How does intelligent life come to be? What is its future?
It was interesting to me when I first heard that Moores law was a logical extension of evolutionary theory. It was through understanding this that I was able to understand the wisdom of Ray Kurzweil and His law of accelerating returns.
The Law of Accelerating Returns
We can organize these observations into what I call the law of accelerating returns as follows:
- Evolution applies positive feedback in that the more capable methods resulting from one stage of evolutionary progress are used to create the next stage. As a result, the
- rate of progress of an evolutionary process increases exponentially over time. Over time, the “order” of the information embedded in the evolutionary process (i.e., the measure of how well the information fits a purpose, which in evolution is survival) increases.
- A correlate of the above observation is that the “returns” of an evolutionary process (e.g., the speed, cost-effectiveness, or overall “power” of a process) increase exponentially over time.
- In another positive feedback loop, as a particular evolutionary process (e.g., computation) becomes more effective (e.g., cost effective), greater resources are deployed toward the further progress of that process. This results in a second level of exponential growth (i.e., the rate of exponential growth itself grows exponentially).
- Biological evolution is one such evolutionary process.
- Technological evolution is another such evolutionary process. Indeed, the emergence of the first technology creating species resulted in the new evolutionary process of technology. Therefore, technological evolution is an outgrowth of–and a continuation of–biological evolution.
- A specific paradigm (a method or approach to solving a problem, e.g., shrinking transistors on an integrated circuit as an approach to making more powerful computers) provides exponential growth until the method exhausts its potential. When this happens, a paradigm shift (i.e., a fundamental change in the approach) occurs, which enables exponential growth to continue.
This is interesting but does not actually answer where intelligence comes from. To do this we need to understand what consciousness is. There is a lot of discussion and argument on this with many modern philosophers weighing in. I don't want to get lost in those muddy waters so I will just suggest what I think to be true.
Consciousness begins at a level of physics very deep within the elements that make up the universe so I will start with what I think the universe is.
I think that the universe has always existed in some form not necessarily what we see today but in some form. It derives from a context of energy that has no differentiation and all physical reality passes eventually back into this form. This is the closest we can come to the concept of nothing. Contextual uniformity. The smallest amount of change in context causes everything to come into existence as such creation needs only perspective. The abstraction of definition is the beginning of the change in context. To have perspective you need to have at least two individualized points at a minimum. It is the energy shared in the altering of this context that Is the true base of all energy and matter. Everything follows from contextual energy.
Consciousness then flows from the altering of perspective. It must therefor be a territorial system of perspective of at least two points. For consciousness to be aware and intelligent it must preform homeostasis within its system.
This means that intelligence is the ability to self control experience.
So this shows that consciousness is the basis of all physical reality and that intelligence is likely in any system that can self regulate throughout the cosmos.
One of the basic criticisms of panpsychism is that it is not falsifiable but I counter that If panpsychism is scientifically it should make predictions that actually occur.
I predict that we will find many other examples of behavior that cant be explained by common materialist phenonema such as nervous systems and brains.
I would suggest that proteins are an older and more successful example of intelligence. We do not know very much about proteins yet although we have vast amounts of information there is much yet to learn.
The Very Intelligent Protein mTOR
Major accomplishments of mTOR are directly regulating the function of the ribosome, the amount of proteins made, the amount of RNA made from DNA (transcription), energy metabolism, the creation and maintenance of many different organelles and programming cellular death. mTOR is, also, directly involved in brain functions of all types, such as stimulating neural stem cells to populate the developing brain, creation of neuronal circuits, neuroplasticity and very specific functions of sleep, eating, and circadian clocks.
There is much more provided at the link .
Another example of an unfamiliar type of what could easily be defined as intelligence is within rocks.
How Do Crystals Grow?
Some crystals geodes in particular actually control their environment to enhance their ability to grow and reproduce themselves in this effort. Im going to borrow this from http://www.kurzweilai.net/forums/topic/humans-are-first-out-of-the-gate#post-57422
Mnemomeme A truly brilliant poster to that site. http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/ucla-chemists-create-synthetic-153588.aspx
“We created three-dimensional, synthetic DNA-like crystals,” said UCLA chemistry and biochemistry professor Omar M. Yaghi, who is a member of the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI) at UCLA and the UCLA–Department of Energy Institute of Genomics and Proteomics. “We have taken organic and inorganic units and combined them into a synthetic crystal which codes information in a DNA-like manner. It is by no means as sophisticated as DNA, but it is certainly new in chemistry and materials science.”The discovery could lead to cleaner energy, including technology that factories and cars can use to capture carbon dioxide before it reaches the atmosphere.
“What we think this will be important for is potentially getting to a viable carbon dioxide–capture material with ultra-high selectivity,” said Yaghi, who holds UCLA’s Irving and Jean Stone Chair in Physical Sciences and is director of the CNSI’s Center for Reticular Chemistry. “I am optimistic that is within our reach. Potentially, we could create a material that can convert carbon dioxide into a fuel, or a material that can separate carbon dioxide with greater efficiency.”
The research was federally funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Basic Energy Sciences. The lead author is Hexiang “DJ” Deng, a UCLA graduate student of chemistry and biochemistry who works in Yaghi’s laboratory.
..yet for some reason, the people who have the most experimental success with crystals are nanotech/biochemist combinations…. so…
…seems extremely probable to me that geodes are a type of living thing. A silicon-based life form that’s been here on earth for millions (possibly billions?) of years.
All of this said… the fact that we’re not finding noisy life in the universe may have damned little to do with how noisy it is, and much more to do with how jittery and rapidly we live. If there are sentient silicon-based life forms, they might just be talking so incredibly slowly that we can’t hear them… or alternatively, maybe they communicate so fast we can’t even see it happen.
…or a much stranger possibility… we know there are at least six more dimensions in the physical universe than we have sensory interaction with… maybe they’re talking on some other layer of the physical universe than we’re even looking at? Maybe we’re that guy wandering around New York City staring at his own feet, and asking himself, “where are all the people? Isn’t this place supposed to be crowded?”
There are also forms of scalar intelligences within our society. They are known as corporations. States and just about any other form of humanity that we spread that defends its existence as one organism.
Then there is the phenomena of of memes Ideas that spread and use many algorithms for survival. I will leave this today with this video that while it does not mention memes is pretty obviously referring to memes.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc
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