I don’t have a brain!!
I can’t talk like a normal human being, I’m an alien!!
I don’t have a long white beard, a long green one maybe!!
So what’s it like to be me… an alien?
Alien??
Ummm… do you have stairs in your house?
Float mostly, occasionally bounce.
OK, in that case, listen carefully. Feel free to post like this in threads that you make in MB or the Rant House. However, posting like this in other threads (such as the merchandise thread) will lead to your posts being deleted, and repeated violations will lead to your banning.
Sorry, I was only trying to contribute my suggestions on the ILP merchandise thread. I will be more serious from now on.
My question is a serious one despite being in MB.
What is it like to be an alien?
Thomas Nagel asked a similar question about bats.
Interestingly Colin McGinn states:
“The bats have the experiences, all right, but we humans aren’t able to know what they are like. Maybe there are also things about the physical cosmos that we won’t ever be able to penetrate - the origin of the universe, the ultimate structure of matter and energy. In a way it is surprising we know as much about the world as we do, given that we are recently evolved creatures with a finite brain capacity. If reality is independent of knowledge, as realism supposes, then it is entirely a contingent matter which facets of it are knowable to us.”
I’m pondering the potential unknowability of reality, and the deeply puzzling nature of the mind-brain relation.
Anyone have any suggestions or thoughts on this?
Haha, no need to be serious, man. Just try and keep it out of serious threads. Otherwise, be as alien as you like.
Ok HVD.
Just trying to be light hearted but serious at the same time. Us aliens do suffer from happiness, find it hard to be melancholy. Just want to float around, laugh and bounce mostly.
Stairs, I have no need of them I can float!!
After reading about Nagel I spent quite a lot of time imagining what it would be like to be a bat. I tried imagining their echo finding like a visual field in which you had depth perception to a much higher degree than we presently do and also that it’s a bit like being in a disco where they’re doing the rapidly flashing lights, so everything seems very jerky.
But then I considered that I probably still had no idea, after all did you ever hear of the blind man who was told what orange looked like and he said “Hmmm, I imagine it’s rather like the taste of pineapple”.
On another point about bats and something most people don’t seem to know, have you ever been walking down the street at night and felt something rush at your face from above but nothing actually touched you? Because it was probably a bat, happens all the time in the country but only occasionally in the city, they’ll probably make a few passes trying to figure out what you are. It’s happened a few times when I’ve been with friends and I’ve always found the city dwellers had no idea what it was and put it down to a bird (at night!).
my mother is an alien. but only cause she is an english lady living in the states…
i guess i cant really qualify as a half alien then. DRAT
It’s hard to take you serious with an Avatar of a bouncing green man.
to answer your question how does it feel to be an Alien. It feels fine. I am a Dominican man (cause of birth) living and serving in the states. So under Obscure’s bandwagon, I guess I’m 100% alien.
the truth is, is that I come from a planet named Avalon.
I was deliberately trying to be provocative and get the serious philosophers roused from their snugness. I think it was a success. I don’t see why a bouncing green man shouldn’t be taken any less seriously than an avatar boldly displaying ‘The XXI Empire’ or no avatar at all or whatever. I can change my avatar and morph into some other form. So for now I shall proudly display a wonderous view from my world far far away. It should never be forgotten that outward appearances should not be used to judge a person, human or otherwise (aliens included!).
I shall continue in a somewhat sombre mood befitting a philospohy discussion forum. Be warned I may laugh at any time and for no apparent reason, but hey that’s just what aliens are like!!
Thank you Mat, I too have tried to imagine what it is like to be a bat, but sadly without success, I just fell to the ground with a ‘thud’. I guess gravity got the better of me.
What I’m now struggling to get to grips with is trying to imagine objects without any colour (color for our US friends). Not even any shades of grey (gray) or black or white. Simply no colours at all. I’m convinced that our perception of reality (whatever ‘reality’ is) shapes our thoughts and reasoning.
In regards to the perception shaping reality, Matthew E. posted a rather interesting quote about Bohm and how Bohm thought that our language had shaped our perception of reality, I thought it was quite the opposite. Unfortunatly the discussion never went any further. As for there being no colour in a bat’s perception, there will be some sort of interpretation of the sound “sound” and “not sound”. It would rather be like the difference of “light” and “not light”. They may have even learnt to differentiate between different type of sound reflection, which would be colour for them (almost all of our senses are differential, after all)
Hey Alien, Naw man… I was just kidding. What I meant was that even if you are in the serious threads and you are joking around, I wouldn’t take it in a bad way. Your bouncing green man avatar shows something about your character, and I personally liked it. This one is cool, but the other one was better. I am the last person that would judge a person for their appearence. Sorry if I offended you, I meant it only in jest.
no hard feelings, I hope.
Thanks Smooth, apology accepted. Although I didn’t mean you specifically, was referring to ppl in general.
Btw I think you should lead the movement that jjj suggested. He may not make much sense in other areas, but that is one of his slightly sensible ideas. Not that any social utopian movement could ever become universally accepted, as an interesting ‘meme’ it would be a fun topic for discussion. We could only try to ‘infect’ other minds by our simple yet powerful and irrefutable dialectic. You never know it could even eventually spread worldwide like a global pandemic!!
its funny you mentioned that alien… myself and smooth have a little experiment XXI Affiliates.
as you can see we were and still are inspired by ILP.com.
Awesome!!! That was great! Hey Alien, I really want to use that.
Here are some words from Method Man that I contemplate on when thinking about the Mental Revolution:
“As the world turns, I spread like germs!
Bless the globe with the pestilence,
the hard headed never learn!”
BTW, how do you link a website to words like that?
I’ll ask my friend what it is like being an Allen…
hold on… whoops… got to start reading more carefully.
MentulZen.
Hmm interesting stuff.
The way I see things is, or like to think things are, like this…
Everything that exists is a wave of a particular frequency.
If we take those frequency of waves on a scale of 0 to 100, 0 being the slowest and 100 being the fastest, then the sounds wales emit are very low on the scale, these are sounds but also a wave, and the wave has a very lowfrequency. These would be about 10 on the scale. Sounds as we know them would appear from maybe 10 to 20. Smells on the other hand are a vibration of higher frequency, say 30 to 40. Taste again is a higher(or lower depending, I have no data etc to check, it is only an idea) vibration, say 50 to 60. Then we have colours which are in the range of 70 to 80, then radiation etc all the way up to light at 100, being the fastest possible thing, it is at the top of the scale.
Now I suggest that each of our senses is tuned to pick up certain frequencies between certain ranges, and if our sense get a bit mixed up (which mine have, being schizophrenic, but I shan’t go into what I have experienced here) it is actually possible to smell a colour or see a sound.
We are pretty sure that different animals can see in different visual ranges, for axample some night hunters may be able to pick up signals in the infra red range. We use this to develop technology to enhance our feeble senses.
Now if only we could mess with a human brain in some way to cross link the senses… oh hold on, we can, I think they are called Psychoactive drugs.
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Alien, ever tried to imagine a brand new colour in your head?
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PnLnS.
MentulZen.
what about trying to make yourself reach orgasm just with your thoughts? With no ejaculation?