39 Comments

Sean Carroll may disagree with your speculations:

http://blogs.discovermagazi...

http://blogs.discovermagazi...

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Mr. Butcher: I wasn't so worried Robin would ask us to go snake-handling on Sunday. In my own case (as a non-believer) I just thought he was being too generous in his estimation of human senses and cognition, in terms of explaining an experience of an unseen intelligences as possible dark matter critters. But it's an interesting speculation and no doubt MOST of human experience has yet to be explained by science, but that doesn't mean it can't or won't be.

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Right, so the question is about, if they exist, whether we can apprehend them directly as beings, or just figure out patterns in the things they cause. The question I was addressing was whether we can apprehend them directly, as the people who sense unseen intelligences would seem to be doing. If so, this would be a result of their interaction with life on Earth over geologic periods of time in ways that differentially affected individual survival. Because we only seem to have become consistently aware of dark matter in the last century and only revealed it by using complex tools and rigorous analysis, it seems difficult to imagine why we would be able to sense them on our own. If the question is whether they can do something that affects the whole Earth or large parts of it or something very abstract that we'd only notice with complex tools and analysis, that's much easier to accept. But I don't think that would make people sense that there are unseen intelligences, because we wouldn't have been engineered by evolution to be bright enough to notice.

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The idea that 95% of the matter in the universe is liquor is inspiring.

Given that it's dark, that implies dark rum or whiskey.

Bourbon, as the brownest of the brown liquors, is presumably highly represented.

God does exist and loves us, obviously. We just need to find those bourbon-pockets...

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A couple of other points on the article topic:

1. The idea of 'dark matter = ghosties' is not new, for at least half a decade it's been a recurring theme in the loony fringe. Google "dark matter spirits" for a wide range of it.

http://spx.13.forumer.com/a...http://answers.yahoo.com/qu...

Also, I object to this sentence:

"physics today does offer one plausible place for a spirit hypothesis, in “dark matter.”

I'm pretty sure the overwhelming majority of professional physicists would take issue with that statement.

Anyone with ghostly feelings might do well to read this post on Yahoo: http://answers.yahoo.com/qu...

Last of all, some alternative axioms that seem to fit the data:http://en.wikipedia.org/wik...

For me personally, the idea that local physical law is not the same as universal physical law is most compelling since we've had that kind of evidence-driven paradigm shift in physics before. Perhaps as Newtonian motion yielded to relativistic motion, we will see other physical laws and constants yield to distant astronomical observations. Example below, with popsci description below it.

http://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-...http://www.dailygalaxy.com/...

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"We should judge him on his net contributions, which I think are high."

Just a note: I was judging the article/behaviour, not Robin generally. The strength of my disappointment here is a reflection of the value I place on his regular writing.

A.C.

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Why is "we are simulations" a more crazy or extreme idea? It stands out to me from your other examples as being neither crazy nor extreme.

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Who's to say dark matter has to form in any way similar to "our" matter in order to contain spirits (or whatever your personal dogma dictates it be called)? Its obviously beyond our current comprehension, so the construction of any life inside it is probably also beyond our current comprehension.

There's so much to this universe that we will never be able to quantify through scientific method. If "substantial clumping" is found (or not), people who believe in higher life forms will continue to believe in them, and people who don't will continue not to. Some people would never believe in God unless they shook his hand (and would probably still take a dna sample for the record). It definitely seemed to touch a nerve with some of you, but I think the point of the article was just to be some interesting speculation on the nature of a newly discovered phenomenon. I also think that some of you have a personal bias that is offended by the idea, and you thought he was going to end the article by asking you to go to church. amirite?

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Given that there exist dark matter intelligences, to support the idea of "spirits," a case still must be made that they have the capacities to observe our matter and invoke specific interactions at will.

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The votes show that the crazier and more extreme the ideas in the posts, the more attention it gets (e.g., bringing back flogging, we are simulations, Singularity hard-take off etc.). Robin's got to keep increasing the bizarreness level to hold people's attention (super-stimuli, need to keep increasing the input to maintain same effect).

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I predict that dark matter does clump complexly, but that we will discover ordinary-matter aliens sooner and closer than we will discover dark-matter aliens.

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The idea would be that dark spirits are advanced enough to know how to influence our world, not that we evolved special detection abilities.

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heh, great point -although a distinction can be made between abstract math (like exponential calculations) and the ability for central tendency human brains to solve much more complex stuff in an automated way (catching and throwing a baseball, etc.).

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That's both a good point and a cruel transparency about the near asymptotes to our epistemology one would expect given the tinyness of our brains and culture vs. the vastness and complexity of our reality.

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Anonymous Cow, great to see a fellow traveler.I'm sympathetic to your criticisms of Prof. Hanson, although a regular reader will note that he meanders here and there into sin but also regularly outputs high quality analysis. We should judge him on his net contributions, which I think are high.

As for spirits, I think they're more reflections of our human/great ape psychology than our abilities to detect dark matter complex life -which if its as rare as visible matter life, is unlikely to overlap in our interactive area -to name one of several problems I see with the notion that folk spirits are dark matter complex life.

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A lot of people have had similar thoughts. Stephen Baxter envisions a unvierse dominated by dark matter-based beings, which he refers to as "the photino birds". But I would be suspicious of any argument that humans could sense dark matter beings. Our senses and cognition are products (most recently) of the African savannah, not the dark matter halo around the Milky Way, and our shortcomings in being able to make sense of and behave well in a new environment - even one we built ourselves, if rapidly - doesn't bode well for having general agency detectors, in media that don't seem to affect our survival on this planet. Why would such an ability ever have been selected for? For crying out loud, most humans can't understand exponential functions; why should we be able to directly apprehend something like a dark matter being? Even without arguing against the possibility of such dark matter beings, the conspicuous false positives of our agency-detectors (reproducible with drugs or magnets) would seem to be better explanations for these kinds of experiences.

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