We are way more imaginative that scientists give us credit for

[Carrock]

6 minutes ago, Strange said:

If the aliens decide to explain the technology, I can imagine several possible results:

1. The scientists / technologists who hear the explanation slap themselves on the forehead, say "of course" and rush out to build their own.
2. The humans would spend months or years trying to understand the advances in science required - mathematicians would struggle to convert the alien notation to something they were familiar with - but after a few years or decades, they would put together their first prototypes.
3. The aliens spend decades providing lectures, explanations, seminars, diagrams, working models, etc. And the human audience just sit there looking blank and going, "Nope. Still not getting it. Can you explain it again from the beginning? Are you sure it isn't magic?" 

3 is definitely the most interesting, especially if they have the same problem when we try to explain e.g. how a bicycle works.

BTW, I couldn't select the numbers in your post. Was that magic, or could I work how you did that if I really tried?

[Phi for All]

23 minutes ago, Strange said:

If the aliens decide to explain the technology, I can imagine several possible results:

1. The scientists / technologists who hear the explanation slap themselves on the forehead, say "of course" and rush out to build their own.
2. The humans would spend months or years trying to understand the advances in science required - mathematicians would struggle to convert the alien notation to something they were familiar with - but after a few years or decades, they would put together their first prototypes.
3. The aliens spend decades providing lectures, explanations, seminars, diagrams, working models, etc. And the human audience just sit there looking blank and going, "Nope. Still not getting it. Can you explain it again from the beginning? Are you sure it isn't magic?"

Not sure why, but this made me think that it might be easier to confuse us than we suspect. Imagine a technology that worked in an extremely non-intuitive way, like the use of perfluorochemical liquids in deep sea diving. You want me to inhale LIQUID?!?!

What if the technology involved required you to lean forward when you want to stop, or step into thin air over a great height, or something else that seem antithetical to what we're trying to achieve? 

[Strange]

59 minutes ago, Carrock said:

BTW, I couldn't select the numbers in your post. Was that magic, or could I work how you did that if I really tried?

Yep. It's magic.

(There are a pair of buttons on the [desktop] editor window for creating bulleted/numbered lists.)

56 minutes ago, Phi for All said:

Not sure why, but this made me think that it might be easier to confuse us than we suspect. Imagine a technology that worked in an extremely non-intuitive way, like the use of perfluorochemical liquids in deep sea diving. You want me to inhale LIQUID?!?!

What if the technology involved required you to lean forward when you want to stop, or step into thin air over a great height, or something else that seem antithetical to what we're trying to achieve? 

Or:

So this "Transporter" thing is going to kill me, then create a copy of me somewhere else? And you expect me to just walk into it?

I was really thinking of concepts that the human brain is just not engineered to handle. Obviously I can't give an example! And that is the problem with the "incomprehensible alien" trope in SF; they are still constrained to be incomprehensible in ways that humans can think of.

Also related to the idea I heard once (in an "is mathematics invented or discovered" debate, I think) that if there were alien intelligences in a gaseous (or plasma) form, then some things we think of as advanced mathematics (calculus, fluid dynamics, etc) could be like basic arithmetic to them. And then one of their great mathematicians comes up with the concept of integers; which is a topic that only the most advanced students are able to tackle.

[swansont]

3 hours ago, S-Man said:

I still wouldn't use the term magical, but I agree yes. We would be amazed, at awe and so on, but only because we're seeing it with our own eyes as opposed to seeing it on an episode of Star Trek. I wouldn't be surprised if/when another advanced civilization does make contact, we will be able to attribute certain things about them or their tech with stuff that we've already referenced in pop culture or our TV screens like "Oh look at that, they've got something that reminds us of our concept of warp drive" rather than "Oh look at that, they use space puppies to power their engines, we would have never thought of that".

I would like to point out that the Star Trek warp drive is fictional, and you absolutely do not understand how it works. Fictional is pretty close to magical, concept-wise.

[Sensei]

Quote

We are way more imaginative that scientists give us credit for

This should be relabeled to:

"Some humans are way more imaginative than scientists give us credit for"

Majority of humans imagine just about money, food, sex etc. stuff.

e.g. "what I would do if I'd just win the lottery!"

If I would get $0.01 from everybody who said so on this world, I would be richer than Bill and Jeff together..

 

Edited April 5, 2019 by Sensei

[Phi for All]

1 hour ago, Sensei said:

If I would get $0.01 from everybody who said so on this world, I would be richer than Bill and Jeff together..

Imagine how often you could play the lottery! 

[Strange]

If I had a dollar for every time someone said "you could monetize that" ...

[Sensei]

4 minutes ago, Phi for All said:

Imagine how often you could play the lottery! 

.~17 years ago, I have been banned from the real local Casino...

 

[Phi for All]

29 minutes ago, Strange said:

If I had a dollar for every time someone said "you could monetize that" ...

Send me a dollar and I'll send you a copy of How To Get $1 From Everyone On The Planet.

20 minutes ago, Sensei said:

.~17 years ago, I have been banned from the real local Casino...

Counting cards gives you better odds than the lottery.

1 hour ago, Sensei said:

Bill and Jeff together..

What are you implying here? I know Jeff is single...

[Sensei]

13 minutes ago, Phi for All said:

Counting cards gives you better odds than the lottery. 

..nobody mentioned "counting cards"..

13 minutes ago, Phi for All said:

Send me a dollar and I'll send you a copy of How To Get $1 From Everyone On The Planet.

May I ask for 100k copies in hard-cover.. ? 500+ pages of A4 pages please.. (for $1 per copy as you arranged with Strange already)

(my local scrapyard is accepting maculature at decent price)

 

[Phi for All]

2 hours ago, Sensei said:

May I ask for 100k copies in hard-cover.. ? 500+ pages of A4 pages please.. (for $1 per copy as you arranged with Strange already)

You get a link, Count Sensei. I can send it 500 times, if you like. 

[Alex_Krycek]

On 4/5/2019 at 12:40 AM, S-Man said:

Honestly now, our imagination can take us to the furthest regions of...existance. What do you guys think?

On the one hand, yes, I agree that our imagination is immensely capable.  But all of the examples you mentioned, the things that are supposedly so crazy, are already within our realm of understanding (the giant alien eyeball looking down from the sky, for example).  I challenge you to articulate something that is beyond your imagination - it's impossible.   The only way you can imagine something is if you have some frame of reference to build that "new" mental model on.  That's not to say there are not things that are beyond our comprehension - which of course there are, we just have no way of imagining something that is totally alien.  But I guess the heart of your question is: do human beings possess the cognitive faculties, tools, and methods to discover and understand ever more complicated phenomena?  Scientific progress over the last few centuries would seem to indicate that we do, albeit how much progress we've actually made is another question entirely.

If you take the caveman / Siri example, the caveman has no concept of computers / A.I / audio technology, etc.  Perhaps the caveman could start to understand if you dissembled the device and showed him the components, but his puny neanderthal brain would lurch and struggle to grasp even the most basic idea before he became frustrated and clubbed you in the head.  Could you explain to the caveman (let's say a Homosapien this time) about black body radiation, ultraviolet light, the atom, or anything that we take for granted now?  Probably not.  He would look at you in amazement and then worship you like a God, before changing his mind and thinking you're the devil and clubbing you in the head.

There's a "curse of knowledge bias" happening.  These concepts might seem easily imaginable to us, because of the centuries of scientific progress that humans have made and the education that we have received in our individual lives, but to others such ideas are outside their realm of understanding.  Similarly, because humans now have some limited knowledge about the universe, we think we can imagine anything - but my view is it's still in the same limited sphere.  There's also the problem with the instruments humans use to examine the universe.  They're incredibly limited. 

On the other hand many scientific breakthroughs started first with the imagination.  In Einstein's case it was doing thought experiments about the speed of light; Isaac Newton was living alone in the countryside to avoid the plague when he made many of his remarkable breakthroughs.  Nikola Tesla was operating at a level that was unheard of during his time.  

Ultimately the question relates to the potential of the human imagination.  Is the imagination fundamentally connected to the universe itself, and so has the ability to conceive of anything that exists within the universe that it is connected to?  Or is the human imagination just an extension of what has been deduced scientifically over time, an extension of established knowledge, and thus it is limited by that knowledge to only imagining certain concepts that it has been preconditioned to understand? 

 

PS:  Your post made me think of David Bohm's Theory of the Implicate Order:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wy9kS8ob2Y

 

 

Edited April 6, 2019 by Alex_Krycek

[S-Man]

9 hours ago, Alex_Krycek said:

Ultimately the question relates to the potential of the human imagination.  Is the imagination fundamentally connected to the universe itself, and so has the ability to conceive of anything that exists within the universe that it is connected to?  Or is the human imagination just an extension of what has been deduced scientifically over time, an extension of established knowledge, and thus it is limited by that knowledge to only imagining certain concepts that it has been preconditioned to understand?

That is very well said. It could be that it's a mixture of both, because to rationalize it we could say that even a civilization that is millions of years more advanced than us, was at some point in their history at our level, and then went on from there to learn and discover more and more, which would indicate that their advances were within their ability to comprehend the greater picture all along. So it wouldn't surprise me if human beings were ultimately capable of conceiving anything the universe has to offer.

19 hours ago, swansont said:

I would like to point out that the Star Trek warp drive is fictional, and you absolutely do not understand how it works. Fictional is pretty close to magical, concept-wise.

I personally don't, but I understand the concept of it and I'm sure there are people a lot smarter than me that actually understand the intricacies too, even though it is fictional. We know how a lot of things work in theory and there is theory about what it would take to warp space, only that we don't have the tech to do it right now - much like with wormholes.

21 hours ago, Ten oz said:

You realize toddlers use cell phones, right?

That's because they can access that technology at a time when their brain is still forming so their world view isn't challenged at any point. The point about the caveman and the smartphone was that it would have to be a caveMAN, an adult who's had time to grasp his reality. Then there's the issue of whether or not our brains are more evolved now than they were tens or hundreds or thousands of years ago. As for Sensei's 'chimpanzees using technology' argument, that's with humans training them to do so and their brains being able to understand cause and effect. So too would a caveman understand that if they press the part of the phone that is the Lock Button, the front of the device will light up. Action A leads to Result A. That doesn't mean they'd understand anything more regarding the device. They would probably use the screen as a flashlight until the battery runs out, and when it shuts down for good they would assume they had angered it somehow and pray to it to someday power back on again

20 hours ago, Strange said:

If the aliens decide to explain the technology, I can imagine several possible results:

1. The scientists / technologists who hear the explanation slap themselves on the forehead, say "of course" and rush out to build their own.
2. The humans would spend months or years trying to understand the advances in science required - mathematicians would struggle to convert the alien notation to something they were familiar with - but after a few years or decades, they would put together their first prototypes.
3. The aliens spend decades providing lectures, explanations, seminars, diagrams, working models, etc. And the human audience just sit there looking blank and going, "Nope. Still not getting it. Can you explain it again from the beginning? Are you sure it isn't magic?"

1 or 2, definitely. I can't fathom a world in which an advanced intelligence would spend decades trying to explain something to us and we still wouldn't get it. We have mastered the language of mathematics and we are logical and rational beings (at least our brightest minds are). So failure to understand after decades of explanations would simply indicate that the aliens explaining things to us aren't advanced enough themselves, because if they were, they would be able to find a way to get their point across.

21 hours ago, Ten oz said:

Are you implying that human (homo sapiens) capacity for imagination is greater today than it was in previous years?

Absolutely. Yes. I firmly believe that we are at a time in our evolution that is more of a transitioning period than ever before. We have only recently begun grasping where we might be headed as a civilization, what we might become, what might become of our planet and so on.

Sorry for the multitude of replies, I had reached my reply limit yesterday

 

 

[Phi for All]

19 minutes ago, S-Man said:

I personally don't, but I understand the concept of it and I'm sure there are people a lot smarter than me that actually understand the intricacies too, even though it is fictional. 

No. What swansont was saying is that Star Trek warp drive isn't a viable concept. He's a physicist with the US Naval Observatory, and iirc, he's consulted on Star Trek scripts in the past, so when he says nobody understands it, it's because it's completely made up and non-physical.

[Ten oz]

7 minutes ago, S-Man said:

That's because they can access that technology at a time when their brain is still forming so their world view isn't challenged at any point. The point about the caveman and the smartphone was that it would have to be a caveMAN, an adult who's had time to grasp his reality. Then there's the issue of whether or not our brains are more evolved now than they were tens or hundreds or thousands of years ago. As for Sensei's 'chimpanzees using technology' argument, that's with humans training them to do so and their brains being able to understand cause and effect. So too would a caveman understand that if they press the part of the phone that is the Lock Button, the front of the device will light up. Action A leads to Result A. That doesn't mean they'd understand anything more regarding the device. They would probably use the screen as a flashlight until the battery runs out, and when it shuts down for good they would assume they had angered it somehow and pray to it to someday power back on again

The human brain has been the same size and shape for at least 200,000 years. The earliest writing we have go back a little over 3k yrs and reflect thoughts and ideas philosophically the same as modern time. The earliest cave art we have found goes back 40k yrs and also reflects humans with the same basic expression of the their world as we see today. Their is not any indication in the fossil record or prehistory art (cave paintings, jewelry, tattoos, etc) that human cognitive capacity has appreciable changed.   

The cavemen you think aren't capable of learning how to properly use a smartphone invented language, art, clothing, cooking, tools, use of fire, navigation, and etc from scratch with no training or templates to follow. Inventing such things from scratch would be intellectually challenging for anyone alive today regardless of education level.  

36 minutes ago, S-Man said:

I personally don't, but I understand the concept of it and I'm sure there are people a lot smarter than me that actually understand the intricacies too, even though it is fictional. We know how a lot of things work in theory and there is theory about what it would take to warp space, only that we don't have the tech to do it right now - much like with wormholes.

Their are no intricacies. It is a MacGuffin. It is just a plot device. 

Quote

 

The director and producer Alfred Hitchcock popularized the term MacGuffin and the technique with his 1935 film The 39 Steps, an early example of the concept.[6][7] Hitchcock explained the term MacGuffin in a 1939 lecture at Columbia University in New York:

It might be a Scottish name, taken from a story about two men on a train. One man says, 'What's that package up there in the baggage rack?' And the other answers, 'Oh, that's a MacGuffin'. The first one asks, 'What's a MacGuffin?' 'Well,' the other man says, 'it's an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands.' The first man says, 'But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands,' and the other one answers, 'Well then, that's no MacGuffin!' So you see that a MacGuffin is actually nothing at all.

 

 

[Strange]

1 hour ago, S-Man said:

1 or 2, definitely. I can't fathom a world in which an advanced intelligence would spend decades trying to explain something to us and we still wouldn't get it. We have mastered the language of mathematics and we are logical and rational beings (at least our brightest minds are). So failure to understand after decades of explanations would simply indicate that the aliens explaining things to us aren't advanced enough themselves, because if they were, they would be able to find a way to get their point across.

I am assuming (in 3) that the aliens are infinitely patient and really, really want to help us. "Come on, it's so basic, surely you can understand it's just -----------. Isn't that obvious?" 

I just think there may be limits to what the human brain is capable of understanding, even using the tools of mathematics and abstraction that have got us so far.

Or maybe not. We won't know until we encounter these aliens.

The trouble is, any examples that any of us come up with (warp drive, matter transporter, etc) are already things we can imagine and we can make up science-fictiony explanations for how they might work. But that doesn't prove that an alien couldn't come along and present us with something (whether a concept or a piece of engineering) that is just beyond the capabilities of the human brain.

[swansont]

1 hour ago, S-Man said:

 

I personally don't, but I understand the concept of it and I'm sure there are people a lot smarter than me that actually understand the intricacies too, even though it is fictional. We know how a lot of things work in theory and there is theory about what it would take to warp space, only that we don't have the tech to do it right now - much like with wormholes.

It’s fictional, and as such, doesn’t work, so nobody can know how it works. It’s an empty box. There’s no actual mechanism inside for anyone to understand.