Historian Dr Francis Young on extraterrestrial life and its imagined implications (Bluesky):
One of the most darkly funny scientistic pieties is the idea that the discovery of intelligent life beyond Earth would ‘humble’ humanity - given that in the late c19th and early c20th (an era renowned for human humility […]) it was a mainstream view that Mars was inhabited
It never ceases to amaze me how we have culturally memory-holed the fact that before c. 1920 it was perfectly normal to believe seriously that intelligent life existed on other planets in the Solar System
The discovery that Mars was likely lifeless … is a mid-20th-century development.
But the idea that a broad consensus that we are not alone in the universe will somehow inaugurate an era of world peace is pretty silly, given that many intelligent people believed this with complete seriousness in 1914.
It’s a good point!
Further back in history, the Medieval cosmology was also densely populated.
From The Discarded Image (Wikipedia) by C S Lewis (which I read on recommendation from Robin Sloan), there are intelligent, powerful gods - which we can see as planets - and angels and we have so much in common with other life on Earth:
The powers of Vegetable Soul are nutrition, growth and propagation. It alone is present in plants. Sensitive Soul, which we find in animals, has these powers but has sentience in addition. It thus includes and goes beyond Vegetable Soul, so that a beast can be said to have two levels of soul, Sensitive and Vegetable, or a double soul, or even – though misleadingly – two souls. Rational Soul similarly includes Vegetable and Sensitive, and adds reason.
(p153)
There are not just humans and angels, there are
bull-beggars, spirits, witches, urchins, elves, hags, fairies, satyrs, pans, faunes, spleens, tritons, centaurs, dwarfs, giants, nymphes, Incubus, Robin good fellow, the spoom, the man in the oke, the fire-drake, the puckle, Tom Thumbe, Tom tumbler, boneles, and other such bugs.
(p125)
We were not alone.
Still further, into the deep history of Eurasian magic, the 40,000 year-old system of belief underpinning the West:
Across the vast grasslands and forests of the Steppe in Central Asia and west into Europe, the world was animated by spirits, some originally human, others less so.
Animism is a mode of action, creating relations between kinds.
In conceiving of such relations it may be that all things, living and non-living, are seen as persons. Many groups do believe that all things are human, and hence have personhood, whether they may appear as a rock, or tapir or the Sun. Relations between persons are of amity, indifference or enmity…
And before you say that animism is an idea that we have moved past, and it is absurd that the rock falls to the Earth because of some kind of “amity”, let’s go back to Lewis in The Discarded Image who points out that our natural laws - such as the law of gravity - have an anthropological frame:
to talk as if [falling stones] could ‘obey laws’ is to treat them like men and even like citizens.
Still our language today.
So maybe let’s go further than Dr Francis Young…
The discovery of extraterrestrial life would not result in a humbling Copernican decentring of human consciousness.
Not just because a belief in extraterrestrial life has occurred before and we didn’t show much humility then.
But because (Eurasian) humanity already had its Copernican moment, tens of thousands of years ago, and animism means that humans have always been one mere consciousness among thousands.
Humanity has never felt alone and this is as humble as we get.
I can’t help but connect all of this with AI consciousness (on which topic I maintain an agnostic watching brief)…
If AI consciousness were shown to be real, the argument goes, we would need to update our ethics with “robot rights,” granting justice, autonomy and dignity to our fellow sentient beings.
(The short story Lena by qntm resonates because we instinctively see the treatment of the uploaded brain as Not Okay, even though it is just software, evidence that we do indeed have a kind of folk ethics for artificial non-humans.)
And that, we suppose, is what would cascade to a Copernican shift in how humanity sees itself, etc.
But I’ve never been sure that recognising AIs as sentient would make a blind bit of difference. As I said when I wrote about AI consciousness before (2023), I’m pretty sure that chickens are sentient and it doesn’t stop us doing all kinds of awful unethical things with them.
Even if you and I don’t agree on chicken sentience, what about people who work in sweatshops, and they are definitely sentient, and they don’t get access to the same “robot rights” currently being debated for future sentient AIs.
So if we’re hunting for a route to an expanded moral frame for humanity, I’m not sure we’ll find it purely via ET or AI. I wonder what it would take.
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Historian Dr Francis Young on extraterrestrial life and its imagined implications (Bluesky):
The discovery that
It’s a good point!
Further back in history, the Medieval cosmology was also densely populated.
From The Discarded Image (Wikipedia) by C S Lewis (which I read on recommendation from Robin Sloan), there are intelligent, powerful gods - which we can see as planets - and angels and we have so much in common with other life on Earth:
(p153)
There are not just humans and angels, there are
(p125)
We were not alone.
Still further, into the deep history of Eurasian magic, the 40,000 year-old system of belief underpinning the West:
Animism is
And before you say that animism is an idea that we have moved past, and it is absurd that the rock falls to the Earth because of some kind of “amity”, let’s go back to Lewis in The Discarded Image who points out that our natural laws - such as the law of gravity - have an anthropological frame:
Still our language today.
So maybe let’s go further than Dr Francis Young…
The discovery of extraterrestrial life would not result in a humbling Copernican decentring of human consciousness.
Not just because a belief in extraterrestrial life has occurred before and we didn’t show much then.
But because (Eurasian) humanity already had its Copernican moment, tens of thousands of years ago, and animism means that humans have always been one mere consciousness among thousands.
Humanity has never felt alone and this is as humble as we get.
I can’t help but connect all of this with AI consciousness (on which topic I maintain an agnostic watching brief)…
If AI consciousness were shown to be real, the argument goes, we would need to update our ethics with “robot rights,” granting justice, autonomy and dignity to our fellow sentient beings.
(The short story Lena by qntm resonates because we instinctively see the treatment of the uploaded brain as Not Okay, even though it is just software, evidence that we do indeed have a kind of folk ethics for artificial non-humans.)
And that, we suppose, is what would cascade to a Copernican shift in how humanity sees itself, etc.
But I’ve never been sure that recognising AIs as sentient would make a blind bit of difference. As I said when I wrote about AI consciousness before (2023), I’m pretty sure that chickens are sentient and it doesn’t stop us doing all kinds of awful unethical things with them.
Even if you and I don’t agree on chicken sentience, what about people who work in sweatshops, and they are definitely sentient, and they don’t get access to the same “robot rights” currently being debated for future sentient AIs.
So if we’re hunting for a route to an expanded moral frame for humanity, I’m not sure we’ll find it purely via ET or AI. I wonder what it would take.