A Surprising Side of Carl Sagan

I have a real problem with the distinction between "religious people" and "non-religious people" because it presumes a distinction that I don't think exists. Everyone takes something to be the highest good. Most philosophers (for most of human history, anyway) and what you call religious people typically take God to be the highest good, the supreme summum bonum. Others worship pleasure or power or Man or nature or whatever else. In this sense, everyone is religious. We just differ about what the highest good is and what Man's orientation toward that good is.

What you call religious people do experience awe at creation. Indeed, God is not generally knowable directly, but creation is taken to tell us about the creator or first cause (what is in the effect must be in some way in the cause for you cannot give what you do not have).

> mysticism can be fun in a world with rules.

Two problems. First, mysticism isn't obscurantism. I believe Rahner somewhat obnoxiously called mystery "inexhaustible intelligibility" which is to say that true mystery is fully intelligible, but we cannot exhaust the knowing of that thing. I might imagine this to be something like trying to swallow the Nile. There's no end to it. The mystery par excellence for Catholics, then, is the beatific vision.

Second, what do you mean by "rules"? There are no rules, but things do have natures and what we call "scientific laws" are just shorthand descriptions of tendencies of things of a certain nature. There are no externalized laws "out there" that "govern" the world from without, imposing order onto what is otherwise some kind of unintelligible chaos. Things themselves are ordered by virtue of what they are. It's important not to commit the reification fallacy here w.r.t. "law". Furthermore, it almost sounds like you're saying that what you call religion is somehow antithetical to there being natures and principles. On the contrary, that is essential to something like Catholicism. Read the first few verses of the Gospel of John. Jesus is identified with the Logos, which is to say something like the order of the universe which was made incarnate in the hypostatic union. Natural law theory, something traditionally embraced by the Catholic Church, presupposes not only the utter intelligibility of the universe, but that things have natures and that the basis for ethics is human nature.

So what I sense here is a number of presuppositions, among them that "religion" (a word itself too broad and vague) is essentially (and only) an emotional phenomenon, which, in the case of something like Catholicism, isn't true.

All the agent needs to do is design or adjust the life forms it wants to find the message so that they are inclined to choose a numeric base in which the right sequence appears in the digits of π. The definition of π defines it's value, but the sequence of digits doesn't just depend on the value, but also the choice of base.

Aren't the digits of pi randomly distributed? So then, you can encode literally any message you want by picking an offset into them. Could even design a "compression" algorithm where a message is designated by its offset, though I'm guessing it won't be very efficient in practice.

"If their culture has not given them all the tools they need to pursue this great quest, let us temper our criticism with kindness. None of us comes fully equipped." - Carl Sagan. The Demon-Haunted World.

Interested in reading more about this.

The fact of the matter remains that he was more academically active than the current crop of science evangelists (cough NDT) and was more relatable at least in his TV persona. Unless he was straight up evil in his life his ego doesn’t matter and is more likely not surprising.

Still interested in the citations though.

We clearly have very different tastes.

What’s wrong with trying to transcend known Physics, there are so many things we don’t know, so speculating / imagining what is still unknown is part of sci-fi (as long as it’s not fantasy like the space mushroom network in Star Trek Discovery - which is not Star Trek anymore anyway)

And talking about logical consistency… Martian is good, but it had parts in it that were questionable, so I don’t understand why you’re not applying your same standards you used for Moon to the Martian.