Tal, a conversation with an alien (2 page)

Yes, very much
. There is an important tournament going on in London and I was about to review the results on my computer. 

--
I regretted saying this immediately. I just wanted him to leave before he requested something else.

Oh really?
Do you play?

Yes, but I am not very good. Compared to a professional anyway
.

Like Kasparov?

Well just about anybody who takes it seriously.

Would you like to hear abo
ut an interesting chess game that I played against Kasparov?

You played Kasparov?

Yes, back when he was a teenager. He was a rising star in the Soviet system, and I really wanted to play against him. He had an intense emotional energy, a deep seeded need to win.

W
hen he was just a teenager?

Yes
.

--
I laughed nervously.

Kasparov was born on
April 13, 1963. Where you even born when Kasparov was a teenager?

Ah,
I see you are a chess connoisseur.

Well I just have a very good memory.

Impressive, but I did play him, and many great chess players before him.

Please
, you look barely out of your teens.

Well I am much older than Kasparov
. I have been on this planet for almost one hundred thousand years. And that is just a walk around the park for me.

Y
ou're joking. Are you saying you are some sort of immortal, like the Highlander or something?

No, that is
fantasy, who would believe such a concept? People running around and cutting each other's heads off with samurai swords. Ridiculous. No, I am what you humans would call, an alien.

E
xcuse me?

An alien.

-- I looked him over for a split second. He did not seem insane, but now I was getting a little nervous. I had a complete stranger in my living room. My mind started to contemplate various unpleasant scenarios.

Are you serious? 

I'm sorry this juice makes me feel very light and jocular.

Oh, ok
, very funny.

--
I felt only slightly relieved. He had developed a big grin on his face as he finished the entire bottle.

But in all serious
ness, yes, I am an alien. I was not born on this planet, but have been here for over one hundred thousand years, since around the time humans developed language. Now there were others, but most left recently, when humans started writing. You know, no one was too happy about that. It was like the whole Prometheus fiasco all over again. But I stayed. 

I’
m sorry but Prometheus brought fire to humans, not writing.

Well,
fire wasn't the only thing humans stole from the gods, and fire wasn't what made the gods leave.

--
I was taking this nonsense in, and was frankly speechless. In hindsight, while most of what he said in our conversation made complete sense, I still have no idea what he was talking about here. It seemed to me he was acting a bit tipsy, almost drunk. He continued.

I like
this juice and I like you. Since you seem to know a lot about the subject, perhaps I can tell you a story from human history to repay you for your hospitality. Would you bring me another bottle please? And have a seat. Most humans love a good story, action, adventure, plot twists. And best of all, when they know that it actually happened, not some figment of the imagination, it can be quite exhilarating.

Li
sten, I am not interested in any stories, and anyway, you could make up any story you like, how could I possibly know if it is the truth.

Yes, I
suppose you are right. These days humans desire facts, figures, proofs, agreement between many credible sources.

--
This moment reminded me of something that Carl Sagan, the great astronomer, once wrote about crazy people who claimed they were in contact with aliens. He told them to make the alien prove it is truly an alien by asking it to do some ridiculously difficult, yet unsolved mathematical exercise, like writing a proof for the Riemann hypothesis or the Goldbach conjecture. Unfortunately, I would not have recognized a proof of either of these if I saw it, and I am not sure Carl would have either. Still I had the idea that perhaps I could get him to say something stupid, admit he was wrong and leave. So I brought him another bottle and played along.

So you have been here for
one hundred thousand years?

Yes,
I have been documenting and interacting with life on this planet. An anthropological study, you might say.

Why?

The same reason anyone should study, curiosity. In my case, I am curious to understand the evolution of my species' perception, hopefully finding a somewhat similar more primitive model in humans. Plus, I simply enjoy interacting with the many different varieties of life on this planet.

Well you won't find any
variety here, just me. So where is your spaceship?

I have been on this planet for many years now and there are considerably more convenient ways of getting around than
having to get into a big metal box, or plastic plate.

I
suppose you have a point there. Now you said you have been here for a hundred thousand years, weren't we just cavemen then?

You would be surprised at how sophisticated human thought has been in the past.  Physically humans haven't changed much in that time, an
d in many ways their perceptions and observations of the natural world were more acute then, without all the human made distractions. Plus, a lot of really exciting things were happening back then. I could give you a bit of a history lesson about ancient humans if you are interested.

No
, that really isn't necessary.

Not an admire
r of stories I see, well perhaps just some cold hard facts. 

So you can tell me
some alien secrets, like the meaning of life, the universe and everything?

Well I
can't really tell you those secrets.

Oh.

What I can do is describe to you how I observe the world, and how some other life forms in the universe observe the world.

And that will g
ive me all the answers?

No
, once you truly understand what I have to tell you, the universe will become a much grander place, with more questions. When it comes to life, the universe, and everything, questions answered only create more questions. Your confusion will only increase.

It's ok then really.
I’ve had a long day. I’m tired and I don't need any more confusion than I already have. I try to avoid confusion as much as possible.

Well
, perhaps that is your first problem, but we can fix that. It looks like I have a lot of juice to drink, and a lot of talking to do.

--
He either wasn't picking up on my annoyance and sarcasm or didn't care. He stood up, went over to my crate and took out another bottle of juice. Perhaps someone a little younger and a little bigger would have gotten fed up and demanded he leave immediately, but for the time being he was posing no threat to me, and I decided to continue my course.

Paradigms

All right, well do you have any super-alien-powers?

I could tell you
that I can teleport, time travel or see alternate dimensions, yet, how helpful would that be?  You have read about all of these things in your fictions. Perhaps I could show you, but even then, if I did some fancy tricks; after I drank all of your juice and left; my tricks would just leave you completely confused. Tomorrow you would think it was all a hallucination or a dream. You would discount what you experienced, since dreams are not real. No, these days it is not enough to hear it, or to see it, you must understand it. I will teach you to understand, but you have to accept a few basic concepts about knowledge first.

Okay.

The first thing you need to know is that I know a lot. When one being who knows a lot attempts to communicate some of that knowledge to a being who doesn't, that communication must be in the language of the less informed listener. Imagine you are training a dog. You must speak to the dog in the language it understands, the language of bones, treats, and voice inflections. If you attempt to verbally lecture your dog about the many benefits of sleeping outside, your dog will simply sit, listen, wag his tail, and as soon as you aren’t looking, return to his bone chewing on your comfy couch. So it is with teaching humans. In your current scientific paradigm, humans take pride in dealing with complex concepts. You use deduction, logic and analysis to develop an understanding of complex concepts from more basic ones. These basic concepts are like building blocks. Once you understand the basic stuff, you can then take on larger structures. Like a child, humans take small blocks, combine them and create large structures. The smaller building blocks, the basic ideas, have to be valid and stable. If even one is incorrect, the structure will come tumbling down.

I am aware
of how logic works. I have read books by quite a few philosophers, from Aristotle to Bertrand Russell.

Very nice.
Fine fellows. Now understand that humans are social creatures and every human culture plays with its own building blocks. These blocks are called a paradigm. A paradigm is an accepted social understanding of how things and events are to be seen and understood. In a successful social group, all the people, or at least most, understand things in a similar way.

Lik
e common cultural customs or religions.

Yes.
I have been here for a very long time and have discussed all sorts of physical and metaphysical concepts with many individual humans throughout history, and with each, I have had to speak in the language and ideas of their paradigm. If I had a conversation with a catholic monk in the middle ages, I would need to describe myself in the language that such a person would understand. A spiritual, mystical language of angels, demons, and God. If I were to have the same discussions with a great yogi in a cave in the Himalaya, I would speak of the Vedas, of yoga, and of meditation. I certainly would not start a scientific conversation about neutrons, electrons or the theory of relativity. If I did, the yogi would sit and listen, smile, and as soon as I left, return to the quiet contemplation of the universe in his comfy cave.

That makes sense. But what
is your point?

My point is that
the building blocks of knowledge that I will work with when teaching you, are ones accepted and understood in the belief system of your paradigm, or as you said, your religion.

Sorry,
but I am not religious. I would say I am an agnostic, borderline atheist.

That is
fine, because here in your time, in your paradigm, the religion you believe in, you call science.

Excuse m
e, but science is not a religion.

I would say that it is
. Like any good belief system, science is used in your society to describe the world around you, and to explain how and why things happen. The fact that science focuses more heavily on the how rather than the why, doesn't change that.

But in science we prove things, we know them
to be the truth, not just belief. Religion functions on faith, science functions on truth.

Scientists
attempt to build models and run experiments that reveal the truth. Yet what was proven by scientists as truth in their time was almost always incomplete and often just plain wrong. Think of the scientific truth that the earth was the center of the universe and the stars revolved around it. Or other famous scientific theories like the luminous ether, phrenology, or Newtonian physics. At no time has science been actually completely correct. Even in your current time, scientists argue, like a bunch of bickering Rabbis, constantly rewriting, and reinterpreting what the truth is. 

I agree, the truth is always changing in science
, but isn't that constant rethinking and testing what sets science apart from religion?

Think of the ethos that drives science,
the scientific method. The method that seeks the simplest explanation, the most elegant explanation, the repeatable explanation. This ethos is itself not a universal truth. Humans could just as easily focus on the anomalous, the not so easily repeatable events of the universe, the way many religions focus on miracles to understand the world. What you consider important in science is not universal, it reflects human beliefs and opinions of your current time. How many interesting events, interesting results, have been discarded by science because they cannot be repeated ninety-five percent of the time in a laboratory; failing to stand up to that holy grail of concepts, statistical significance. Yet the threshold for statistical significance, and even the definition of proof, is bickered about not only between scientific fields but within the fields themselves. Humans have been around for a very long time, and only in the last few centuries has science become the norm. Before that, scientific thoughts and methods, like those of the Ionians in Greece, were tried and thrown out, or were considered helpful but subservient to already established religions. It is by no means the most natural way for a human to think, just one of many.