On Wed, 2 Jul 2003 16:12:15 +0200, =?iso-8859-1?Q?J=F6rg=20Rhiemeier?=
<joerg_rhiemeier@...> wrote:
>Andreas Johansson <andjo@...> writes:
>
>> This is related to why I scrapped my then chief coniverse in, IIRC, 1997,
and
>> started the one in which most of my conlangs are spoken in. The old one
>> contained several intelligent extraterrestrial species, and I eventually
came
>> to feel that they failed to live up to my modest demand for plausibility
in
>> two ways: 1) the existence of several alien civilzations at roughly the
same
>> technological level as we but none significantly more advanced must be
>> essentially nil,
>
>Very true.
>
>> and 2) no matter how alien I tried to make the
>> extraterrestrials, they still seemed way to human.
>
>It is really hard, if not outright impossible, to invent an alien race
>that is not a kind of human stereotype in disguise. Most sci-fi authors
>"alienize" their aliens by giving them a non-human anatomy
>(and be it a few amendments on the human body plan) and some
>salient personality trait. The problem with this is that the aliens
>are defined by which way they differ from humans, and the humans
>thus represent a "normal type". That is of course complete bull.
>
>One "solution" I used in a con-universe (which I have put aside
>a few years ago) was the one from the Traveller RPG: an alien race
>once colonized the vicinity of the solar system many thousand years
>ago, and for unknown reasons relocated humans to hundreds of
>planets; then the aliens conveniently disappeared. Thus,
>I could mess around with lots of exotic but still human cultures
>which also were fairly homogenous with regard to their tech level.
I can think of a workaround to try and do something less anthrocentric:
define an alien race carefully, and use them as the 'average' around which
humans are just one deviation. It will still come up with more humanlike
aliens than truth likely merits, but it will at least get us off the center
of things.
>> Should we one day meet 'intelligent' extraterrestrials, we might very
well be
>> able to discuss maths and astronomy with them, but I'd be quite
pessimistic
>> about the possibilities for meaningfully discussing things involving
emotions
>> and Weltanschauung.
>
>I am not very optimistic about the possibilities of inter-species
conversation,
>either. Their mindset will most likely be so alien that we and they have
>rather little to say to each other.
Marvin Minsky talks about how we can at least expect some basic concepts to
be the same here and elsewhere, in particular, nouns, verbs, and clauses:
http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/AlienIntelligence.html
I think the most significant point in that text is that there are probably
not any radically different useful paradigms for representing language
(although we can probably never prove that).