Lex Fridman: prediction

Transcript context

…But that’s different than saying that they’re living among us. If you tell me that there’s aliens living five galaxies over and that they’re just out there somewhere, I’m more on your side than that they’re here, because just like Bigfoot, we have camera traps. We have DNA sequencing through water now. You’re telling me no one found one wingnut of a ship in all… The Egyptians up until right now, no one in Russia saw a crashed ship, took a picture, tweeted that shit real quick and… I think there’s no Bigfoot, there’s no trivial manifestations of aliens. I think if they’re here, they’re here in ways that are not comprehensible by humans, because they’re far more advanced than humans. They’re far more advanced than any life forms on earth. So even if it’s just their probes, we cannot just even comprehend it. I think it’s possible that they operate in the space of ideas, for example, that ideas could be aliens, feelings could be aliens. Consciousness itself could be aliens. So we can’t restrict our understanding of what is a life form to a thing that is a biological creature that operates via natural selection on this particular planet. It could be much, much, much more sophisticated. It could be in a space of computation, for example. As we in the 21st century are developing increasingly sophisticated computational systems with artificial intelligence, it could be operating on some other level that we can’t even imagine. It could be operating on a level of physics that we have not even begun to understand. We barely understand quantum mechanics. We use it. Quantum mechanics is a way we used to make very accurate predictions, but to understand why it’s operating that way, we don’t. And there’s so many gigantic powerful cosmic entities out there that we detect, sometimes can’t detect, dark matter, dark energy, but it’s out there. We know it exists, but we can’t explain why and what the fuck it is. We give it names, black holes and dark energy and dark matter, but those are all names for things that mathematical equations predict, but we don’t understand. And so all of that is just to say that aliens could be here in ways that are for now and maybe for a long time going to be impossible for humans to understand. So aliens in the strict biological sense, like horseshoe crabs, we agree that we haven’t found physical aliens?…

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