Advanced Civilizations

[Moontanman]

I would like to discuss the old adage that aliens thousands or millions of years ahead of us in technology would be similar to us vs ants. 

 

My stance is that this idea is not tenable, while technology might advance to give the users of that technology almost god like powers the individuals would still be more or less equal to us as individuals.

 

If we could go back in time 100,000 years and take a human child or maybe even a neanderthal child and raise it in the modern era it would have the same intelligence more or less as a modern human.

 

In fact if you brought back an adult from that time period it should be possible to educate him or her enough so that they understood that the things we can do are products of technology and not magic.

 

It stands to reason that beings with advanced technology would have no evolutionary pressure to become super intelligent but would like us rely on their technology.

 

In fact there is a school of thought that asserts that humans are individually becoming less intelligent on average than we were when man had to be a jack of all trades and figure out how to do things either by being told by a peer or figuring it out  himself. 

 

We stand on the shoulders of giants, we arguably have the entire knowledge of humanity at our finger tips, no extra intelligence needed and the suggestion that brain size is decreasing in modern humans instead of enlarging or remaining the same could lend some credence to this. 

[A-wal]

What if, due to overpopulation and tradition later on, they've been only allowing their most intelligent individuals to reproduce for the last few billion years?

 

Those are the ones we're more likely to meet because the more advanced the are, the further away from their home they'd be able to go.

[Moontanman]

What if, due to overpopulation and tradition later on, they've been only allowing their most intelligent individuals to reproduce for the last few billion years?

 

Those are the ones we're more likely to meet because the more advanced the are, the further away from their home they'd be able to go.

 

That is of course always a possibility but why, with access to the total knowledge of their civilization, would they want to be individually more intelligent? with out their technology the extra smarts would serve no real advantage. Whales, for instance, have huge complex brains but the lack of manipulative organs, hands, limits the usefulness of their brains. 

 

I guess what I am trying to say is to what end would huge IQs serve if someone who is only smart enough to use the technology can do anything a smarter being could do. Actually now that I have typed that I wonder if biology could compete with technology as a way to improve the individual. 

 

Of course this is difficult to really speculate about and other creatures could have motives we cannot understand but from an evolutionary aspect changes in biology have costs to the individual that technology can solve or supplement with out a biological cost and can change in an individuals life time instead of having to wait for the benefits to take effect in later generations.

 

If you cannot benefit from the biology why make the effort to change something that technology can do immediately?

 

I am not sure that an individuals intelligence would make them any more likely to star travel than improvements in technology.  

[A-wal]

I firmly believe that we're only aware of a small slice of reality and I would expect any advanced civilisation to be explorers of not only three dimensional space but other 'realms' of existence. Technology is a means to an an end, not an end in itself, it would serve to heighten their awareness and intelligence.

 

We are more than capable of experiencing other places, we just need to either meditate properly so that our brains release DMT or cheat and just take some DMT.

[Moontanman]

I firmly believe that we're only aware of a small slice of reality and I would expect any advanced civilisation to be explorers of not only three dimensional space but other 'realms' of existence. Technology is a means to an an end, not an end in itself, it would serve to heighten their awareness and intelligence.

 

We are more than capable of experiencing other places, we just need to either meditate properly so that our brains release DMT or cheat and just take some DMT.

 

 

i will tell you like it was told to me, belief is not the same as knowledge and strength of belief has no bearing on reality... 

Edited March 2, 2016 by Moontanman

[A-wal]

Of course not, but what people experience through DMT (and some other chemicals) is no less real than what we experience without them.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MML30JwG-6E Where you go isn't some internal realm of imagination. The things experienced there could never be fabricated like that, it's a real place.

 

We've always got a mixture of chemicals running through us, what makes one any less valid than the other?

 

What we think of as reality is a purely subjective experience any anything that alters that perception isn't automatically any less 'real'.

 

 

Here's another much shorter video that's a really nicely explained introduction to it.

[CraigD]

Of course not, but what people experience through DMT (and some other chemicals) is no less real than what we experience without them.

...

Where you go isn't some internal realm of imagination. The things experienced there could never be fabricated like that, it's a real place.

Let me start by saying I completely understand this worldview, A-wal. It’s one I shared for a long, strange while myself. From the Bus to the Rainbow road to the Eagle’s Path, I’ve been there.

 

However, ordinary reality has a critical characteristic that all “realities” of altered consciousness lack: it’s capable of storing retrievable data. This is the key reason we refer to it as “objective”, “shared” and “consensus”. Anyone can write data into objective reality, such as by inscribing glyphs on paper, which later they or others can read. You simply, demonstrably, can’t do this in an altered consciousness reality – they’re private to the individual, not shared.

 

The obvious explanation is that all species of private experiences are internal – they take place entirely in the brain and nervous system of the experiencer. Because we’re unable to read one another’s thoughts or memories, we cannot share data other than via objective reality.

 

This is not to say that we can’t learn from experiences of altered consciousness. But as strongly as you believe that tryptamines allow us to experience realities other than the ordinary, I believe that they merely alter our perception of ordinary reality, the wondrousness of which I think you under appreciate.

[A-wal]

I don't undervalue what we tend to think of as conventional reality at all. Some aspects of it are beautiful and I can't image them being replicated in other states of consciousness. It's why I train in martial arts. I've never been interested in self defence, I'm in it purely for the art. I think it gets its beauty from phi, our whole body is designed with this ratio and it would be interesting to trace out the angles of the paths the movements. I have a feeling it would create sacred geometry patterns.

It's very difficult to test whether altered states can be thought of as objective (as objective as reality can get anyway) reality because you don't have complete control of your movement. There are tests that could be done but it's very difficult for scientists to get funding for this type of research. The biggest hurdle isn't scientific, it sociological. There's a huge stigma with these kinds of topics within the 'scientific' community and a stigma against drugs generally. It's a real shame.

It's amazing how similar peoples experiences are. Yes, they're using the same chemical but look how varied peoples experiences of other drugs like alcohol are. If the realm experienced were purely internal I would expect more or less every experience to be unique to the observer. It's very interesting that we create this chemical naturally and can create much more through focused meditation. I experience very mild versions of this occasionally through training, at the times when it feels like there's no real distinction between my mind and body and everything just flows. Love it when that happens. :)

This is a very deep subject, the ultimate rabbit hole in fact and I could talk all day about it, this barely scratches the surface. I just think that if we want to imagine how an advanced extraterrestrial race might be more advanced than we are, this is the area that really matters. Better technology would make them better equipped to do stuff but this is actual advancement, consciousness. It's the only way they could see us as "ants".

Edited March 3, 2016 by A-wal

[Moontanman]

I don't undervalue what we tend to think of as conventional reality at all. Some aspects of it are beautiful and I can't image them being replicated in other states of consciousness. It's why I train in martial arts. I've never been interested in self defence, I'm in it purely for the art. I think it gets its beauty from phi, our whole body is designed with this ratio and it would be interesting to trace out the angles of the paths the movements. I have a feeling it would create sacred geometry patterns.

 

It's very difficult to test whether altered states can be thought of as objective (as objective as reality can get anyway) reality because you don't have complete control of your movement. There are tests that could be done but it's very difficult for scientists to get funding for this type of research. The biggest hurdle isn't scientific, it sociological. There's a huge stigma with these kinds of topics within the 'scientific' community and a stigma against drugs generally. It's a real shame.

 

It's amazing how similar peoples experiences are. Yes, they're using the same chemical but look how varied peoples experiences of other drugs like alcohol are. If the realm experienced were purely internal I would expect more or less every experience to be unique to the observer. It's very interesting that we create this chemical naturally and can create much more through focused meditation. I experience very mild versions of this occasionally through training, at the times when it feels like there's no real distinction between my mind and body and everything just flows. Love it when that happens. :)

 

This is a very deep subject, the ultimate rabbit hole in fact and I could talk all day about it, this barely scratches the surface. I just think that if we want to imagine how an advanced extraterrestrial race might be more advanced than we are, this is the area that really matters. Better technology would make them better equipped to do stuff but this is actual advancement, consciousness. It's the only way they could see us as "ants".

 

 

Lets set aside the altered states, I think it is off topic at least and certainly does not add anything tangible to the discussion. If you want to continue with an altered thread of your own I will be glad to discuss it there. 

 

Lets get back to my contention that an advanced civilization would still be made up of individuals whose use of technologies might make them able to do god like things but not be individually anymore advanced than we are currently. This certainly holds true for us, a human from 150,000 years ago would still be as human and as powerful or powerless as technology permits or limits us today.  

 

Advanced technology hasn't raised us up individually even though we arguably have the complete knowledge of mankind at our fingertips... 

 

Fiction offers us a glimpse of this, we are a type .01 technology, to be type 1.0 we would have had to harness the energy equivalent of our sun, in fiction the STNG Federation would be an example of a type 1.0 civilization. An example of a type 2.0 civilization would be the "Borg" and in this example the individuals are inferior to us and have been taken over by technology. This is a paraphrasing of Dr. Michio Kaku's examples of what those type civilizations would look like.  

[A-wal]

I don't think it's off topic at all, because:

Advanced technology hasn't raised us up individually even though we arguably have the complete knowledge of mankind at our fingertips...

 

I agree, I don't think technology will be what makes another civilisation more 'advanced' than us. If we meet an alien race with the technology to get here then it won't be that that makes them see us as inferior.

[Moontanman]

I don't think it's off topic at all, because:

I agree, I don't think technology will be what makes another civilisation more 'advanced' than us. If we meet an alien race with the technology to get here then it won't be that that makes them see us as inferior.

 

 

What would make them see us as inferior? 

[A-wal]

You said you didn't want me talking about altered states. A wider perception of reality would make them see us as inferior, a broader perception of existence. If the same way that we have that compared to an ant. It's very naive to think that what we are aware of is all there is on the basis that it's all we're aware of, most of us anyway. ;)

[Maine farmer]

What about the Borg from Star Trek, and the Replicants from Stargate SG1?  Sometimes I think the human race is heading for a Borg - like existence , If we don't self - destruct first.