Re: Re: Is SETI dangerous?

From: Byrne Hobart (sometimesfunnyalwaysright@gmail.com)
Date: Tue Sep 25 2007 - 14:47:11 MDT


I didn't say the Jupiterians were stupid. They're highly intelligent
-- they just happen to have much slower subjective time. They used to
live 25 million years per generation -- thanks to their
pneumatic-computer Singularity, they can experience the same
subjective time in 1/1000 as long -- which still makes them 1/1000 as
fast as us. What I'm asking is how they'd even know we were here. Our
existence is, in a way, transmitted on a different frequency.They
don't have any reason to see us as 'intelligent' for the same reason
we don't administer IQ tests to mushroom.

It's more complicated than being able to describe an AI in some
notation. You also have to know how to translate that notation into
someone else's. Even if we have the source code, we have no clue what
kind of compiler they want. Differences this vast are analogues to
compressing data -- it's going to look like noise -- so we'll have no
idea whether their information is in binary or unary or phinary, and
won't even be able to break it up into something with an analyzable
pattern.

Basically, it's a problem of context. You need context to understand
the meaning of data, but to get that context, you already have to have
the meaning.



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