TheBlueNebula

Some say black holes will kill with pressure.
Some say rads.
With gravity too much to measure
I'd side with those who go for pressure.
But if you favor those young cads
Who argue radiation's case,
Of energy there's doubtless scads
Near event horizon's rude embrace.
And, either way, it all goes bad.

A Black Hole Mystery Wrapped in a Firewall Paradox

This blog post propounds a seemingly effective rebuttal to Stephen Hawking's aliens-as-conquistadors scenario. But its fundamental point apparently boils down to "Extraterrestrials advanced enough to accomplish space exploration (and overwhelm us with their technological superiority) won't bother because of the lack of a demonstrable ROI."

Along the route to making this point, the author manages to stand up some straw man arguments against such ideas as "we're the only intelligent life in the universe" and "we'd make good subjects for scientific study."

For me, Hawking's scenario delivers a Pascal's Wager-like persuasive payload against which this blogger's dismissiveness is ineffective. Consider Pascal's thought with the concept of intelligent extraterrestrial life in place of divinity:

If I saw no signs of a divinity, I would fix myself in denial. If I saw everywhere the marks of a Creator, I would repose peacefully in faith. But seeing too much to deny Him, and too little to assure me, I am in a pitiful state, and I would wish a hundred times that if a god sustains nature it would reveal Him without ambiguity  Pensees

Would it not be a better wager for us in our "pitiful state" to accept a belief in the potential danger of advanced alien explorers than to assume that we can adequately calculate the economic disincentives to their putting Earth on their list of hostile takeover targets?

Why We'll Never Meet Aliens

Graham Hancock may be wrong but his heart (and head) are in the right place. TED may be right (about Reality) but they seem to be doing it wrong.

I have been following with interest the controversy surrounding Graham Hancock's TED talk video and the TED officials' decision to remove it from their Youtube channel.

I have long appreciated Hancock's speculative non-fiction. His ideas may well turn out to be incorrect but they do not deserve to be "sequestered" simply because they are incompatible with the TED organization's apparently prevailing preference for a materialist agenda.

Of course, where TED is paying the bills they can do what they will with their properties. But in the much larger public space where they do not exert control they seem to be fomenting a massive Streisand Effect that weakens their reputation and diminishes their credibility.

Graham Hancock's post on Google+ contains numerous links that provide background and commentary on this matter for those interested.

Graham Hancock's G+ post on the TED controversy

Assuming that conclusions based on research involving Western (and mostly American) subjects can lead to a fundamental, universal understanding of human nature is a major mistake made by anthropologists and psychologists, according to this new analysis.

"Given the data, they concluded that social scientists could not possibly have picked a worse population from which to draw broad generalizations. Researchers had been doing the equivalent of studying penguins while believing that they were learning insights applicable to all birds."

We Aren't The World

"To think of ourselves as misfits in our own time and of our own making flatly contradicts what we now understand about the way evolution works—namely, that rate matters. That evolution can be fast, slow, or in-between, and understanding what makes the difference is far more enlightening, and exciting, than holding our flabby modern selves up against a vision—accurate or not—of our well-muscled and harmoniously adapted ancestors."

A new book  Paleofantasy: What Evolution Really Tells Us About Sex, Diet and How We Live by Marlene Zuk, labels as "fantasy" the popular notion that we humans have been (and continue to be) better suited anatomically and behaviorally to the life style experienced by our distant ancestors. Was there ever a time when our species was superbly adapted to our environment?

I, for one, am more concerned to be what we are becoming than I am desirous of becoming more of what we have been.

Misguided Nostalgia for Our Paleo Past

Gobekli Tepe is probably 11,500 years old. People living at that time were supposed (according to a prevailing archeological opinion) to have been hunter-gatherers who never settled in one spot for long and who certainly never erected buildings, monuments, or permanent temples. 

Göbekli Tepe is now considered to comprise the world's oldest known religious structures. Located on a hilltop, the site contains 20 round structures surrounded by large T-shaped, limestone pillars Slabs used for the pillars were sourced from bedrock pits about 100 meters away, Many of the pillars are decorated with carved reliefs of animals and other pictograms.

Somewhere around 8000 BCE someone buried the entire site in dirt and left it abandoned. So, not only does Gobekli Tepe represent a scope of building project that wasn't supposed to be happening at its time period, but it also represents an attempt at preservation, concealment, or perhaps repudiation that, to put it mildly, is difficult to explain.

Gobekli Tepe raises more questions than answers. Unfortunately, so does this article by Paul D. Burley, who has been studying the pictograms. 

"What is important here is for some unknown reason the builders of Gobekli Tepe constructed a temple apparently highlighting a time 11,600 years in their future."

 It seems that he intended to make a case based on his interpretation of the images he claims depict the location of the ecliptic intersecting the galactic plane. Maybe that location is correct only during our time, and not at the time the pictograms were made. But for those of us not thoroughly schooled in archeoastronomy this conclusion is much less than obvious.

Gobekli Tepe - Temples Communicating Ancient Cosmic Geography

"In Earth, among millions of lineages or organisms and perhaps 50 billion speciation events, only one led to high intelligence; this makes me believe its utter improbability."
-- Ernst Mayr

Could this same line of reasoning be used to contend for intelligence's utter triviality--its ultimate irrelevance to survival? Is it simply one of countless many extreme approaches to adaptation, comparable to giraffes' necks or koalas' eucalypt diet. Are humans filling an otherwise empty ecological niche?

Originally posted 20 Oct 2012 on Google+

Belief exhibits a sort of "regression to the extreme," according to this model. Given the state of our culture, I guess I'm not surprised. But personally, I've often found extremism to be maladaptive.

" . . . when zealots are below a critical value, the system remains similar to how it started. But above a critical value, the zealots quickly convert the entire population . . ."

Why Moderate Beliefs Rarely Prevail

Originally posted 14 Oct 2012 on Google+

"Whereas books and newspapers typically are combed over by fact-checkers and carefully rewritten by editors, Facebook posts tend to be free flowing and more closely resemble speech . . ."

"If memories are the product of evolution, then the ability to remember socially derived conversations may have provided an advantage that helped early humans survive , , ,"

I wonder how precisely the authors of this study think survival-challenged early humans could have been exposed to fact-checked, edited non-conversational content. In other words, over what other content does a facility for remembering social blather give the advantage to an early human?

"Urgh! Bobo no! Stop wasting your time studying those paleolithic toxicology monographs and listen to your friends' random babbling about which roots and berries make them vomit."

"The study involved three different experiments with a sample that largely included undergraduate females . . ."

I also wonder just how much we can learn about the strategies of survival-challenged early humans from the behaviors of twenty-first century undergraduate females.

Neural Networking: Online Social Content Easier to Recall Than Printed Info

Originally posted 27 Jan 2013 on Google+

"Is it possible for something to be true but not understandable?"

"But what if it were possible to create discoveries that no human being can ever understand?"

A lot of epistemological smoke and mirrors are strewn about in this Slate article. If I get what's going on here, the point of this piece is to suggest that some physical laws or scientific facts that are fundamentally incomprehensible to human minds may be known or knowable by computers.

Didn't we more-or-less get past this with the Critique of Pure Reason? Yes, I see that picture of Karl Popper next to the lede, but he's just there to illustrate a minor point about scientific proof--one that would apply equally to artificial and human minds.

I'm answering No to the first question, based not on my sanguine esteem for the human intellect, but merely on the fact that nobody (not even the hypothetical hyper-intelligent artificial brain) will be able to make sense of what he means by "true" in that sentence. This is one of those Dinge an sich "trues" that won't stand up to scrutiny.

I'm going to answer No to the second one, too. Oh yes, it's possible that some distant race of intelligent aliens might be able to "discover" something about themselves that humans will never be able to know because we will never encounter them. That's a reasonable use of "discover." But for "discover" to make sense in any non-special-secret way, the discovery would have to be comprehensible to the human mind if it were exposed to it.

Nah, I'm going to say that I need a much better account of what a "discovery" might be like that can only be recognized and appreciated by an artificial mind.

The author of this article hides that difficult concept behind the familiar word "discovery" as if it should not be a problem. It is. A machine's iterative processes may detect patterns or relationships within massive amounts of data that no human individual would have the time or capacity to study. Is this a discovery? How would I (or anyone else, including another machine) know?

Explain It to Me Again, Computer