One more try in this #SoCIA18 block! "The Spiritual Quest in the SETI Research, by Jose Funes." Good news (for my attentional skills), there are slides.
Excuse me, José Funes.
A member/leader of Project OTHER: "Ortos Mundos, Tierra, Hunanidad, Espacio Remoto." Dealing with otherness and diversity.
The spiritual quest as part of a multidisciplinary approach to SETI, and supporting thought experiments. Did spiritual genesis happen on Earth (by chance), or is it a necessary part of a species' development?
Teilhard de Chardin: introduced concepts of biosphere and noosphere (a planetary thinking layer) - possibly as something yet to develop?
Slides are going fast, I fall behind. Definition: "Spiritual beings" = those capable not only of processing information, but self-conscious subjects capable of thinking & reflection.
Spiritual characteristics of Extraterrestial Intelligence: self-consciousness, symbolic communication (incl. ability to experience beauty & communicate emotion via arts???), ... jeez, I got through 2/5 on that page.
Charateristics 10-12: Free will, moral sense, empathy; respectful attitude toward biosphere/cosmos; sense of belonging to universal/spiritual community.
Lotsa humans don't meet that.
Lotsa humans don't meet that.
Search for spiritual ET as search for someone with whom we could communicate symbolically at an inter-subjective level. (Well, okay. Of course.) Might affect 2 terms of Drake Equation: odds of survival & odds of sending messages?
Okay, a thought experiment. (That's all we got until SETI receives an ET signal.)
Types of civiliations: S+ = spiritual-moral sense, S– = aggressive-predator attitude, S-free = independent of spirituality. Imagine if this has any effect on length of time sending or receiving message.
Now (topic jump?): compare to 1492. Culture of encounter with Other requires a change/expansion of our own perception. (Unsaid: and/or/otherwise leads to cataclysmic violence!)
Whew. This moved faster than I could manage, but lots of depth to it. Learn more about their program at blog.ucc.edu/ar/other-en
Neat comment in Q&A that human understanding of teleology (which is one underpinning/requirement for religion) may arise from tool use, which requires an understanding of objects as having purposes.
unroll
