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SETI: A Critical History
Part II Expanding the ETI Discourse
Introduction
| SETI: A Critical History is a copy of the following
PhD thesis, reproduced here with permission: SETI's Scope How the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Became Disconnected from New Ideas About Extraterrestrials by Mark A. Sheridan Drew University May 2009 © 2009 by Mark A. Sheridan (email) All rights reserved |
| Contents
Cover Dedication Opening quote Some important events in the history of SETI 1. Introduction Part I. Constructing SETI 2. SETI science Greenbank3. SETI as popular science ETI portraiture as a rhetorical site >> Part II. Expanding the ETI discourse 4. The rehabilitation of "mind" 5. The Soviet critique of SETI Differences in attitudes toward ETIs6. The evolutionists' critique of SETI Dueling improbabilities7. The philosophers' critique of SETI 8. Plausible non-humanoid ETIs ETIs with non-humanoid sensorial Part III. Implications of the expanded ETI discourse for SETI 9. Reactions to the "nature"-based critiques Project Cyclops10. Inflection SETI's standing in the scientific community11. Evanescence 1993: annus horribilis12. Conclusion Bibliographical essay Bibliography SETI: Primary and secondary sources |
Evolutionists from a variety of disciplines paved the way for this expansion of the ETI discourse by asserting that humanoid ETIs were unlikely, while at the same time pointing out that non-humanoid ETIs represented a credible evolutionary possibility. Ironically SETI itself bore some responsibility for the expansion of the ETI discourse. By simply suggesting a feasible way to communicate with ETIs, SETI inspired experts in a number of fields to wonder about the possible nature of the beings that might be composing and sending us messages.
The emergence of cognitive science played a major role in the expansion of the discourse to include the consideration of ETIs' "nature." Behaviorism dominated experimental psychology during much of the first half of the 20th century, and it shunned discussions of a being's "mind" as unscientific. Raised in that intellectual milieu, SETI's architects exhibited a blind spot toward questions about ETIs' cognition, consciousness, and intelligence. The multi-disciplinary field of cognitive science began to supplant the behaviorist paradigm around the same time SETI appeared, and its concepts and methods made a scientifically rigorous discussion of how beings construct realities possible for the first time. Scientists, science writers, and philosophers of science used these tools to imagine possible forms of extraterrestrial intelligence. At the same time, advances in a wide variety of fields, from entomology to weapons-systems research, provided what might be called a new analogical base from which to construct plausible hypotheses about ETI forms. To take a simple example, once scientists discovered that some insects "see" ultraviolet wavelengths, contributors to the ETI discourse analogized that ETIs might exist that are able to "see" different segments of the electromagnetic-radiation spectrum than humans and to imagine how doing so might produce consciousnesses and intelligences that differ from a human's.
Thus, at the same time the weight of expert evolutionist opinion increasingly came down against the possibility of humanoid ETIs, other experts discussed the possibility of non-humanoid ETIs with increasing rigor. Concern grew that SETI looked for an improbable kind of ETI, and would struggle to communicate with, or even detect, other kinds of ETIs.
Part II briefly reviews the significance of cognitive science for SETI and then examines three of these nature-based critiques in detail: those of Soviet SETI scientists, evolutionists, and philosophers of science. It closes with an overview of the plausible non-humanoid ETIs suggested; these stood as a kind of mute challenge to SETI's assumptions that ETIs are like us and are, as a consequence, relatively easy to communicate with.
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