To Serve Man

[_EAllusion]

There is a famous Twilight episode that most readers have seen called To Serve Man.

If you haven't seen it, you can watch it here:

http://vimeo.com/37778819

The basic plot of the episode is that alien race comes to earth, promising peace and sharing technology. The ambassador of the alien race leaves a book behind. A team of linguists set out to translate the book. At first, they only have the title "To Serve Man," which sounds promising enough. As the episode moves on, the aliens provide many wonderful things for humanity and start shipping them back to their home planet, which promises to be a paradise.

In typical Twilight Zone fashion, the plot twist at the end is that "To Serve Man" is a cookbook and humans are being shipped back as livestock for consumption.

Now there's an interesting question here. Should people have trusted the aliens? After all, everything the aliens did for them was enormously good. In the end, they were conned, but that doesn't mean their trust was misplaced necessarily. Maybe they were just unlucky. Shouldn't we see this as a case of trust reasonably earned that just happened to go wrong?

I don't think so, and let me tell you why. There is a key mistake here. Our judgments about trusting other people based on their deeds is grounded in knowledge of how human-beings behave. At the base level, we mirror our mental world onto that of others. This is why sociopathic conmen are so dangerous, and also why mere introspection isn't sufficient. It works to an extent because people are fundamentally similar due to similarities in inherited brain structure and environment. We supplement our projected theory of mind with acquired knowledge of how people behave. It starts out crude - with young kids learning stranger danger skills - and becomes more sophisticated as people age and acquire experience.

But here's a fundamental problem: Aliens aren't people - at least not the sort of people we are familiar with. There's no reason a priori to think they have mental worlds anything like our own. Knowledge of how humans think and behave does us no good in their case. We're in the dark when it comes to alien thought processes. Good works don't necessarily predict a benevolent disposition like it would in a human. There's a lot unknown about a mind so foreign to our own. A healthy agnosticism leading to skepticism is the warranted approach.

Gods, though, are aliens too. Revealed religions claim to have contact with one or more alien beings communicating with them. Even if you believe there exists a God who is a disembodied mind that is all-powerful, all-good, all-knowing, and the creator of the universe existing outside, yet entirely through it, your point of contact with the god of your revealed religion is the claim to be that God. Mormonism in particular is clear about God being an alien being in psychic contact with us.

So how do we know this god is good? How do we know this God's claims about paradise will hold up? Let's assume this is in the good works this being does for people. God, the alien being, has done a lot of good for people and this provides a basis for a trusting attitude towards this alien's claims. We'll put aside the argument from evil that militates against that and the problems with attributing anything happening in our world to divine influence. Let's just grant the point. Is that sufficient to trust an alien mind? I'm not so sure. Actually, I'm quite skeptical.

[_Maksutov]

Always interested in this issue. H. P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti have treated it in fiction, and there's a term..."misotheism", I think, about this idea.

[_bcspace]

And some of you thought this thread would be about sandwich making. For shame!

[_TrashcanMan79]

Always interested in this issue. H. P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti have treated it in fiction, and there's a term..."misotheism", I think, about this idea.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misotheism

New word for me. Very interdasting stuff.

[_Gadianton]

Thanks EA, that was a great episode. Stephen Hawking also says we should not try to contact alien life. So even if there is a God, here is a sober lesson to avoid prayer.

[Guest]

Thanks EA, that was a great episode. Stephen Hawking also says we should not try to contact alien life. So even if there is a God, here is a sober lesson to avoid prayer.

That brings up an interesting point wherein the LDS Church has the advantage. In the rest of Christianity and other religions, God is essentially an alien being. In LDS theology, God is a homo sapiens, one of us and one we can relate to and who can relate to us.

Perhaps then, it is Gadianton who is listening to an alien being:

"for the evil spirit teacheth not a man to pray, but teacheth him that he must not pray."
2 Nephi 32:8

[_Gadianton]

lol. thanks BC, that came close to being a good point. If you tried this hard in all your threads you might get somewhere.

[_Kent]

I think the average LDS would base their trust in part on experience, which often includes the experience of divine love, etc. The question of deceit would require a more compelling premise than the Twilight Zone one, of course. Why would such a powerful being bother to deceive people so elaborately? And the practical question of what the relative benefits of trusting and not trusting a being with so much power would also arise. What would be the potential benefits and risks of each choice?

By the way, there's an important word missing from your first sentence.

[_Arrakis]

I love that episode, but have always wondered why the 8ft tall aliens would construct doors in their spacecraft they have to duck to go through. Just sayin'..... (@23:30).

[_bcspace]

lol. thanks BC, that came close to being a good point. If you tried this hard in all your threads you might get somewhere.

All my posts get to the truth much closer than most. You're just so often dismayed that I can do it so succinctly with no weaknesses to take advantage of.