7 Responses to “Transcension Hypothesis: An Intriguing Answer to the Fermi Paradox?”

1. 

   December 12

   Alexei Andreev

   “It is assumed that the vast majority of advanced cultures have arrived at similar conclusions to those expressed by transcension and do not violate the principle.” I think this is by far the weakest point. I am not buying that if there is a decent number of civilizations that went through a singularity, not one of them will have preferences about atoms in the rest of the universe. Or to be more precise: not have preferences that involve rearranging said atoms.

2. 

   December 12

   RedneckCryonicist

   I see no reason to believe that other “advanced cultures” exist. It bothers me that otherwise skeptical people have adopted this as a faith position when it meets the criteria for woo-woo in skeptic Carl Sagan’s famous essay, “The Dragon in My Garage.”

   Ironically people like Sagan held the existence of exoplanets as a faith position which failed to meet skeptics’ own standards until evidence started to flood in for them in the past 20 years or so. We just assumed before then that exoplanets had to exist because science fiction propagandized the culture with the idea, and some scientists made hand-waving speculations about their plausibility, not because we had evidence for their existence at the time.

   So we got lucky when exoplanets became an empirical reality. It doesn’t follow in the least that we’ll also get lucky with our fantasies about ET’s.

   • 

     December 15

     Taurus

     I agree that Smart’s “transcension” is woo; as ridiculous as assuming that a chimpanzee brain could even *conceptualize* meaningful prognostications about future advances in human technology, let alone synthesize them.

     Smart is an ant, and the human capacity for mathematical thinking and reasoning, like chemical signalling, is the product of unintelligent selection pressures exerted by the physical environment. It works, like an ants’ antennae work, even though it only allows for a pale virtualization of the universe at a superficial level.

     …but you’re way off on the exoplanets. The laws of physics are rules for inference, and the existence of exoplanets was straightforward. Nebular theory was first developed hundreds of years ago. It was no different than accretion theory or the “discovery” of black holes before one had ever been observed.

     This does not refute what I said above. Mathematics allows for a “real” picture of the universe at some level; it works, just like an ant’s brain can integrate a “real” picture of the universe at some level (its antennae aren’t lying).

     The problem is prognosticating about what beings unimaginably more intelligent than you might choose to do or not do (and especially imposing limits on their choices given that we can’t even yet unify gravity and quantum field theory). I see no reason to assume that Smart (or anyone else) can describe the motivations of (alien) superintelligence(s).

3. 

   December 12

   Louie Helm

   It doesn’t matter if some people have preferences about the universes atoms if other actors have large scale economic incentives to use black hole physics before interstellar expansion becomes a feasible priority.

4. 

   December 13

   Scott Fowler

   I don’t know whether exploiting black holes in this manner becomes more believable because it’s a good candidate for the great filter, or whether the great filter becomes more believable because the black hole part checks out. Actually wait it’s both

5. 

   December 13

   Maxim Khesin

   I haven’t read the thesis in its entirety, but I have a similar thought for other reasons. Basically, anthropic/indexical uncertainty might suggest that a super-civ even slightly ahead on the intelligence/resource, having unknown values, is not what you want to meet. So the best strategy is hiding, and black holes might be a very good way of hiding (again, didn’t read the article yet)

6. 

   December 15

   Taurus

   “blunder”…? “Hopefully the earth doesn’t follow suit”…?
   Don’t you think you’re being a little presumptuous?