the mac tonnies show

[mike]

i see science is saying that soon they will be able to "download" data direct to the brain. i wonder how long it will be before we do the reverse, backup our brains data to artificial media, i think the human hive mind is not too far away.

Well once you bridge the mind/machine gap I would think transfer between the two would be simultaneously possible...

It sounds great, but there are some orders of magnitude when going from basic information (ascii spreadsheets) to full-blown experiential 3D memories and emotions. We can easily back up our tax data, but the sheer volume of what is stored biologically is pretty hard to fathom. Not to get too technical, but just working with 3D in real-time is pretty hard from a pixels-color-motion standpoint. Even a simple hologram of 1000Length x 1000height x 1000depth bits x 32 bits (color) x 24 frames per second multiplied by emotions, smells, touch, intentions......,
well, you get the picture.
I guess the lesson is that life is meant to be lived, not stored.

at the end of the day our current media is just a small lump of gray matter, which typical of our kind we are reverse engineering and duplicating

http://edition.cnn.com/2005/TECH/05/23/brain.download/

it really is the next step in our evolutionary journey, and no where near the end of the road.

the twist is, that once a bio form creates synthetic intellect, said intellect is likely to then go back and change the bioform to iron out all the useless biofactors left over from the base evolutionary process, such as hair and genitalia.

on the point of over population life is viral, its meant to spread if its at all possible to do so, while its true our current problems are caused by overpopulation, the real issue is overpopulation in a closed environment, this planet still has plenty of room under the oceans and underground, and of course there is space as well, hollowing out sections of the moon and building vast population centres there makes sense. eggs n baskets etc. and free energy would come in handy for that.

the idea that the iraq conflict could have put 500 astronaughts on mars, is the most profound thing ive heard this year. that really disturbs me for some reason

 

[CapnG]

the idea that the iraq conflict could have put 500 astronaughts on mars, is the most profound thing ive heard this year. that really disturbs me for some reason

Because that's the size of a small town, perhaps?

 

[auntiegrav]

Thanks for the link, Mike.
A better use of the brain download would be to download oneself into a robot and send the robot to other planets, then upload the experience.

"Pearson said that computer consciousness would make feasible a whole new sphere of emotional machines, such as airplanes that are afraid of crashing."

Just a thought, but an airplane that is afraid of crashing would be afraid of flying, also. At least if it is intelligent. It may also be susceptible to suicidal hypnotic suggestion. Put that in your WTC pipe and smoke it.

What really disturbs me is that nobody asked the Iraqi farmers what they needed before invading and destroying their farmland. (Yes, much of Iraq is not just desert.)
Those trillions of dollars would have built a lot of barns and irrigation systems (and maybe they could grow poppies for the CIA like the Afghanis).

People with cheap food are docile and easily controlled.
Oh. That would be the U.S., wouldn't it? (The price is going up. Got ammo?)

We go to war because we want too much. We go to space because we can't stand living with ourselves in what's left of our neighborhoods.

 

[Brian Now]

the idea that the iraq conflict could have put 500 astronaughts on mars, is the most profound thing ive heard this year. that really disturbs me for some reason

Tonnies is talking about theoretical future technology and putting today's prices on it which is not very meaningful.
For one thing do we even have the technology to house, feed and keep 500 people in space? And if so can we do it for the 6 month trip to Mars? And if so, is this large vessel capable of shielding 500 people for 6 months against radiation and micrometeors? And if so what happens when they reach Mars?
Even if it's just 2 astronauts at a time there are still large technological hurdles to get them there and start a colony.

But hey, it's ufology and you can say anything you want

 

[ArizonaWill]

With that kind of money, perhaps Mac meant we could send 250 manned flights to Mars, each carrying only 2 people. That might be easier than sending 500 people in one mega-ship, which for our species would still be in the long term sci-fi range.

Of course, since Steven Greer is on such intimate terms with the aliens that he holds their hybrid babies (good old Uncle Steve!), maybe he could get THEM to fork over some zero point energy machines and teach us how to get to Mars in a more economical and efficient manner. I won't hold my breath, since all these loving space brothers seem to mostly just take, take, take, but never even send flowers or candy.

 

[auntiegrav]

I won't hold my breath, since all these loving space brothers seem to mostly just take, take, take, but never even send flowers or candy.

Yeah, but apparently the publishers benefit from them. Give 'till it hurts.

AG

"Living (reproduction, growth) is a continuous acquisition of matter and energy. This affinity for 'more' is analogous to a program in a computer that seeks out new data. Living things without this affinity simply die. Democracy is a way to fool the program in many people so that a few can live as though the unnecessary acquisition of matter and energy (profit) for them is going to benefit the many by some kind of money evaporation/condensation cycle called "the economy".
Inflation is the global warming in that cycle, and more heat simply means the money stays up in the clouds longer."

 

[Poi]

Great show! Mac's one of my favorite guests, but you guys came up with some great questions and hypotheses too, Gene and David. Love it when the show just clicks along offering lots of new things to think about.

Good discussion following too.

 

[Gareth]

Great show. Mac is up there with Dolan now as my equal favourite guess by a long way.

Just out of curiosity (save me scrolling through the show) does anyone know what those were books were called that were mentioned. The first one was an older book about Mars that was apparently well worth reading according to Mac. The second book was the one that both David and Mac had read regarding the massive changes our species will face on the way to 2100... David mentioned how terrifying it was...

 

[David Biedny]

GSB,

The book is "The Revenge of Gaia" by James Lovelock.

dB

 

[Heinrich Moltke]

The lady doth protest too much ---

A short comment on the direction of the discussion at the end of the latest show. There's an inevitable tendency when dealing with other points of view, especially unstable ones, to simultaneously hold it accountable for failings in two opposite directions. Take the assertion in the last minutes of the discussion that the abduction encounters, visitations, and so on that are being reported have recourse to themes that are a little too obvious:

"If they're genuine, why do they repeat the same kinds of research? Why do we see UFOnauts digging in the sand..."

"The abductee literature, it seems so easy, the whole conventional wisdom when it comes to abductions seem so absurd..."

There are plenty of critics who would equally hold abduction accounts responsible for being nonsensical as a whole. So on one hand, you have the issue of alien encounters being utterly incomprehensible -- rubbish -- and on the other, at the exact same time, the issue of the motifs being repetitive, explanations being a little too pat, and so on.

In actual fact, encounter accounts can be said to bear the proper mixture of discernible and inexplicable, or in other words what one might expect from an actual phenomenon. In the latter category, of course, we find as mentioned the "absurdly theatrical procedures" given in many accounts. Likewise, the theatrics do not end there: accounts of extraterrestrials showing up in absurdly obvious and phony disguises (wigs, fake moustaches) exist, as well as graphic visual transmissions, apparently telepathic in their method of transmission (from visions of the earth burning in environmental or nuclear conflagration to the aliens and their "little jokes": one account has an abductee asking what goes faster than light and being shown an image of a revolver bullet being fired into his head).

This effort to come to grips with the meaning of abduction accounts repeats the disagreement between Kant and Hegel (believe it or not): Kant believing that some things simply cannot be known (thing-in-itself) having recourse to so-called regulative ideas with a purely operational validity, Hegel believing that Kant's standpoint to be self-contradictory, and that anything known to be unknown is necessarily known, i.e. everything is knowable by definition.

When it was suggested at the end of the show that we simply can't know or understand the aliens' motives, we have an effort to impose a regulative idea on something fixed as completely unknowable by definition. Of course, what creeps up from underneath is the stubborn fact that some things do seem knowable -- pop up as perfectly plausible to human intelligence (Hegel) even if that intelligence is ultimately proved incorrect, namely the lamented recurring themes in the abduction literature, based in part on what are said to be explicit communications, etc. So to use a spatial metaphor, the truth is "somewhere in between", or better yet, out there where reality is located as evidenced by our continued cognitively-bipolar attempts to process it.

A future historian of science, or of human thought in general, will no doubt get a real kick out of our efforts to come to grips with this giant issue about which we know so little, and the patterns that our thinking routinely exhibits in doing so.

 

[auntiegrav]

Likewise, the theatrics do not end there: accounts of extraterrestrials showing up in absurdly obvious and phony disguises (wigs, fake moustaches) exist, as well as graphic visual transmissions, apparently telepathic in their method of transmission (from visions of the earth burning in environmental or nuclear conflagration to the aliens and their "little jokes": one account has an abductee asking what goes faster than light and being shown an image of a revolver bullet being fired into his head).

When it was suggested at the end of the show that we simply can't know or understand the aliens' motives, we have an effort to impose a regulative idea on something fixed as completely unknowable by definition. Of course, what creeps up from underneath is the stubborn fact that some things do seem knowable -- pop up as perfectly plausible to human intelligence (Hegel) even if that intelligence is ultimately proved incorrect, namely the lamented recurring themes in the abduction literature, based in part on what are said to be explicit communications, etc. So to use a spatial metaphor, the truth is "somewhere in between", or better yet, out there where reality is located as evidenced by our continued cognitively-bipolar attempts to process it.

So, in a nutshell, you are saying that by branding the confusing as unknowable, we are limiting our ability to understand what may turn out to be reality..? Ok, I'm gellin' with that.

In other words, we shouldn't say we know what reality isn't until we know what it really is.

I agree completely. One additional point, though: As much as I hate statistics ("lies, damn lies, and statistics"), experience has demonstrated that the vast majority of demons turn out to be either not real or else human in origin, yet we often hear people say things like "No humans have ever built something x size." or "Humans aren't advanced enough to do anything like that."
This is the same type of thinking as saying "we can't guess what an alien would do".
Some of the biggest scientific projects we are awed by are not all that great of a leap of imagination, but an incredibly detailed bit of coordination and planning and development. Problems are solved one at a time, and complexity comes about from simple solutions that are added together again and again.
The post office once launched a rocket full of mail to say it could be done. No sensible person would think that was a useful, practical way to get mail delivered, yet they did it anyway.
There's no limit to the deceit and waste that our secret governments have achieved in the name of "because we can". While witnesses bicker over the color of the lights they see, our government probably builds giant triangles to deliver drugs to street gangs to raise cash for mercenaries.
While I am fond of the ETH over the multidimensional hypothesis, I am also not ignoring the HFH (human fraud hypothesis), which takes on many forms, from individuals to the multinationals (and possibly beyond).

 

[Heinrich Moltke]

In a nutshell, that was my point.

But there is more to it, of course. Mention was made during the interview of the constitution of reality by the mind at the quantum level in regards to the abduction phenomenon itself, its many facets. While I have always thought that the notion of an observer in quantum mechanics influencing or even constituting an object or event by his perception coincides with the Kantian synthesis a priori, it seems to me that in humans at least, this is limited to what we would call the sensory. Our consciousness is not powerful enough to influence reality in as bald as way as supposed by some when it comes to abduction accounts. I am not able to turn a tree into a chair simply by thinking it: there is no reason to suppose that the very physical events of encounters or abductions, which are multi-faceted and complicated, are a kind of fanciful intervention in reality that is self-generated or some quantum mechanical projection into reality of a collective unconscious Earth-mother vibe, as was toyed with in the interview.

Although, it does raise one possible angle to the why-don't-they-land-on-the-White-House-lawn objection: if an advanced consciousness were to overtly come into contact with a lesser one, it might influence the lesser one more than just at a cultural level -- it might risk 're-constituting' it at the so-called quantum level, influencing it in a profound way at a deep level that the lesser consciousness might not even realize. Thus the need to use kid-gloves would end up being much more urgent than even supposed by those who use the West vs. Native Americans analogy in supposing that overt contact is not made because it would rob human civilization of unique developments that might be of use to all (after being subsumed or at least thwarted in the direction of the alien civilization).

As regards your point about the human fraud hypothesis, I naturally would say that fraud occurs, hoaxes exist, and so on. But I'm wary of enshrining it as a hypothesis, or any hypotheses in general. One of the limitations of science is that its methodology is institutionalized, and presenting a hypothesis away from the data which is supposed to generate it is accepted scientific practice, but it is still mostly a gesture, a kind of ritual that has primarily institutional significance. If I see a video of a supposed UFO and it is fake, then I call it a hoax -- I advance the hypothesis that it is a hoax. But I don't then abstract that hypothesis qua hypothesis -- in other words, I don't deduce from that hypothesis its own general brand of hypothesis. That interferes with true agnostic abduction because the temptation to re-apply that hypothesis now in generalized form becomes too great.

This may sound contrary to practice, but I submit that it is and has been the practice of the best science: a hypothesis is advanced only based on the data at hand, and to the maximum extent possible consciousness of that hypothesis qua hypothesis is suppressed for the greatest possible interval. Only after being suggested by the data again and again is a hypothesis referred to in a useful way. At the current stage of study of abduction accounts, with the landscape as complicated as it is, I myself would advise against bandying about hypotheses when what is really going on is out-and-out speculation.

 

[auntiegrav]

This may sound contrary to practice, but I submit that it is and has been the practice of the best science: a hypothesis is advanced only based on the data at hand, and to the maximum extent possible consciousness of that hypothesis qua hypothesis is suppressed for the greatest possible interval. Only after being suggested by the data again and again is a hypothesis referred to in a useful way. At the current stage of study of abduction accounts, with the landscape as complicated as it is, I myself would advise against bandying about hypotheses when what is really going on is out-and-out speculation.

That's probably the best advice concerning terminology.
I revise my phrase "Human Fraud Hypothesis" to "Human Fraud Practices", as the importance lies in the reality, not the premature conclusions of one person. We know there are some fraudulent practices and disinformation systems being applied to many aspects of aerial phenomenon and reporting, along with some simple avoidance of the subject by media due to reputations and stigma. Finding an accurate label for practices which don't contribute usefully to understanding is quite important, I think ("lyin' cheatin' bastards" doesn't come out well in public).

It's all in the marketing.