Snot all that hard, I guess. Anyway SRS, you haven't been paying attention! I have never posted about an obscure intergalactic atomic body. I have enough trouble keeping track of all the obvious, ground-hugging Terran-defined, macro-scale bodies around here!!

I did hear the most interesting diatribe today about intelligence today, in a taped lecture I was playing in my car, which I believe was called Matter and Consciousness by Paul Churchland. Anyway, he's going on about intelligence and whether it exists on other planets and so on, and he makes an interesting observations.

1. It is perfectly possible to be highly intelligent and have no capability to grasp numbers, math or arithmetic whatsoever.

2. It is perfectly possible to be highly intelligent and have no capability for language.

Both these conditions occasionally occur in humans.

So on the subject of possible patterns of alien intelligence, we should be prepared, should the day ever come, that it is possible to encounter a high intelligence from some other species which not only does not "do" math, or language, but has no idea such things exist.

This, he goes on, opens the door to another interesting question, namely that their may be modes of intelligence which we don't know exist, for which we do not have the capability, and which have all kinds of endless horizons in them just as mathematics and language seem to have.

How about THEM apples, huh? I mean, suppose you were an organism in a distant system, just for larks, who had evolved to be the united cellular awareness of the whole planet -- just one entity, a whole planet. No reason why not -- just because our organism is multi-iterative doesn't mean theirs has to be.

And imagine you used some of these areas of intelligence for which Terrans have no capabilities. To a Terran, the lights by which you measure your whole intellectual existence are not lights at all, not even a working channel, not even the little lit-up number that NAMES a channel of perception.

What do you think about?




A