jerryL

"Ideals are like stars". All Schurz is doing is defining, yet again, desire. Desire is metonymic by definition, and I think it is one of the most important evolutionary traits of the human mind. This permanent dissatisfaction of the mind must have proven originally very useful in going after more game that we could consume, and it is still useful in scientific pursuits. How would AI find its ideals? What would be the origin of the desire of AI that would make it spend energy for finding something utterly useless like general knowledge? If AI evolves it would be focused on energy problems (how to think more and faster with lower energy consumption) and... (read more)

You have it backwards. The message is not the data they send, but the medium they use for sending it. When the combined brainpower of earth turns to analyze the message, the first inquiry shouldn't be what pattern they form, but how can you form a pattern across millions of light years. At that moment you drop any hypotheses that negate that possibility, and focus only on those that are corroborated. You use the combined brainpower of earth and you have individual or small groups of scientist working on all the hypotheses they can imagine. The only important thing is that they work in parallel creating as many hypotheses as possible. As you falsify hypotheses... (read more)