Jim McCauley wrote:
"GatherNoMoss" wrote in message
oups.com...
..
The brain as a quantum computer has gained more press I notice lately.
And it occurs to me that intelligence, the brain is the key to
understand the universe.
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Astoundingly anthropomorphic. Understanding how the _human_ brain
comprehends the universe is pretty interesting, I'll grant you, but there
may be other sorts of intelligence that make equally valid sense out of it
all while operating on utterly different principles.
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Forget space exploration......it's all in the mind.
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I'd like to have conversations with at least a few of those other types of
minds. It might offer perspectives that are otherwise unattainable.

I agree with you.

However, I was hunting through the archives of talk.abortion to obtain
a classic post by a poster who was known by the nom de plume of Minxs,
and then subsequently M. Grey de Shirland or Malapert.

Basically, I was arguing in that group against legal abortion, and one
of the things I addressed was that a definition such as "human, born,
and alive" for a human being isn't good enough. It isn't based on
abstract first principles, but on certain concrete things.

So it discriminates against aliens from outer space, and against
artificial intelligences. And, of course, it may then discriminate
against the unborn child too.

In any event, it was an interesting post in which she noted that in
reality, any alien extraterrestrials we would ever be likely to find
would be so alien as to be utterly outside our sphere of sympathy.

I did find a post in which she made a shorter expression of this view:

A sentient, mentating "space alien" that
had no humanlike characteristics, something *really* alien (such as
you and I can't even conceive of), would not be valued by us. In
fact, the more intelligent and competent such an alien being would be,
the more certainly we'd destroy it in disgust and fear.

I certainly agree that real aliens wouldn't be the "ridgeheads" made
famous by Star Trek, with pretty much the same basic range of human
emotions - yes, even the Vulcans, mentioned in that post - and so on.

But I think of outer-space aliens in the terms of Clarke, not the terms
of Lovecraft. I think there is a common ground on which we can meet -
we can discuss the Riemann zeta function and the Gamma function... and
agree not to particularly concern ourselves with the details of alien
family life and sociology, because we would be far less equipped for a
common understanding in those areas.

(I don't say we wouldn't want to learn in those areas too, just that we
would acknowledge ourselves unqualified to comment or interfere.)

John Savard