About transcendence, and alien intelligence.
More about “transcendence,” and quibbling with that essay I linked yesterday. It said this:
Transcendence—basically, the human experience of a higher and deeper reality somehow hidden in our everyday existences, but giving hints of itself in certain circumstances—is a constant phenomenon across time and cultures. … Without any form of supernatural existence, what could transcendence be about?
The error is tying the perception of something “higher and deeper” than our everyday existence, with religion.
In fact, evidence of a “higher and deeper reality” is everywhere. As I suggested yesterday, it’s in the perception of vast reaches of space, and ranges of time, than we can understand, indirectly or directly (through systemic investigation, i.e. science), even if they violate our intuitive understandings of the world. There really is an enormous universe; and it really is billions of years old.
Ironically, many humans reject that evidence as uncomfortable, in a deep way that is more than about violating religious myths. The two most prominent ways are via young-earth creationism, which insists that the world can’t be any older than the most ancient human memories recorded in holy books, and in flat-earthism, which insists that the local perception of a world within the horizons of our view must extend indefinitely, and the idea that the world is round (spherical) is so counter-intuitive as to be nonsense. (Beware intuition, beware common sense; they only work in very limited circumstances.) Why don’t all the oceans simply flow down to the bottom of the sphere and fall into space? You see arguments like that seriously proposed.
Further, I think this yearning for transcendence, as identified with religion, isn’t so much a yearning to perceive something greater than human reality — it’s to confirm religious presumptions that put people, all of humanity, at the center of reality. It’s all about you, say the world’s religions. According to Christianity, the whole point of reality is for you to be “saved” by a “creator” who for some reason made you in need of saving.
Evidence of a universe “higher and deeper” than humanity is everywhere. Visit the natural history museums, and read the fine print to understand *how* people have reached the conclusions they have about the age of the Earth and of the universe. Being aware of and understanding all that, and how humanity exists in a tiny tiny bubble of that reality, should be enough transcendence for anyone.
Look up at the sky at night, and realize what you’re seeing. It’s not all about you.
\\
There’s an analogous issue I’ll take time this evening to discuss, since I don’t think I’ve mentioned it before.
(I’m borrowing an image I used earlier, on Oct 5th.)
Science fiction spends a lot of time wondering about alien beings, in the sense of intelligent races more-of-less equivalent to humanity. Or even more primitive beings, in very different environments. How would they think? In most science fiction, especially in the pop SF of movies and TV, aliens are humanoid and think just like us, more or less. (At best, this or that species exaggerates a common human trait.) More ambitious SF in novels and stories over the decades have gone further, from aliens on Mars who were intelligent but thought differently from humans, in Stanley G. Weinbaum’s “A Martian Odyssey” in 1934, to aliens who perceive time in its entirely, in Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life” in 1998 (which became the film Arrival).
This is what science fiction does best — challenge our preconceptions about how reality works. On the other hand, some thinkers (like E.O. Wilson) have suggested that, given reality the way it is, intelligent creatures might well evolve very similar to us, given similar environments. While other thinkers have suggested that, in different environments, intelligence might evolve quite differently, the example being octopi and squid, who live in a liquid environment.
What everyone is overlooking, I think, is that we already have examples of “alien” thinking right among us. But by “alien” I am drawing an analogy to the reality deniers in the section above about transcendence. The evidence at hand is the autistic community. The autistic are regarded as virtually “non-human” by those who think there is only one proper way to be, to think, and anyone who deviates from this is somehow flawed. (Despite the many personality tests, such as the Myers-Briggs, that have floated in and out of popularity over the decades, that indicate that different people do think very differently.) In fact, as many have pointed out, some of the most brilliant thinkers throughout history have exhibited traits we would now consider “autistic.” They think in different ways. And we all benefit from their thinking.
(Not to mention intelligence in dolphins, chimps, octopi, etc. Everything is a range. There are no binaries.)
Science fiction doesn’t need to go looking for alien intelligences. They’re already here.
