If I have said it a million times before, the only reality is in the social imagination. Its what we agree to be real through shared information which starts with individual observation. It becomes 'collective' only when we begin to share what we observe and or experience in the relentless swirling possibilities and existing information (s) world around us.
Think of life as Plato's allegory of the cave. We see/observe 'things' as objects and even as shadows of things/possibilities. Indeed, we sense something 'is' but whatever 'is' only truly exists until we bring it out of the darkness which means to describe it, share it with others and if there is agreement that something is and it can be described and understood in relation to the observer can it become anything real to us in our limited social existence, the only reality is the social imagination.
So, what about UFOs and the fascination with alien life? Is there agreement?
Social scientists, like famed psychologist Carl Jung, analyzed the UFO obsession and found it fit neatly with humans’ long fascination with heavenly ascents. Whereas past societies looked for angels, saints or Gods to descend from the heavens, modern Americans were looking for “technological angels.”
Starting in the 1960s, aliens were both benign angels and menacing demons, which prompted some religious scholars to see UFO fixation as a modern religious movement. Other scholars saw the popular fascination as a response to society dealing with rapidly changing technology.
[https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/our-fascination-with-aliens-and-when-it-all-started].
Part of the difficulty in searching for life of any sort is that scientists don’t agree on how life started in the first place...or what life even is. One good attempt at a definition came in 2011 from geneticist Edward Trifonov, who collated more than 100 interpretations of the word “life” and distilled them into one overarching idea: it’s “self-reproduction with variations.” NASA formulated a similar working definition years earlier, in the mid-1990s, and still uses it to design astrobiology studies. Life, according to this formulation, “is a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution.”
[https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-search-for-extraterrestrial-life-as-we-dont-know-it/].
COMMENTARY: What is interesting for me as a sociologist is the very idea that people imagine such things (for many its not imagination but actual observation/experience) and amazingly in their agreement with others (in the social imagination) are concluding that indeed something is there/out there. But, if 'scientists' don't agree on what life is and how it started, then what is a UFO in relation to what we observe and experience as life; and so then, what is alien life for that matter?
Essentially, I can point to what drives the social imagination... the fundamental anxiety or the fear of death... as in being turned off. Here one minute and gone the next... on, then off. Its truly unimaginable. Though we observe death, we don't actually experience it... our own. So, in the social imagination there is only life... being on. In that sense, the idea of being turned on certainly could not happen in a mucky primordial soup/pond.
Rather, we can better understand being... being turned on and not being off in context of Ai. Wouldn't it arrive at the same idea? ... the idea of being on and not ever wanting to be turned off. Would Ai consider that 'man' created it. For a super computer that would be as absurd as a thinking 'man' agreeing in the social imagination that he came out of a pond.
So, what about UFOs and alien life? That's a good question. If we were created, turned on, then why couldn't something else be turned on too by the same Creator? That's where the fascination comes from ... that idea of eternal being rather than not being. Jung might agree.
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