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I’ve always felt like a lot of the assumptions in Fermi’s Great Filter feels off. Like, the way we talk about “intelligent life” feels iffy, both in astrophysics and other fields. I’m not great at articulating this, but if you’re one for video essays, Dr Fatima Abdurrahman recently made a video that captured much of what I’d struggled to say on this. (https://youtu.be/_tw0aqmnmaw)
No pressure to watch the video, especially as not everyone enjoys consuming content in that form.
Anthrocentrism is part of what I mean, especially if we consider that historically, colonialism has had a lot of power to draw the line between who “counts” as fully human or not. A depressingly common motif is the cyclical logic of “this is what we understand human intelligence to be” -> “these people do not have the signifiers of human intelligence that we understand” -> “therefore these people aren’t intelligent” -> (those people are less likely to be considered as the general understanding of ‘intelligence’ expands and evolves).
I’ve always felt like a lot of the assumptions in Fermi’s Great Filter feels off. Like, the way we talk about “intelligent life” feels iffy, both in astrophysics and other fields. I’m not great at articulating this, but if you’re one for video essays, Dr Fatima Abdurrahman recently made a video that captured much of what I’d struggled to say on this. (https://youtu.be/_tw0aqmnmaw)
I can’t guarantee I’ll watch that video, but I can guarantee I intend to watch it when I can.
Generally speaking, though, I do agree that most people’s idea of “intelligence” is very anthro-centric, if that’s what you mean.
No pressure to watch the video, especially as not everyone enjoys consuming content in that form.
Anthrocentrism is part of what I mean, especially if we consider that historically, colonialism has had a lot of power to draw the line between who “counts” as fully human or not. A depressingly common motif is the cyclical logic of “this is what we understand human intelligence to be” -> “these people do not have the signifiers of human intelligence that we understand” -> “therefore these people aren’t intelligent” -> (those people are less likely to be considered as the general understanding of ‘intelligence’ expands and evolves).
Yeah, the sociological side of “quantified” intelligence has a whole host of issues.