Re: Why the Fermi Assumption matters

On 3/9/25 12:39 PM, JTEM wrote:
 >   John Harshman wrote:
I offer this post as a fine example of self-contradiction. JTEM complains about barriers to communication yet this is what he thinks of as communication.

But that's the purpose of the "humans are apes" idea: to emphasize
our relationships to other animals. >

 > But it's not the relationship, as I pointed out. It's mere the
 > conventional means of categorization.
It's not the name that counts; it's the existence of a clade that includes humans, chimps, gorillas, orangutans, and gibbons. Calling that clade "apes" is only a shorthand way of pointing to the existence of that clade and emphasizing that it does not exist if you exclude us from it. You can give that clade whatever name you like, though I suggest that calling it "humans" would be considerably more confusing. To say "humans are humans" is to say nothing, unless you go on to say what you mean by "humans".
Also, neither label is any sort of statement about morphology or behavior, any more than "pandas are bears" is.
 >>> Secondly, it's not a "Truth" but a "Convention." It's a way that
 >>> we order things... our relationship to other animals. It's how
 >>> we put things together in our minds to aid on our understanding.
 >>
 >>> It's not real. Logically, it makes just as much sense to go the
 >>> other way:  "If we are humans than our ancestors were humans and
 >>> the LCA was a human and so on & so forth..."
 >>
 >> Taken to its logical conclusion, then, you would like to declare that
 >> all of life be considered human.
 >
 > No. Taken with reading comprehension, I just said that the goal is to
 > communicate not act dogmatic. As a narcissist, you must control
 > conversations. They exist as an exercise in power, in your ego.
 > Calling humans "Apes," though not a reality of nature but a human
 > convention, was a barrier to communication with many creationists. And
 > you're a narcissist, you can't cede that as you need control.
Try calling apes "humans" and see how well that communicates with creationists. It's not the name you give a group they dislike; it's the claim that we're related to all those monkeys.
The rest of this is left as an example of what JTEM calls "communication".
 >>> That's actually logic. You really need to summon a healthy dose
 >>> of idiocy to not be able to see this. Just because we have
 >>> selected to group things a certain way does not mean that there
 >>> aren't other ways to group them. So why get all dogmatic in the
 >>> first place? I mean, in addition to the communications issue..
 >> You aren't actually
 >
 > Again, as a narcissist this is sacrilegious, "Ceding power to
 > others." To people who aren't a head case, there's nothing to even
 > argue.
 >
 >>> Also, it's inaccurate. The LCA was bipedal and all in but absolute
 >>> certainty used tools for real, not some idiot "I'm using hammer
 >>> as a noun, instead of 'bang' or 'whack', so that manifests the
 >>> noun into existence!"
 >>
 >> What LCA?
 >
 > It's a mystery!
 >
 > That's it! That's the ticket! (You headcase!)
 >
 >> There seems to be no connection between
 >
 > For you, the only thing that can matter is yourself.
 >

You seem to be assuming that technology will stay at its current
state forever. Why? >

Let's test if you're saying someone of any value or merely
expressing your narcissism:  Assume technology does not "stay at its
current state forever"... look around. See aliens? >

 > Whoops!  Your opinion is yet another expression of your narcissistic
 > personality disorder.
 >
 >
 >