UFOs, UAPs, and UEPs(?)

Posted on June 29, 2021 by James Cross

There has been a rash of new sightings of articles and opinion pieces on Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs), which for some reason have been renamed Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs) in some recent reports. I can’t say I see a big distinction between the terms. Perhaps, somebody felt we needed a new term because the term UFO, which really just means something flying and we don’t know what it is, had become overly contaminated with in implicit acceptance of extraterrestrials. At any rate, let me try to make sense of some of it and offer a new term that might explain some of the more weird sightings.

The latest round of articles got kicked off with reports that the Pentagon was going to release a report about unexplained sightings of aerial phenomena. The actual report recently released deals with 144 sightings between 2004 and 2021 but actually doesn’t say a lot about them. One of the sightings was explained as deflating balloon. Some of the others exhibited unusual characteristics but there was nothing in the sightings that definitively suggested extraterrestrials were involved. In fact, a a wide range of phenomena could explain the sightings, With this report in the background, there were a series of interviews and articles in various media with people involved in some of the sightings. One of the more watched segments was an 60 Minutes interview with two Navy pilots.

One of the more insightful commentaries on the report was actually in what is primarily a political blog Daily Kos. Although the blog is overwhelming political and left-oriented in its subject matter, it occasionally has some good science writing. I think this article falls into that category. The article There are only two good answers for the upcoming UFO report, and you’re going to hate them both by Mark Sumner makes a two really critical points.

His first point is that, if these videos really accurately reflect some level of technology, we’re in big trouble. Either the Chinese, Russians, or somebody else here on Earth have technology far exceeding our own. Or, we really are being visited by extraterrestrials. In either case, the outlook isn’t good. He writes: “Being on the low-tech side of those contacts doesn’t work out, even under the best of circumstances. Visitation from ‘friendly’ high-tech neighbors isn’t much better than a visit from the ‘unfriendly’ variety when it comes to the odds of survival.”

Before you reach for the cyanide capsule, consider his second point. “The one thing that these videos have in common is that they are videos. And what videos all have in common are video artifacts.” We want to think photographs, video, and radar are the best possible evidence but, in fact, all of this are subject to all sorts of anomalies from dust speaks, reflections, mirages, software glitches with modern technology, to say nothing of deliberate manipulation. Many of the classic photographs of UFOs have since been revealed to be fakes. Many of the so-called “flying rods” most likely are simply insects that take on a distorted shape during filming. Well-intentioned and honest people can be fooled. He links to a video that demonstrates the phenomena.

A more unusual take on the Nimitz sighting was done by David Halperin, the author of Intimate Alien. Halperin’s approach is psychological and I would highly recommend his book, which goes in depth with some of more famous sightings, to anyone interested in exploring the psychology behind the phenomena. I may be overly simplifying but his approach is to accept the phenomena as real on some level, but not at all what we think they are. They are projections of our own psyche generated from beliefs, confused memories, and sensory illusions. Halperin on the Nimitz sighting tries to be fairly balanced. He not only links to some of the debunking web sites but also calls into question the account of one of the pilots who was outed as faking UFO encounters years earlier. Still there were two pilots involved in the sighting and Halperin accepts the other pilot at face value. He thinks she saw something that oddly mirrored or mimicked the pilot’s behavior. This mirroring or mimicking phenomena has been a characteristic of other sightings. He concludes: “And the tic-tac over the waters off the California coast, on November 14, 2004? Did it mirror something that was within Fravor and Dietrich, and was therefore truly seen by them–even though it wasn’t truly there?”

For some reason, Scientific American has gotten invested in UFOs or UAPs too. They’ve published a number of articles. (Note: Some of these may require a subscription to access but I’ll try to summarize.) Avi Loeb has two articles. One seems oblivious to Mark Sumner’s astute observation about low and high tech encounters and hopes for benevolent aliens. The other draws a possible link between Oumuamua and UAPs with a suggestion that aliens are dropping off and retrieving probes. I guess a former chair of the Harvard astronomy department can get away with writing article likes these. If I wrote and submitted them (and anybody bothered to look at them), the reject notice would arrive back in my inbox faster than I could press the get mail button. Another article by John Gertz argues that, if the aliens really are here, they are probably only here as robotic probes. That might be a good argument for some of the more unusual UAPs if the aliens were unintelligent enough to allow us to spot them. That I doubt. I will return to this in a little while. Finally, there is another article by Leonard David which is a summation and concludes there still isn’t any evidence of alien visitation. What I want to call out in this article is a quote from William Hartman, who worked on the Condon Report, that he cannot escape “the feeling that there may be electromagnetic phenomena in the atmosphere that we still don’t understand.”

With this last in mind, let’s think for a moment about Unexplained Electromagnetic Phenomena (UEP) and consider the Hessdalen lights. Here we find strange lights that have been observed on and off since at least the 1930’s. They have been the subject of extensive scientific observation. To quote Wikipedia: “The Hessdalen lights are of unknown origin. They appear both by day and by night, and seem to float through and above the valley. They are usually bright white, yellow or red and can appear above and below the horizon. The duration of the phenomenon may be a few seconds to well over an hour. Sometimes the lights move with enormous speed; at other times they seem to sway slowly back and forth. On yet other occasions, they hover in mid‑air.” The monitoring station has video and photographs for every year from 1998. These are still unexplained, although there are theories. Most theories revolve around electromagnetism and/or ionized particles. Ball lightning, a similar if not identical phenomena, still isn’t completely understood and observations of it have been occurring for at least a hundred years. Scientific data on it is still sparse and some even doubt its existence. Ball lightning, in fact, was one common explanation that has used over to years to explain, otherwise unexplainable, UFO sightings.

So are UAPs explained? I think mostly they are one of the following:

  • Human technology misidentified
  • Artifacts of recording media
  • Optical illusions
  • Natural atmospheric or astronomic phenomena that are understood but misidentified
  • Electromagnetic phenomena that are not yet completely understood

Is there room for aliens? Not much.

An op-ed in the Washington Post by Mark Buchanan may say it all: Contacting aliens could end all life on earth. Let’s stop trying. The argument is simple. Let’s be careful about trying to contact extraterrestrial life. “That’s because any aliens we ultimately encounter will likely be far more technologically advanced than we are, for a simple reason: Most stars in our galaxy are much older than the sun. If civilizations arise fairly frequently on some planets, then there ought to be many civilizations in our galaxy millions of years more advanced than our own. Many of these would likely have taken significant steps to begin exploring and possibly colonizing the galaxy.”

I think extraterrestrial life would make the same calculation. No civilization could assume that it would be superior to any civilization it might contact. None could assume any contact would be beneficial. Even a superior civilization that was bent on expanding and colonizing the galaxy could not assume a civilization it might contact might not be dangerous to it in some unforeseen way. A strategy of stealth would be beneficial in almost all cases. This would be especially the case if the civilization was advanced and benign. It would follow the Prime Directive of non-interference. So, if the aliens are here, we are not likely observing them.

Posted in Aliens, Electromagnetism, Fermi Paradox, Human Survival | 8 Comments

Did Homo erectus speak?

Posted on May 9, 2021 by James Cross

Did Homo erectus speak? is a new article on Aeon by Daniel Everett. The author makes the argument that the evidence of fairly sophisticated culture and technology by Home erectus suggests that this predecessor of modern humans likely had some form of language. This would also mean Neanderthals and other descendants of Homo erectus also likely had language.

Erectus settlements show evidence of culture – values, knowledge structures and social structure. This evidence is important because all these elements enhance each other. Evidence from the erectus settlement studied at Gesher Benot Ya’aqov in Israel, for example, suggests not only that erectus controlled fire but that their settlements were planned. One area was used for plant-food processing, another for animal-material processing, and yet another for communal life. Erectus, incredibly, also made sea craft. Sea travel is the only way to explain the island settlements of Wallacea (Indonesia), Crete and, in the Arabian Sea, Socotra. None of these were accessible to erectus except by crossing open ocean, then and now. These island cultural sites demonstrate that erectus was capable of constructing seaworthy crafts capable of carrying 20 people or more. According to most archaeologists, 20 individuals would have been the minimum required to found the settlements discovered.

To build and operate boats, erectus needed to talk about what material to collect, where to collect it, how to put the material together and so on – just what we ourselves would need to talk about in order to build a raft. In addition to the assembly of a raft, the planning for the trip as a whole, the reasoning for the undertaking, would have all required language.

We can therefore conclude that erectus required language.

The author goes on to define language as the ability to communicate with symbols. Complex grammar is not required. He continues with a proposal for how language evolved from tool use through development of icons and symbols, and association of sounds with symbols.

It has been noted before that many of the same brain regions used in tool making are the same or closely related to the regions used for language, thus hinting at an association between tool making and language. I find it not likely a coincidence that humans are only species that make sophisticated tools and also have a sophisticated language.

I have doubted the idea of some linguists (Chomsky most notably) that language materialized with no predecessor ability about 70 thousands years. I do believe there was a major shift in cognitive ability that included the capability for sophisticated and recursive grammar in about that time frame. This I discussed that in a previous post. Prior to modern language capabilities, I suspect, there was a form of language intermediate between the primitive signaling found in other species and modern language. This language might have been sign language combined with something similar to the primitive pidgin languages that spontaneously arise when people, not sharing similar languages, are thrown together and forced to communicate.

Posted in Human Evolution, Intelligence | 9 Comments

The Other Simulation Hypothesis

Posted on April 27, 2021 by James Cross

The simulation hypothesis is mostly associated with Nick Bostrom and his paper Are You Living in a Computer Simulation? Bostrom argues that we likely are living in a simulation and Elon Musk agrees with him. Frankly I think it is unlikely we are living in a simulation in the way Bostrom’s means it, but at any rate, it is impossible to prove or know and, as far as I can tell, would make no practical difference. In the end, if reality is a simulation, then being in a simulation or not being in one becomes for all practical purposes the same. There is a different way from Bostrom’s that we might be living in a simulation. This way could account for the occasional unreality of things most of us sometimes experience. It could account in a deeper way for why Bostrom might have thought about arguing we are living in a simulation.

Xerxes D. Arsiwalla, a physicist in Spain, was the lead author on a paper Are Brains Computers, Emulators or Simulators? In the paper, he draws a contrast between the brain as a computer vs the brain as a simulator. If the brain is a computer, he argues that “all cognitive processes can be described by algorithms running on a universal Turing machine”. This implies that consciousness is computational. On the other hand, if consciousness is non-computational, then it would be based on what he terms “non-classical logic”. He goes on to state:

Machines implementing non-classical logic might be better suited for simulation rather than computation (a la Turing). It is thus reasonable to pit simulation as an alternative to computation and ask whether the brain, rather than computing, is simulating a model of the world in order to make predictions and guide behavior. If so, this suggests a hardware supporting dynamics more akin to a quantum many-body field theory.

The paper goes on to discuss the limitations of computationalist view. He cites the Turing Halting problem and the Penrose tiling problem which can’t be solved by computation. Then he provides a “third example of a non-computable problem is the collapse of the wave-function or the measurement problem in quantum physics, which evades an algorithmic description”. Not mentioned here is another class of problem. This would be a type of problem that might be solved computationally but one that requires so much computer resources that it cannot be solved in any given amount of time.

An emulator “can be defined as any machine that can be used to specify dynamical states transitions of another system”. Computers can do emulations; however, a computer emulation would be subject to the limits of computation. Emulators can also be what the paper terms “dynamical systems-based simulations” which are not computational. The difference between the two is:

The difference of say computing an explicit solution of a differential equation in order to determine the trajectory of a system in phase space versus mechanistically mimicking the given vector field of the equation within which an entity denoting the system is simply allowed to evolve thereby reconstructing its trajectory in phase space. The former involves explicit computational operations, whereas the latter simply mimics the dynamics of the system being simulated on a customized hardware. For complex problems involving a large number of variables and/or model uncertainly, the cost of inference by computation may scale very fast, whereas simulations generating outcomes of models or counterfactual models may be far more efficient.

We finally reach the key argument of the paper. Brains are not computers. They are simulators.

Beyond this example of the motor system, if the brain is indeed tasked with estimating the dynamics of a complex world filled with uncertainties, including hidden psychological states of other agents… then in order to act and achieve its goals, relying on pure computational inference would arguably be extremely costly and slow, whereas implementing simulations of world models as described above, on its cellular and molecular hardware would be a more viable alternative. These simulation engines are customized during the process of learning and development to acquire models of the world. The simulated dynamics of these models lead to predictions as well as counterfactual hypotheses, which can then be passed through feedback control loops to correct for prediction errors. Note that these dynamics-based simulations differ from computer simulations. In the former, no specific function is being computed. Instead, as in control engineering, a model of the process is encoded (or learnt) in the network’s connectivity and is used to generate subsequent state transitions. More complex models require more complex network architectures and multi-scale biophysical dynamics, rather than heavy computational algorithms, which is presumably not what we see the brain to be designed for.

This explains much about the evolutionary origin of consciousness. Compared to actual computers, the brain and nervous systems must make the best with a relatively small amount of energy and a relatively slow computational speed. In simple organisms those limitations may not be fatal. However, the evolution of greater adaptive capability, the integration of more sensory data, and the development of broader repertoire of behaviors would eventually hit a computational barrier. The brain could not compute quickly enough to provide an selection advantage if it relied solely on a computational approach. The evolutionary response would be development of a simulation on top of a computational base. Unsurprisingly , our consciousness feels occasionally exactly like a simulation, although for the most part we think the simulation is real.

Posted in Consciousness, Human Evolution, Information | 47 Comments