Given real aliens, how can you be sure of making any claims at all about their civilization/technology/culture/anything without having the sort of observational evidence that would be necessary to make such claims?
We’re in Cartesian Demon territory when discussing these theoretical others. We can plop our human notions on top of them all we want, but unless we have direct, observable evidence of the way “they” think/operate/whatever, we can just as easily assume any given conclusion about them as just as likely as any other. And that includes all the N conclusions we haven’t even thought of (or simply can’t conceive of due to our necessarily human viewpoint).
It seems wildly overconfident to make any claims about them at all that aren’t completely hypothetical in the way you describe in your other reply here. Your idea that they either have to have capped tech or be actively trolling is itself just a hypothesis at best, and an idea at worst.
All filtered evidence is good for is formulating hypotheses, or even just inspiring ideas that are not hypotheses.
We can consider whatever, there is no fundamental duty to only think in particular ways. The useful constraints are on declaring something a claim of fact, not muddying epistemic commons or damaging decision relevant considerations; and in large quantities, on what makes terrible training data for the brain, damaging the aspects with known good properties. Everything else is work in progress, with boundaries impossible to codify while remaining on human level.
Given real aliens, how can you be sure of making any claims at all about their civilization/technology/culture/anything without having the sort of observational evidence that would be necessary to make such claims?
We’re in Cartesian Demon territory when discussing these theoretical others. We can plop our human notions on top of them all we want, but unless we have direct, observable evidence of the way “they” think/operate/whatever, we can just as easily assume any given conclusion about them as just as likely as any other. And that includes all the N conclusions we haven’t even thought of (or simply can’t conceive of due to our necessarily human viewpoint).
It seems wildly overconfident to make any claims about them at all that aren’t completely hypothetical in the way you describe in your other reply here. Your idea that they either have to have capped tech or be actively trolling is itself just a hypothesis at best, and an idea at worst.
We can consider whatever, there is no fundamental duty to only think in particular ways. The useful constraints are on declaring something a claim of fact, not muddying epistemic commons or damaging decision relevant considerations; and in large quantities, on what makes terrible training data for the brain, damaging the aspects with known good properties. Everything else is work in progress, with boundaries impossible to codify while remaining on human level.
Some thinking processes seem to be more useful for arriving at true or useful results; paying attention to that property of processes is rationality. This doesn’t disqualify processes of which we know less, that would be throwing away the full current force of your mind.
The other comment is about updating and credences. I’m not engaging in updating or credences in this thread.