All about natural stuff, page 1

All about natural stuff
Or an essay about theoretical alien nature and human nature.

Some time ago on a different board of Above Top Secret I placed my personal view about how the human mind works and a little bit about how higher and lower beings would interact with their surroundings. I say ‘personal view’ because I believe that such discussions are always philosophical in nature and not yet capable of being factual in science. My initial writing of the subject was caused by the view of some members here at ATS at human and alien nature, a subject by itself very hypothetical. I decided to place the article on another sub-forum of Above Top Secret because it went more over the theoretical functioning of the human mind and the origins of self awareness then over aliens. On the bottom of this article is a hyperlink referring to the before mentioned article named ‘The incapable Machine’. In case any of you would like some more background before continuing this article I advise to read it and post any problems and views with my writings at that article there.

While the article ‘The incapable Machine’ ended up as an article about the origin of the human conscience, its initial goal was to correct some apparently erroneous thinking in the existence of alien conscience. Once again I point out the ‘apparently erroneous’ part since we are talking about a hypothetical issue and not a factual issue. The issue of alien conscience becomes a factual issue the very moment aliens land in our backyard and hold a press statement.

As a starting point of my essay I would like to take the point that alien conscience is by no means different from human conscience. We should assume that the conscience part is the same regarding any intelligent sentient race regardless of their origins. As stated in my piece The Incapable Machine I go out from conscience as being a continuous stream of decisions and that decisions are being made on the basis of three factors, these being:

- Genetic Inheritance; the genetic basis of a intelligent being determined when conception takes place.
- Travelled past; The history of a subject’s life and the consequences flowing forward of it.
- Current situation; The situation we are in at the moment of making a decision.

I also mentioned the meta-factor of the future, once more for more information click the links below this article.

I name this part because I consider them a general part of making decisions and as a universally correct model for all sentient races that life within the same dimensional limitations as we do. As such we should assume that races that are restricted toward the three dimensions and the factor time will all make their decisions upon their genetic inheritance, travelled past and current situation while still regarding the meta-factor ‘future’. As long as we regard the beings as being in the same temporal plain as us we should assume that their way of making decisions is the same as ours.
It can certainly be remarked that other alien civilizations have different genetics, difference travelled pasts, different current situations but that underlying process for making decisions will remain the same.

While we as humans might think that a decision of an alien race might seem odd, when we analyze the race enough we should be able to determine the reason for the decisions such a race makes, how odd they might seem. In that way, analyzing an aliens actions is the same as analyzing that of another human except that many factor we are used to contemplate with might be different. The body of an alien might not necessarily have two eyes, two arms and two legs, the planet of an alien might be different of earth, yet despite this, the decisions will be similar.

With this we can generally say that any intelligent sentient race, human or otherwise will have conscience at the same way as us as long as their advancement is still determined by the same restrictions as ours. There are however some notable cases that have different effects;

- Less awareness
- More awareness
- Extra-dimensional

In ‘ The Incapable machine’ I mentioned the cases of less awareness and more awareness, at that moment I handled the case of less awareness quite a bit. I mentioned that less awareness can be seen as the animals on our planet. The animals on our planet have less brainpower and as a result their conscience is limited, there are more ‘unknown factors’ but due to a lack of brain capacity the illusion of conscience is limited. Animals are with that closer to machines in one way then we humans. To explain this we need to understand that what we experience as ‘self awareness’ is merely an illusion created by the brain to explain decisions made by our conscience that seem inexplicable. As explained in The Incapable Machine self awareness is an illusion created by our brains lack of knowledge regarding the three factors that make up consciousness. We don’t know our exact genetic composition and the results of this, we don’t know exactly how our travelled past influences our decisions and we don’t know every factor influencing us in our current situation when making a decision. Our brain fixes this ‘black hole’ in our mind by creating the illusion of self awareness. By logical reasoning we should say that animals, that have brainpower to analyze their surroundings have a bigger ‘black hole’ and thus should have more self awareness, however the amount of self awareness is relative to that same brainpower and thus their self awareness is also less making the decisions closer to that of computer algorithms. Simply put, animals keep less track of their surroundings when making a decision then humans or other creatures with similar sentient abilities have. When we draw a line we can start with a computer; a computer only interests itself in the input relevant to it and ignores all others, in the worst cause it results in a flaw or error since it did not anticipate any other factor. Animals are a step higher, they are aware to a certain degree of their surroundings, it is needed to survive in the wild. Humans are even more aware, capable of high level of manipulation and yes use and abuse of that surroundings. With that I hope to have explained a little about creatures with less awareness.

Now to the juicy stuff. We now know how creatures with less awareness or the same amount of awareness think, let’s move on to creatures with more awareness. A creature with more awareness is capable of tracing even more factors from the outside world (more inputs in computer language) then humans and aliens with similar sentient abilities. Such creatures can track and keep account of more factors and inputs then we can. Essentially speaking the ‘black hole’ that exists is smaller and with that the illusion of self awareness still exists but in a diminished form. Instead, a creature with more awareness has a better awareness of its surroundings. Perhaps I can give a simple example;

When a human tosses a plastic bag on the ground, it knows that the plastic bag can damage the environment but a human rarely cares much about it because the human mind can’t exactly know what happens and is limited in its understanding of the results. In other words, the human mind has less empathy for its environment. Even humans acting for the sake of the environment eventually have more internal feelings then actual empathy for their surroundings. A being with more awareness would instantly see the results as if it experiences them and thus take a different action then tossing the plastic bag on the ground. Simply put, a creature with higher awareness has the ability to monitor more inputs and keep track of them, There is more awareness of the world as a whole, but less illusion of self awareness since the outer world is as intrusive as the illusion of self awareness. Essentially we can say that a being with higher awareness can actually create actions that have a brought, even all effecting influence that is purposefully created by that being, but at the same time it is very limited in small actions since it knows the general results of those small actions. We should also assume that higher aware beings still can damage the environment on purpose if they choose to and do so knowing the exact scale of that damage. In that sense a being with higher awareness doesn’t mean that it is ‘enlightened’ but that it simply has such high developed awareness of everything around it and of itself that it knows exactly what happens on a continuous constant level.

To beings such as us a creature with high awareness would seem like a being that is in one way very limited yet in another way almost godlike in its actions. The being would seem very passive to us but when it moves it can ‘move mountains and destroy worlds’ so to speak. Moreover, it is most likely that such a being does not need superhuman powers to do so, such beings can suffice with merely having a extreme sense of awareness. Think of the proverbial butterfly that who’s flapping wings can cause tornado’s elsewhere on the world. Beings with extreme awareness can fully knowingly cause life to grow or world destroyed by the proverbial move of a finger merely by knowing how that move would work out. At the flip side they would be very passive since the slightest action from their side can cause horrifying results and they would actively know it. Would you move your arm when you know it causes a tornado elsewhere?

Despite the amazing results beings with higher awareness have, they are not strange in an off-worldly way that some might have expected. The reason for the absence of real strange and unimaginable possibilities is simply because creatures with extreme high awareness are still bound to the same surroundings as we are. Higher awareness doesn’t cause a being to blip in and out of dimensions or phase. Beings with higher awareness might find ways around certain laws of nature by using others but would be very restrained in its use in order to not cause destruction elsewhere when using them. (unless those same beings are having harmful intend)

The exception on the rule can only exist when we deal with beings that are not bound to the same plain of existence as we are. Such beings can both be less or more advanced or even similar in awareness as us, but because they are not bound towards our plain of existence they have different rules applying to their conscience. In particular I am referring to beings that either not live in time or in dimensions like us. Extra dimensional beings like 4 dimensional creatures have most likely their own set of rules to their world. If those beings do not have genetic material because of such differences are have not the notion of time and thus no ‘travelled past’ then its concept of awareness is very different than ours. I could speculate on such events but there is little use speculating when information is almost non-existing.

On a side note ‘genetic inheritance’ can also be put in the blueprints of an artificial intelligence. It is merely a factor representing the startingsettings out of which such a being comes to exist.

---------------Referance-------------------
www.abovetopsecret.com...

edit on 30-9-2010 by AncientShade because: (no reason given)