Are aliens just a projection of our subconscious?

 

Is it egocentric to believe in aliens?

Our planet is peopled by thinking creatures, therefore we imagine the same of other planets. Aliens have been typically reported to have two legs and two arms and an overlarge head and eyes, a tiny mouth, no hair. They look like a cross between a fetus and a skeleton which has lost some of our organic properties: they don't look like they would sweat or bleed.

They could be analyzed as a product of our subconscious, and of our fascination with forms that are nearly human: ghosts, zombies, severed limbs all linger on the boundaries of humanity. Such constructs challenge our perception of what it means to be human and alive, and tend to inspire us with terror. What happens to “me” when I die, besides putrefying, and where was I before I was born? 

Is my body me?

Whether we believe in an afterlife or not, our body becomes separated from our soul, intelligence, consciousness, emotions, once we die. Whatever happens to everything else, our body decays after our death, and that's awful. It becomes alien. The ovule fecundated by a spermatozoid also lacks consciousness, and emotions, and intelligence, if not soul according to some religions.

And is my hand, severed, still me? And is that photo of my stomach's endoscopy a representation of “me”? It seems that in our guts, in our entrails, death and putrefaction loom more menacingly than in our external appearance that defines us as humans. After all, our pancreas does not differ much from a bat's. 

The mystery of our boundaries (interior/exterior, dead/alive, whole/divided, psychical/physical) informs all horror films, Alien and its skinless creatures come to mind. These are different from reported images of aliens. ETs are described as being inorganic by people who claim to have seen them, while creatures imagined to provoke terror are ultra organic. 

If aliens look like fetuses, do UFOs look like our rockets?

As humans we tend to project our own essence and it's hard for us to imagine something really different. Reports of UFOs are suspiciously close to our own technology: a flying saucer is a metal rocket that projects light, only round instead of elongated.

It is remarkable that their name and shape refer to a container of food -think breast- that crosses the sky in a circular movement. Our technology is mostly inspired by the phallus (rockets, racing cars, skyscrapers, gas pumps, syringes, plugs). Aliens as a fantasy of femaleness?

Or a suppression of masculinity as portrayed stereotypically: aliens have no body hair, no muscle mass, and no erections for sure. They're movable brains.

An appealing theory has it that aliens planted Amanita muscaria on the Earth. People who have sampled this toxic mushroom (carefully enough to be able to tell the tale: I do not recommend trying this) have had out-of-body experiences. Some had the impression they floated way, way above the Earth and explored the cosmos. 

Aliens would have given us this way of experiencing the outer world rather than by physical means. While I know this is sweet folklore, the concept implies that aliens might transport themselves, or communicate using completely different means from us. No metal, no fuel, no electromagnetic waves.

Is there life on other planets that is not particularly intelligent?

To go back to alien intelligent life, we could imagine there is life on other planets that is not particularly intelligent. The creatures, deer-like, would lead gentle, unremarkable lives that do not necessitate the development of thinking. It is meditative to imagine a planet without wars, without facebook, without famines nor obesity.

I let myself dream of Planet Earth where Man would never have happened: a kind of paradise with huge areas of savannah, rain forest, ice pack, taiga, tundra, all pristine. Rhinoceros, unconcerned about the value of their horns, roam freely. Whales swim with no threatening boat in sight. Dodos only have to worry about their next meal.

Does evolution necessarily lead to the development of intelligence?

But life without intelligence doesn't actually make sense for a system in the long term. If life appears on a planet, if from an inert environment, something alive (and what is alive? Basically something that is complex and can die if that complexity is destroyed. When we die, our complex bodies get taken over by bacteria that is a less organized form) happens, it's going to evolve. Complex creatures are not going to just happen, ta-da, from one day to the next. That's if we take a scientific point of view, and not mythological!

If there is evolution from simple to more complex, then intelligence is going to give select creatures a massive edge as it has on our planet, and is bound to happen eventually. It could be that one planet hosts more than one species with intelligence, like we had Neanderthal, and Homo floresiensis at some point, and gosh, I really miss them.

Could a planet be inhabited with just one big jelly?

The alternative to this scenario is a planet where there is just one entity. Maybe something like a mycelium. This organism is not in competition with anything else, but works and evolves cooperatively. I imagine a kind of cloud that moves like a huge sea creature, a bit foamy perhaps, that changes color, and changes shapes. It might not need to develop intelligence, but then again it might as it morphs and expands and needs to use different resources.

I like to think that the intelligence of this organism is wise, because it does not know competition, conflict, violence. And maybe it could impart some of its wisdom to us by finding a way to communicate: stay tuned. We'd stop killing each other, and trying to outdo our neighbors, and to own more and more and more than we need, to leave less and less resources to others, like who needs to possess 165 billion dollars when we could share the planet in peace and justice?

Written fast and furiously by  - -  Arabella von Arx

All images from wikimedia commons.

A mirror in the corner of the Universe

I heard on the radio a young American philosopher, David Chalmers, say that we have a reason to exist. According to him, we are the consciousness of the Universe. Its painters, poets, musicians, philosophers. Without us, the universe would not know it exists. "Universum, cogito, ergo es!"

This premise brushes us against the hair. After the long centuries in which Christianity had put man, God's favorite child, at the center of the Universe, we have learned humility the hard way, step by step. The earth is not the center of the universe and the sun does not revolve around us. Animals also have feelings and thoughts. We are not the ultimate creation of God, but a nasty hiccup in biological evolution. The world is without purpose and not meant by God. That is our credo, as intellectuals particularly in Europe. It was coined in the twentieth century by Heidegger, Sartre, Lévy-Strauss, and others.

Arrive thinkers and scientists such as Chalmers that upset this dogma. From anthropocentrism, they move onto anthropism, or revert to it. Their theory can be interpreted in two ways. On the one hand, it can simply be taken as a vision of reality, a point of view. Undeniably, our consciousness gifts us with an awareness of the universe. I appreciate the poetic side of this version of humanity, we tiny women, we tiny men on our tiny planet in one of countless galaxies of the cosmos, where we act as a kind of mirror. Instead of being placed right at the center of the universe, we are placed in an obscure corner to better reflect the wonder of the universe. If there were no consciousness, the existence of the universe and its essence would go without being perceived, completely dumb, completely numb. It's pretty easy to accept. The second understanding of the proposition, that is our purpose to mirror, is more difficult to swallow, as it presupposes a superior entity has meant for us to exist. Obviously, the candidate for this post is god, which would please Creationists ... or otherwise, it presupposes an awareness that manages the universe and then we're not the only ones to be aware of the universe.

Some of these philosophers also say, shaking statistical data in their fists, that we are the only beings in our universe, but there might be other universes that also produce conscious beings. I find this a questionable interpretation of statistics. We just don't know enough. We are looking for conscious beings similar to us in terms of physics and biology, but they might belong to a different essential realm that we are not aware of. On the other hand, it's convivial to imagine these other consciousnesses in parallel universes, in a way a similar experience to rubbing shoulders with our fellow human beings that we know have a consciousness without ever being able to completely share it. As for me, I firmly hope that we are not alone in this here universe and that we will get to know our counterparts soon, I'm tired of being the only species (where are our Neanderthal sisters and brothers?), though I am concerned how likable we are, what first impression we might make to our extraterrestrial fellows. They might be appalled, and turn their spaceship around in a fast U-turn when they get to know us.

This anthropism theory also assumes that animals have no consciousness. I consult my cat. He is sitting at the window, looking at the universe. His perception without words, without images, without theories, is purely ontological, and probably more suited than ours to the reality of the universe.


Posted by - - Arabella Hutter