The alien hypothesis?

[jbor at bigpond.com]

On 16/10/2005 John Doe wrote:

> A 'concept" is not a self-defining system; it's a
> concept...concepts are not "systems" in any meening
> full use of the term...and the concept for
> 'intelligent life', like any other concept, is as
> clear and defined , or as murky and wooly, as any
> given individual's expression of it in his/her
> imagination...

The simple point is that the concept of "intelligent life" is being 
defined subjectively, or via subjective consensus. It's comparable to 
the ways in which "Religion" imagines its "God/s" existing 
anthropomorphically (if that's the right word). Humans decide or 
project the boundaries of what "intelligent life" can mean; in other 
words, "Science" creates "intelligent life" in its own image. And once 
you come up with the hypotheses and get the calculations and 
experimentation rolling, then you are certainly setting up a system. 
Other life forms (which is the ostensible subject of the research) 
might be operating within different parameters, might value different 
data sets. Isn't it a bit arrogant -- if nothing else -- to dictate 
what the hypothetical life forms need to be before you've even run 
across them?

A-and I can imagine *really* smart extraterrestrials not wanting to 
have a bar of us.

As to Baudrillard's stance on extraterrestrials, well ... But his work 
(pad and pencil stuff to begin with too) isn't equivalent to your 
travesty of it either. And that's part of the point of much Critical 
Theory; the ways in which dominant discourses in cultures and 
communities are promulgated and sustained. How it's really easy to use 
language and rhetoric to dismiss ideas and beliefs and people you don't 
like, or can't profit from.

Coincidentally, the exhibition reviews in the Visual Art section (not 
on-line, sorry) of yesterday's paper here started off by citing 
Baudrillard's 'The Conspiracy of Art' article (and ended by calling 
Michael Houellebecq a "repulsive hack novelist"):

"On May 20, 1996, the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard shocked his 
acolytes by declaring in a newspaper article that contemporary art was 
null and void. ... 'The Conspiracy of Art' has recently been published 
in an anthology of essays and interviews and it is even more potent 
today than in 1996. Baudrillard's opinion is unambiguous. Art today 
suffers from a kind of 'obesity' -- there is too much of everything. 
When art is everywhere, it is nowhere. Contemporary art is nothing more 
than a form of 'insider trading', a closed system, a self-referential 
and self-reverential world. The banalisation of aesthetics and the 
aestheticisation of banality are the same thing, and equally null. ... 
"

http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol2_2/lotringer.htm

http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=10618

best

> there's nothing self-defining about
> it....a buncha folks have developed notions, ideas,
> imaginings etc., about what they mean by
> intelligent...just like any other "sign"  to glibly
> borrow from Saussure...and the "referents" in this
> world are real, not "arbitrary"...when a person,
> including a Post-Modernist, 'refers' to his doughnut,
> he/she does not really, in their heart of hearts,
> believe that its 'not there' - just a linguistic
> construct..the fucking doughnut is REALLY their, and
> maybe the language doesn't ontologically certify this,
> but everyone's BEHAVIOR does...that's what's lost on
> people like Baudrillard..nobody LIVES the way you'd
> think they would IF the World were a mere plasma, a
> skein, of linguistically induced
> hallucinations...scientists don't need this kind of
> silly view, and have been figuring things out just
> fine without it...and will continue to do so, even to
> the chagrin of others who think equations are
> "arbitrary" ; yeah- duh! - the selection of symbols is
> arbitrary; but the 'referents, like Gravitation, are
> not...these are real forces, or to put it as loosely
> as possible, these are real things-going-on, not
> verbal ciphers...
>
>
>>> Actually, "Science" does seem to spend an awful
>> lot of time (and money)
>>> investigating whether Mars could support, or has
>> supported, organic
>>> life and so forth. I'd imagine that the
>> probability of the existence of
>>> "life" elsewhere in the universe could be
>> calculated scientiffically,
>>> i.e. via some sort of equation where the expanse
>> of the known universe
>>> is moderated against the likelihood of
>> environmental and chemical
>>> conditions needed to generate and sustain "life"
>> manifesting
>>> spontaneously. I suspect that the odds would be
>> quite good.
>>> Hypothetically-speaking, that is.
>>>
>>> As to "intelligent life" or UFOs, well, that'd be
>> a separate equation.
>>> Or a derivative of the first. But the concept of
>> "intelligent life" is
>>> problematic in that it's another one of those
>> self-defining systems or
>>> semantic constructs. And, coming at it from
>> another perspective, it's a
>>> little but egotistical, if not downright
>> solipsistic, to assume for
>>> oneself the mantle of supreme being in all of
>> existence.
>> The Drake equation:
>> N=R* x fp x ne x fl x fi x fc xL
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation   for
>> what it all means.
>>
>> David Gentle
>>
>
>
>
> 		
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