Our Limited Imagination Of Intelligent Life May 5
Lately several blogs I read commented on the Fermi paradox and the existance of intelligent alien life. First Greg Laden critisizes a historical argument (poor summary) by Professor Watson that the probability of evolving intelligent life must be quite low given the many lucky breaks that seem to have been necessary for our own evolution. A point I think is largely correct. However, perhaps we should hope that the evolution of intelligent life is rare. This this technology review article argues the reason we don’t observe any aliens is that there are very few of them so the discovery that life is common should make us very scared about our future. Robert O’Callahan’s suggests that instead the low probability event might very well be the transition to intelligent life. Thus if we want to find alien life without learning that we are likely to wipe ourselves out in the short future we should hope something like Professor Watson’s argument holds water.
I tend to think most of these arguments (except perhaps Laden’s) and most discussions of the Fermi paradox or the supposed fine-tuning of the universe for life assume far too much about the nature of intelligent life. In particular it seems unjustified to assume that intelligent life must look anything at all like us. Even assuming that intelligent life must be chemically based seems unjustified. Could configurations of plasma inside stars reproduce in some sense and evolve into intelligent life? Could the patterns of elementary particles in a neutron star do the same? I’m uncertain that we even have any reason to be confident that the chemistry and physics of the gases on jupiter can’t support life. Before we get to the stage of predicting that intelligent life must be rare, and certainly before we can assume our universe is fined tuned for life we need to do some deep mathematics to determine what sorts of laws give rise to interactions likely to support self-reproduction and selection.
On the Fermi paradox, the idea that if intelligent life was common in the universe we should have seen it already, I once again think it incorporates a deep anthropocentric bias. Worse it assumes that millions of years of technological sophistication will leave us with the same primitive desire to fuck our way across the universe. It seems totally plausible to me that the reason we don’t observe much intelligent life is that it’s just not worth the bother to them of looking for us or spreading out across the galaxy. After just begining to build computers we already spend massive amounts of time in them, perhaps aliens are too busy living in virtual worlds to come out and play in the real world. Moreover, we already have the very limited ability to control our own reward system. Give us a few million years and I’m sure that a press of a button could bring us more pleasure than any discovery of an alien civilization. The ultimate fate of intelligent life may very well be unimaginable drugged out bliss.
Additionally the very idea that aliens would colonize planets or be out here in the boring galactic nether regions seems to unimaginatively assume that aliens would remain chemical life forms. Sure people contemplate the idea that advanced life might become largely computational with sufficently advanced races learning to replace their brains with computer chips or other computing machines but few seem to really consider the implications of this idea. Beings such as this wouldn’t be constrained by physical space and would have no need to spread out to avoid overcrowding, rather, they would be limited by computational power. Thus the most likely behavior of truly advanced life is to seek out the most computationally rich physical systems and stay there. This suggests that perhaps we should be looking for the truly advanced alien civilizations to be somehow encoded into the most violent, high energy systems around. Visiting planets or sending out signals to the primitive animals who live there might be the last thing on their minds.
This is just one speculation thrown out about an area we know so impossibly little that it’s hard to conclude anything except that we shouldn’t trust any of our intuitions about what life must be like too much. Ohh and I can’t write a post about this subject without throwing a shout out to Greg Egan for being one of the most imaginative and thoughtful science fiction writers about these issues.
Loading ...
I think the conclusion that we should be scared about our future is generally poor logic - dubious information extrapolated from the group to override the specific information in the specific situation.
Anyway, I think if we get onto multiple planets, then I don’t think we will be wiped out because we will be able to avoid the major issues.
For aliens, I think while the best part of them might inhabit a computationally rich physical system, they could easily have poor cousins (imagine scout robots) looking for other lifeforms etc.
Anyway - at the speed of light time dilation would kick in and it wouldn’t be that boring.
I suppose by the time they would reach us they would be constructed of whatever was the most efficient material to design life.
Hmm, that’s an interesting question as to whether (admitting all the assumptions) the argument should cause us to shift our probability very much. It certainly seems that information about what happens to most civilizations tells us something but surely conditioning on our knowledge of our specific situation could change the probability we should assign to our own survival. Ultimately it seems whether or not the argument will be undermined by our specific information depends on whether you can point to some piece of info you think makes our survival much more or less likely than average. I don’t know if I see one.
Hmm, actually this seems like it has the makings of a genuine puzzle in philosophy of probability. This is hard and I need to think about it a bit more.
Alternatively perhaps you merely meant that this only provides weak evidence in comparison to our direct estimates of our survival probability. I dunno if I buy this since we are so bad at guessing what the future is likely to bring anyway.
In any case I wasn’t so much intending to endorse this argument as summarize it before attacking the assumptions it relies on.
Yes aliens could build scout robots to go looking for life in the hicks but why?
If the beings aren’t going themselves time dilation is irrelevant, what they would care about is time until they recieved word back. Moreover, you need to keep in mind the fact that out in the low energy regions in the hicks computations will take place more slowly so subjectively going out on such a search would require living in slow motion compared to the rest of your civilization.
But leaving this aside why would aliens want to find the primitive life forms who hadn’t yet migrated to the high energy/computation regions? If they want to find interesting aliens they look in other high energy locations. Life forms that still lived in the outer darkness would be to them the way small dumb monkeys are to us.
What I’m suggesting is that the most efficient stuff to make life out of is the high energy interactions that occur near massive black holes, neutron stars and the like so it can’t just be carried around with you.
Underlying both sets of arguments, either that intelligent life is common or rare, is the assumption that “intelligent life” equates to technologically advanced life. On Earth there are several species of whales and dolphins that appear to be quite intelligent. However, living in water likely places a premium on speed and maneuverability, or on size, as necessary to survive predators. Developing appendages equivalent to arms, hands and opposible thumbs, would likely result in the species being eaten before it could develop effective technology to offset the disadvantages of the appendages with respect to predators.
Similarly, certain extinct species, like raptors, appear to have had large brains in relation to body mass. They may have been quite intelligent, but there is no evidence that they developed technology.
Accordingly, it does not appear that the debate is about finding “intelligent life”. Rather, it is about finding life intelligent enough to develop technology equivalent or superior to 20th century Earth in terms of electro-magnetic based communication systems. That life may be the dim bulb in the chandelier, but motivated and bright enough to develop technology to survive, and lucky enough to have survived long enough to do so. That raises very different issues than those raised by either side of the argument.
When we want to know if intelligent life exists we obviously mean whether life that is intelligent relative to the baseline given by our species exists (just like a mathematician and literature major mean different things when they ask, “is anyone in the room good at math”). Now are dolphins intelligent relative to us?
Well intelligence is more or less generalized problem solving ability (my dictionary defines it in terms of ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills). Dolphins (even if given prosthetic arms) can’t invent tools to let them survive on land the way we can for the sea (scuba) not to mention being unable to infer complex abstract patterns (do number theory problems). This is true even when we motivate them with rewards to try to learn math (if you don’t think they are trying use heroin/cocaine to motivate a dolphin to learn calculus and go get a nobel). Thus it’s pretty clear that dolphins simply don’t count as intelligent in the relevant sense (they don’t have the same general problem solving ability our species does). It doesn’t matter if this is because the lack of opposable digits eliminated the evolutionary pressure for intelligence or not.
Still perhaps you might worry that there was some species out there that could invent spaceships and do advanced math but chooses to live simply. However, an intelligent but non-technical species is unstable. Using gadgets will give you a reproductive advantage thus relatively quickly any such species will give up their abstract philosophizing for applied invention. Conversely if they lack the ability to construct gadgets like one might think dolphins do they will evolve to conserve energy by eliminating the reproductively unhelpful brain functions.
The thought that life can exist in a non-biological form is interesting. Still there are many questions that need to be asked first before contemplating such a thing. Intelligence as we know it on earth is made possible by physical chemical processes within our bodys, or in other words within a container. These containers hold information, the same information which intelligence comes from. If an advanced species had found a way to exist in a purely energy form, where would information be stored. If the information is stored through an energy system then how would one form of life be differentiated from another. consciousness would be melded. If the system itself is the holder of all the information wouldnt it be considered the intelligent one.
Intelligence has to be held somewhere, for us it is within our brains. the thought of a life form that is a ball of energy to me seems far fetched. We have to ask what else can physically hold information that is not chemical. plasma itself i dont think could ever evolve into something that can interpret its surroundings and could make actual thoughts.
I think in order for something to be intelligent it would need a defined conscious. This needs to be stored somewhere. The concept of a conscious is still being vastly debated among the scientific community. we still dont know many things about our own. For example, the occurance of near death experiences make us question how can we be “thinking” when we are technically dead. Now many people say near death experiences are just a side effect of the array of chemicals that go off in a dying brain. But there are still many stories about trained doctors witnessing a completely brain dead patient, that means no brain waves whatsoever, being pulled back to life and could recall all the events that took place while in the brain dead state. this can be seen as a spiritual part of us to many of the faithful but to the scientific community there are more logical explinations. some scientist believe that humans have a second consciousness seperated from the brain. This is a communication between all living cells of the organism. we have not scrathed the surface of how we persieve the world but it is apparnt that all perception is made possible by our bodies.
I’m not quite sure I understand what you mean with many of your words. For instance do you mean non-carbon based, non-chemical, non-DNA based when you say non-biological life? Also I think you are a bit confused about the nature of energy and plasma. Plasma is just gas heated to a sufficiently high temperature that it ionizes (many electrons are no longer bound to atoms). Energy is not a thing it’s a property that systems have, e.g., a speeding train has a large amount of kinetic energy because it takes a lot of work to stop. Being pure energy thus doesn’t really make sense. I suspect you meant being made out of something like light, e.g., bosons, but I merely meant that good computational substrates would be very energetic.
Anyway we know that information processing can occur in non-biological, non-chemical systems, e.g., computer chips. Moreover, even though different programs on my computer aren’t divided into disjoint physical containers that doesn’t prevent them from being logically isolated. Anyway the suggestion wasn’t that chemical life isn’t the most probable way for life to evolve but that sufficently advanced aliens would learn to simulate their mental processes on computers.
Near death experiences don’t really show anything about consciousness or brain processes. Since people can REPORT their near death experiences to others they must affect the brain at some point so the person reporting the experience sends the right signals to their mouth and throat to speak. The two explanations then are either that during the time they were near death changes occured in their brain (just because they don’t have measurable EKG activity just means they lack large scale organization of their brain not that individual neurons aren’t firing) or that if we looked closely enough we would see chemicals violating the laws of physics in the brain so the soul could convey it’s memories to the jaw muscles.
Note, to explain near death experiences it’s really irrelevant whether they are brain dead or not. During that time without oxygen various forms of damage and chemical buildup can occur that could easily lead to false memories. Also it’s impossible to tell whether the people who had the near death experiences really had them while they were brain dead (probably wrong use of term) or slightly after or before.