRRGroup, at Wednesday, July 11, 2018

UFO Conjectures

Tuesday, July 10, 2018

A short reality check…

17 Comments:

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