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posted by mrpg on Saturday December 08 2018, @02:05PM   Printer-friendly
from the in-space-things-are-relative dept.

Dr Colombano told Califoria's SETI-backed Decoding Alien Intelligence Workshop back in March that scientists need to broaden their idea of what an extra-terrestrial would like like.

'I simply want to point out the fact that the intelligence we might find and that might choose to find us (if it hasn't already) might not be at all be produced by carbon based organisms like us,' his report read.

He added that scientists must 're-visit even our most cherished assumptions', which has implications for everything from an alien's lifespan to its height.

'The size of the 'explorer' might be that of an extremely tiny super-intelligent entity,' he says.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-6457259/NASA-expert-says-alien-life-visited-Earth.html

Also at Tiny aliens may have visited us and we just didn't know: NASA scientist


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  • (Score: 2) by acid andy on Sunday December 09 2018, @12:43AM (3 children)

    by acid andy (1683) on Sunday December 09 2018, @12:43AM (#771717) Homepage Journal

    Yes that's a very good point. As is one hemisphere of a brain. As is a small part of that. Yet I feel that my consciousness is centered on one whole human brain. Not a particular half. Not distributed between two or three communicating brains. My neurons are all connected to other people's neurons via one another's nerves, muscles and senses and various other physical objects including my keyboard and the SoylentNews server. In that sense, everything that exchanges information with a brain is such a hive mind, or a part of one.

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  • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday December 11 2018, @01:27AM (2 children)

    by Immerman (3985) on Tuesday December 11 2018, @01:27AM (#772698)

    >Yet I feel that my consciousness is centered on one whole human brain.

    We feel a lot of things, a great many of which are provably false.

    We have circumstantial evidence that that "feeling" of one-ness is a situational hallucination. For example, sever your corpus callosum, the bridge between the hemispheres of your brain, and you will still "feel" like a single individual - despite the fact that tests devised to interface with only one hemisphere will clearly show two distinct personalities and intellects.

    • (Score: 2) by acid andy on Tuesday December 11 2018, @01:52AM (1 child)

      by acid andy (1683) on Tuesday December 11 2018, @01:52AM (#772711) Homepage Journal

      you will still "feel" like a single individual

      Will I? I'd be very interested to read any accounts of this. Everything I had read on the subject suggested the opposite: each hemisphere effectively becoming its own individual. I can see how one hemisphere operating on its own could suffer the delusion that it is still an entire brain (I seem to remember reading it can function pretty well in this way) but I think you were suggesting something more profound than that.

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      If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
      • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday December 11 2018, @02:46AM

        by Immerman (3985) on Tuesday December 11 2018, @02:46AM (#772730)

        My understanding is that the individual(s?) involved generally have no sense of sharing a body with someone else, and in the course of their day to day life neither they nor people interacting with them are aware of there being two distinct individuals residing within the same body. You need to artificially isolate the your interactions so that you're only interacting with one "hemi-person" for the differences to become apparent.

        I might be mistaken though.