WHY VON NEUMANN INTERSTELLAR PROBES COULD NOT EXIST: NON-OPTICAL REFLECTIONS ON MODERN ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY, BAD ARGUMENTS AND UNUTILIZED DATA

Clive Goodall

The Ohio State University

Department of Philosophy

350 University Hall

Columbus, Ohio 43210-1365

Abstract

A decisive and lethal response to a naive radical scepticism concerning the prospects for the existence of Extraterrestrial Intelligence is derivable from core areas of Modern Analytic Philosophy. The naive sceptical view is fundamentally flawed in the way it oversimplifies certain complex issues, failing as it does, to recognize a special class of conceptual problems for what they really are and mistakenly treating them instead as empirical issues. Specifically, this scepticism is based upon an untenable oversimplifying model of the 'mind-brain' relation. Moreover, independent logical considerations concerning the mind-brain relation provide evidential grounds for why we should in fact expect a priori than an Alien Intelligence will face constraints upon, and immense difficulties in, making its existence known by non-electromagnetic means.

14 Pages

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