Thread

Non-Human Intelligence

Minds and agencies beyond the human — in nature, science, religion, and the paranormal.

Eight videos that take seriously the possibility that we are not the only kind of mind around. Animals, aliens, gods, ancestors, paranormal phenomena, the AI systems we are now creating — all of them are “non-human intelligence” in some sense, and our usual reflex (either reduce them to humans or dismiss them as fantasy) keeps getting in the way of clear thinking. Watch in order if you want something close to a curriculum; each video also stands on its own.

Recommended sequence

Video · Feb 2026
Thinking Beyond Humanity

The umbrella for the whole thread. Our human self-concept is parochial, evolved, and one mode of intelligence among many. Buddhist philosophy of mind ("a being is an aggregate of aggregates"), ant colonies treated as super-organisms with distributed flourishing, real-world conjoined twins who share sensory streams, and the AI we are now building all show up as case studies in the same project: non-human intelligence is closer to home than we like to admit.

Also in: AI
Video · Nov 2025
Embracing the Paranormal

Opens with the Atlas / Jaylen Robinson past-life memory case from UVA's Division of Perceptual Studies — a five-year-old who correctly picks his "old" parents out of pairs of photographs about a person killed nine years before he was born — and asks what it would take to actually believe what we are seeing. The wider argument: "Modern Westernism" has been a coercively narrowed two-party system (materialist atheism vs. Abrahamic monotheism) since people like Michael Servetus were burned at the stake; almost every other tradition on Earth has room for this kind of data.
Video · Nov 2025
UFO State of the Union 2025

If you have half-followed the UAP story but never quite stitched it together, this is the catch-up. Starts with Fermi's paradox and the very recent NASA hints of microbial life on Mars and possible biosignatures on K2-18b, then walks the historical arc at a brisk pace — the 1952 DC wave, the Belgium wave, Phoenix Lights, Nimitz, Varginha, Grusch, the Schumer–Rounds colloquy, Jake Barber — and lands on what looks different in 2025.
Video · Apr 2024
It’s Irrational to Ignore UFOs (David Grusch is a Big Deal)

Why dismissing the Grusch testimony out of hand is itself a failure of rationality, not a sign of it. In this kind of situation you have to be a conspiracy theorist either way (the whistleblowers are conspiring, or someone else is conspiring to make them look credible), so the only honest question is which conspiracy actually fits the evidence — and what taking it seriously commits you to next.

Also in: Democracy
Video · Mar 2024
Thinking Critically and Open-Mindedly about the Nazca Mummies

A long, careful walk through the evidence presented at the September 2023 hearing of Mexico's Chamber of Deputies. The frame is the title: critical thinking and open-minded thinking are not opposites — you can, and should, hold both at once. Watch this one before the follow-up.
Video · Jul 2024
The Nazca Mummies as Archaeological Objects

Delivered at the Roswell UFO Festival, this is the public retraction. After months of close work with a small volunteer team — specialists in medical imaging, reconstructive surgery, bioinformatics, proteomics, and paleontology — he explains why he no longer thinks the small Nazca specimens are alien corpses, and why "modern fake" isn't the right answer either. His current hypothesis: they are ancient constructed archaeological objects, assembled from real bodies, in a way that is consistent with what we know about ancient Nazca culture.
Video · Oct 2024
Alien Agendas, the Prime Directive, and the Problem of Evil

A talk for the Yale Student UFO Society. Opens with the 1952 Washington flap (radar + visual + multiple witnesses, over the White House and the Capitol) and asks the obvious question: if non-human visitors are real and they are not openly contacting us, why not? Star Trek's Prime Directive is treated as a serious piece of applied political philosophy, run twice — once governed by an all-knowing perfectly good being (essentially a theodicy), and once by powerful-but-flawed beings, with lessons-learned from US foreign policy applied at galactic scale.
Video · Apr 2025
Hypertime and the Possibility of Time Travel

He used to argue, for years, that time travel was either impossible or not really time travel. He has changed his mind. The proposal: a "hyper-time" — a time-like dimension that tracks changes in ordinary time — gives a coherent way to model time travel, parallel worlds, divine foreknowledge, the fine-tuning of physical constants, and even quantum entanglement, all in one frame. Massive spoilers for Terminator and Back to the Future; no prior knowledge of either film required.