belief poll #1

[spoonless]

I think I'm going to start taking a series of surveys about people's beliefs. I've always been fascinated by belief/epistemology, how beliefs form, how people justify them, how different they can be in different social groups, etc. I wanted to put many more questions in the first poll, but it limits the number of questions to 15 so I had to stop there. Another reason for doing this is that I want to get started thinking more about creating some kind of epistemology-net, where it's easier to track different cultural, scientific, and political beliefs and people can register their opinions about different subjects and their justifications for them, and any expert credentials they have on the subject. I think that people should share and talk about beliefs more in general, to help accelerate memetic evolution, and improve the quality of beliefs held by people across the world. You can't do much with a simple poll, but I at least made them each a scale from 1 to 10 where 10 is "yes, definitely!", 1 is "no way!" and 5 is "don't know" or "haven't thought about it". These polls won't accomplish much in the way of the larger goal of getting an epistemology-net started, but they will hopefully at least give me more of a sense of what people's opinions are out there other than my own. (Even the questions one asks tend to be biased by your own perspective, as I'm sure mine are.) I'll try to put a mix of questions, some which I feel strongly about and others which I'm not so sure about. I tried to word them as clearly as possible, but obviously there is always ambiguity so some may depend on how you interpret the question... feel free to take whatever interpretation seems most appropriate to you.

[Poll #1412180]

Comments

[agentsteel53.livejournal.com]

Will humans ever develop the technology to be able to travel through time backwards (into the past)?

I've always thought that this would be possible, but the fact that it hasn't been observed yet implies either:

1) a very diligent adherence to some Prime Directive of non-interference with the past (which, given our species, I highly doubt will be obeyed universally)

2) the impossibility of time travel (but where's the fun in that?)

or 3) the idea that there is a point in time beyond which we cannot travel backwards - i.e. the invention of some sort of device which allows time travelers to return to it. This invention has not yet been devised, and therefore we do not see time travelers. (here's hoping, because time travel is fun)

[onhava.livejournal.com]

Will it ever be possible to communicate with other humans telepathically? (assuming another 500 years of technological advancement)

This is a bit tricky; we communicate over long distances awfully easily now, after all, so what does it take to make it "telepathic"? If cell phone signals went directly to our auditory nerve, would that be "telepathic"? Even with a fairly restrictive definition, I'm guessing it's eventually possible, but I can't imagine why one would want the option when communication is so easy already.

[pazi-ashfeather.livejournal.com]

Is there intelligent life on other planets (besides earth)?

In the sense of "life with an evolutionary strategy based around optimizing behavior in an adaptive way, possibly to include language or something like it, and with the capacity to create cultural and technological artifacts of a sort we might recognize as such." It may not be directly comparable to human minds; I feel that most of what we consider to be properties of human "intelligence" are cognitive traits not directly related to/resultant from our general problem-solving abilities.

Will humans ever develop the technology to be able to travel through time backwards (into the past)?

Not if physics work the way I understand it. However, I do not truly understand it in a quantitative fashion.

Has the earth ever been visited by aliens (intelligent lifeforms from other planets)?

Shipping live meat over interstellar distances seems prohibitively expensive. Perhaps remote or intelligent machines. I am not aware of any strong evidence for such an event in Earth's history, but I wouldn't call it entirely implausible.

Can a person's consciousness continue for years after their body dies? (assuming only current day technology is available)

No, it emerges from an active, living brain. Upon death it no longer exists in meaningful fashion.

Can a person's consciousness continue for years after the body dies? (assuming another 500 years of technological advancement)

Something roughly equivalent, perhaps -- an emulation running on some other hardware, with access to archived memories. It won't be the actual initial instance, but I am conceiving of consciousness as analogous to the signal on a television screen, rather than any recording or specific TV. Reconstruct or emulate the structure in an equal configuration, and you have something close enough to the signal the first time you viewed it.

The original instance still got snuffed, though, when the hardware expired.

[ankh-f-n-khonsu.livejournal.com]

As seems typical for surveys, there was some ambiguity that might've impacted my responses.

* "Will humans ever develop the technology to be able to travel through time backwards (into the past)?"

I'm not sure we haven't got the ability already.

* "Can a person's consciousness continue for years after their body dies? (assuming only current day technology is available)"

In what form? As a separate yet incorporeal entity? Saying that I am confident consciousness continues for years after the body dies isn't the same as saying I imagine individualized consciousness continuing for years after death. Chances are, I've a very different concept of self and consciousness than were encompassed in this question.

* "Are there any properties of the world which are not determined by mathematical relationships?"

"Determined by"? This I object to outright. Math is a language and corresponds with relationships. It doesn't determine them.

* "Will it ever be possible for humans to travel faster than the local speed of light in a vacuum?"

"Travel"? We've already figured out a few ways of traveling without moving, and I imagine Universe has imagined a few more than we have...

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Lastly, of all the results so far, the one that shocks - and pleases - me most is for "Is there an underlying purpose of the universe?"

[browascension.livejournal.com]

I object to 5 or 6 signifying "haven't thought about it". It seems that if someone reads the question, they're thinking about it. And if they don't have an opinion, or don't want to think about it further, they should skip the question.