This was a non-sense writings on ufos theology so get some IQs please.

yatko

If an advanced being entertained religious notions, he/she/it would not be advanced. He/she/it would be in the same unenlightened category as earth people ....on the brink of self-destruction. When one understands their own divinity ... there is no need for 'religion'.

Peace!!

moondove

You are half right, half wrong and motivated by good intentions, or to put it another way, dangerous.

Can you think of how a community can advance past the religious phase? There is little evidence of any mechanism. Man has had space craft, and put men in them who believed in sky pixies. We have sent men into the unknown to found colonies, and laid the vessels down with bibles and priests.

We have the technology to travel to other planets virtually within our grasp, we just have yet to get our act together to do it. Serious space colonization could be a mere couple of our generations away. This does not give us the time to rid ourselves of current religions.

Why should we assume any space-faring aliens, if they exist, would be without similar religions? We have but one example to study, ourselves, and we find that superstitions persist despite growing levels of science and technology. Religions are not withering away. They remain. We are not evolving "better" religions. We are stuck with the old religions and the odd change in minor detail, changes that make the religions stronger.

Faith in the rightness of your own beliefs is not sufficient. There is little or no correlation between intelligence, sophistication and belief. Very bright and educated people convert to Catholicism, or Judaism or Buddhism all the time. I can see no reason to expect religions to pass away, survival is in their nature. I can see no reason to expect intelligent beings to grasp the truth, all the evidence shows that we grasp onto ideas that feel comfortable and I can see no reason to expect any other intelligent species to do any different.

Martin

When technological growth surpasses spiritual growth the result is self-destruction, therefore I dare say it is safe to assume that most 'aliens' that have developed the technology to visit our sorry planet would have to be advanced spiritually to the point where they have come to understand the folly of religious dogma.

On the other hand, perhaps we don't even exist (I have yet to meet anyone who can actually prove that we do) therefore it doesn't really matter

Peace!!

moondove

You still totally miss the point, don't you? As we are becoming more technologically advanced our religions are simply refusing to melt away. Why should a trend that is not happening be expected to continue to a conclusion?

The only evidence we have about religions and technology suggest that religions respond and keep themselves in the game. Religions evolve and survive. Technology feeds itself. Continue those two trends and, if they can avoid destroying themselves, it seems likely that any species that can develop the technology for interstellar transportation would remain subject to some form of religious belief, at least in part of the community.

Yes, on Star Trek and the like nations, religions and money all dissolve with "progress" but can anybody demonstrate how this is to occur?

Please send me the social blueprint along with the plans for construction of a warp drive engine. I expect the second one is more likely, I am not certain that the speed of light can be exceeded, but I expect that it is a simpler challenge than removing religion.

Martin

Although I had originally dismissed your claim that superstitious memetic structures would be found throughout the Universe (in intelligent species), I now see it as a real possibility.

Superstitious memes, or S&M as I commonly refer to them are highly utilizable for those who create them and or assert them. Not because of their relationship with the content of the meme, because there is no content, but because of their relationship with other people.

It's quite simple. When you offer explanations to others about the world around you there is a chance that they will believe you. If they do, you will likely be rewarded with the recognition of being intelligent. Modern times aside, those with relatively greater intelligence have found seats of higher status.

So it makes perfect sense (to me) that S&M would evolve. They allow party one to manipulate and even control party two. A more natural survival tactic there is not.

Steve

(Posted on The Forum)

Memes are likely to occur everywhere. There is nothing about an idea that limits it being re-invented at different times and places. A meme is just an idea, nothing more. It is not self aware or self propelled or anything of the sort. Just a series of concepts strung together.

There is nothing particularly strange and unique about the concepts involved in religious memes. It is quite likely that all intelligent communicating communities will spontaneously develop them, given time. Survival after death, re-birth, re-incarnation, punishment or reward by supernatural forces, placating gods by sacrifice: all of these concepts seem to have developed several times independently among human communities but there is nothing distinctly mammalian, terrestrial, hominid or even organic about such ideas, there is no reason to believe that such ideas could not occur to mortal evolved beings based on silicon or tin compounds which swim in seas of liquid methane as long as they were communicating and intelligent.

Once such ideas have been thought up their meme-like qualities come into play. Ideas which are rewarding to pass on will be more likely to be passed on than other ideas. Reward can come from the intrinsic appeal of the ideas, their perceived poetry if you will, or from their utility. Many ideas are seen as so smart that the bearers of the ideas can bask in the glow.

All that you think is very well presented and without question on the mark, excepting that aliens have made contact in many way, however, covert. I have had alien interaction with many different species. They are in fact, despite being advanced beyond mankind in many ways, just as you suppose. They are in fact, just as mankind is in his world with himself, very divided by species and philosophies and religions ideas, and just as mankind, sometimes war over these differences. Whether intelligent life is in parallel space, other dimensions, or other planets and galaxies, living spiritually or in physical bodies that are different in density or as of the physical structure of mankind, this world is a microcosm of how all of these other places. It's not all that different, despite what is known beyond mankind's ability to know at this time. As mankind can see himself, mankind can see his aliens. It's that simple. Apply this principal and aliens and mankind's gods become less of a mystery.

I am sorry that I cannot join you in your world of alien believers. I cannot understand how something as important as the truth of alien encounters could be concealed in the modern world. Likewise I can see no reason why there would not be an enormous number of unfounded stories of conspiracy and cover-up. It is a natural and inevitable consequence of communication and our powerful ability to believe coupled with our relatively puny means of discovering truth and our total lack of any way of measuring or feeling truth. We can no more feel the truth than we can hear the colour green or taste sounds. What utter nonsense it is to tell ourselves that this or that idea feels like the truth. Does six feel like eight minus two? Or smell like it, come to that.

I have a working hypothesis that at all times any community generates a supply of conspiracy theories, supernatural stories, religions and off the wall scientific theories. Unfortunately approximately 5% or so of these at any one time contain some important truth. It is unfortunate that this is not either higher or lower because it means scientists have to walk a tight-rope between aloof scepticism and being open to any bit of nonsense that comes along.

100 years ago scientists scoffed at tales of fairies, astrology, acupuncture, ghosts, the spirit world, moving continents, apemen, tusked deer, fire breathing dragons, sea monsters and Atlantis. Now we know that there are mountain gorillas (hardly surprising, we have known about lowland gorillas for centuries) we know there are giant monitor lizards and giant squid. We also know that the continents have moved and we know the broad outline of the reasons why, how and when. We have also found that there is some use for acupuncture. But we have not proved the Chinese theories behind acupuncture any more than we have proved the justification for eating tiger penis soup. Astrology is still as far from the scientific mainstream as ever despite the discovery a new planet and the non-discovery of any possible agent of astrological causation. We have found deer with tusks and we have discovered how the genetics of body size in deer correlates to antler size and tusk length. We have found drowned areas of inhabited land under the Black Sea but nothing remotely like a sunken continent in the Atlantic. The scientific approach of scepticism with the flexibility to adopt any truth that comes along has proved itself conclusively to be the right approach.

I believe that there are alien intelligences in the universe. I have run the simulation of the Drake Equation several times with my own hunches and every time I come up with a number of likely intelligent communities that is relatively small, a few thousand at the most optimistic. Only by inputting figures for longevity of intelligent communities that I am not comfortable with can I produce a large number as the answer. Of course all this is speculation but my own predictions are that planetary systems are widespread, or normal, life is present on the majority of earth-sized planets, principally in bacterial form. A small number will have produced multi-cellular life. An even smaller number will have produced complex multi-cellular life. Of those I see no reason to expect the evolution of communicating intelligence to be anything like inevitable. In our long history of complex life hundreds of millions of species have lived and gone extinct and only one genus has come anywhere near the level of intelligence required for space-faring. Ants and beetles and rats and ospreys and bacteria have no need of radios or rockets. Or priests.

Martin

If I think of Atlantis, I have to think of a life I had on Atlantis. If I think of aliens, I have to think of interactions I have had with aliens. If I think of those who mankind sees as his gods, I have to think about the interactions I have had with those gods. I don't talk about what I believe or wonder about as existing much, but rather, I speak of what I have experienced, in this life time, as well as past lives, and know that my journey through life began even before this planet was a world as it is known today.

I don't expect you to believe me by might of what you have to say, but I do believe that with your curiosity and desire to know, you will likely in time, however many more life times, discover the truth or falsity behind some of the things you wonder and think upon, if your soul manages to survive.

I don't debate what I know and I don't normally discuss what I believe, although I do express opinions. I know that I am immortal and you talk like a mortal. I cannot know if you are mortal, but it is unlikely that you would believe as you do, were that not true. Of course, past life memory and memory of one's history is not always known to one in the human condition. So, for all the things that you wonder and think about, there might be good reason, such as buried recalls you are unable to retrieve in the human state of existence.

I do think you tend to dismiss things out of hand, but you seem inquisitive and that is commendable. I wish you a continued journey in life and feel I have nothing I can possibly pass onto you, since you have yet to sort out what you believe from what you know.

Good luck in your quests and try not to make conclusions, excepting those that are open ended and flexible, so that you don't convince yourself of things that are untrue, which can't be extracted if the time should come when you are confronted with truth, that possibly might be the difference between moving on, or staying behind.

Best,

Dickk

Well, what interesting speculation. Is religion synonymous with intelligence? Are we synonymous with intelligence? I suppose that this would be also a question of culture and if there is a higher culture? In my own hopefully materialist thinking does science win over religion or just provide more complexities? What of our own "quest" of spirituality that is supposed to be even devoid of religion? Could it be that religion is that expression of order and emotion to yet be obtained in expression? Is that what is not music all about?

You might be correct of course, they might just be as unknowing and mislead in their belief system as much of humanity. The ultimate truth however, might just as well elude us as well as them. I doubt that we may ever even understand all our own culture much less one that is alien. Perhaps we may never really understand ourselves without some others to compare. As Isaac Asminov says,: "the universe is stranger than we could have ever imagined". I hope for one, that they are more culturally complex than is portrayed by Hollywood.

Religious belief is not synonymous with intelligence, it is a by-product. In a similar way as obesity is a by-product of a successful economy, it follows on, whilst not being inevitable as such it is a consequence that tends to follow. I am unaware of any successful economy that does not have a problem with obesity and likewise all human cultures have had some degree of religious beliefs. There is cause and effect but no absolute inevitability. Hence my theory in the form of a wager, incidentally a wager I would love to lose.

Ideally I would love to lose the bet by seeing a complete withering away of religion in a human society here on Earth rather than having to wait for the slim chance of extra-terrestrial contact. My theory is based on the study of memetics, which is the application of the "evolutionary algorithm" to human culture.

Evolution is not a force of nature, or God, or destiny or Gaia. It is a simple fact of mathematics that does not require a universe in which to be true. Evolution was inevitable before the big bang. It is inevitable from the kind of fundamental principles that have no choice but to be true. If there is an entity that replicates but does not do so with 100% copying fidelity, and it exists in a universe with a finite supply of the raw ingredients necessary to form copies there must be evolution. Any communicating culture satisfies those requirements, ideas can be spontaneously thought up which can get copied from brain to brain, but brains and communicating mechanisms are finite, not all ideas can be passed on. There is competition for the media of communication, we cannot read every book that is written or listen to every song or study every religion or even pass on every rumour about Michael Jackson's sex life. Only those ideas that have what it takes to be spread will spread, those ideas are memes. Some memes are immortal like the laws of Moses or even more long lasting ones like the traces of similarity in languages as distant as Celtic and Japanese, others are popular in an ephemeral way (remember the Ninja Turtles) and most are neither particularly popular nor long lasting.

My theory is that

1] Religious ideas cannot fail to arise spontaneously in a community that is intelligent and communicative. (Secondary assumption: communication is necessary for intelligence.)

2] Religious ideas will be fit memes, they will have what it takes to spread because perceived unfairness and/or death are also inevitable and unavoidable in any intelligent community.

3] Religious memes will collect together in memeplexes, sets of ideas that go well together, support each other and enhance each other's chances of being passed on intact. These memeplexes will be, by definition, religions.

4] Religions will generate whatever proofs or other tricks are required to justify their existence. Over time the memeplex will evolve to contain sufficient tools to fend off whatever outsiders can muster against them.

5] The ever-evolving memeplexes will be able to withstand any change of scientific belief and accommodate themselves to any level of culture, just as Bronze Age ideas at the heart of Judaism are still kept burning (literally) in the houses of particle physicists.

6] Final proof of the existence of god or an afterlife is not possible.

7] Despite the existence of complex religious memeplexes non-belief will also be widespread.

8] A permanent state of a mixed community of religious believers and non-believers is to be expected in any intelligent communicating community. Although there is no way of predicting what the ratio of belief to non-belief will be.

Since coming up with the original theory last year I have thought some more about the subject with particular emphasis on the nature of truth. I am at a loss to work out how a mechanism for perceiving truth directly can ever be made. There are only two alternatives, it is evolved or invented. But I am still unable to see how either route could work. We can only invent things which show information and measure things, no machine can feel and communicate that feeling. When I say no machine can feel I mean that as we do not understand what a feeling is, even in our own body, there is no way in which we can replicate this in a device in a way that the device can communicate a feeling back to us.

Secondly how can a truth feeling organ evolve? What mechanisms are available? How could natural selection "reward" (through differential survival or breeding success) a part of a brain or other organ that could "feel the truth" of pi or the mystery of the trinity? It is an obvious non-starter. We not only have no such organ it is a logical impossibility that it could ever evolve. And if we have no model of a truth sensor available from nature we would have to hope for some lateral thinking genius to come up with a clue to how such a device could be made, a process that could take longer than the history of the universe. It is not that such a truth engine could never exist it is just that I can see no possible way in which we could even begin to sketch out the first hint of a design or even to suggest how to begin the fundamental research needed to bring it about. We could divert the entire output of the planet to the cause and get nowhere because we haven't the first clue as to how to do it. The Manhattan project was different, we knew what was required and how it would work, it was just very difficult to do in practice. But a truth engine is as hard to develop as a time machine or warp drive engine, we don't know for certain that it could work never mind how it might work.

Humans cannot perceive truth directly, which is a great pity, it means we have to expect to share our planet with priests, astrologers and lawyers in perpetuity. (I never claimed to be an optimist.)

Martin

Willett's Wager