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The Intelligent Universe

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Written by: Rod Boyle

Category: Ideas & Questions

Published: 13 November 2015

Hits: 2556

• Universe,
• Intelligence,
• Life,
• Organism,

I'm agnostic. Which means that I don't know if there's a God or an Afterlife or what-have-you. To qualify it further, if you decide to bore me by telling me that you know, I'll opine that you're either a lunatic or a liar. You pick.

What I do, however, speculate upon (and I use the word speculate as opposed to belief, as "belief" always implies those crazed members of right-wing religions who are willing to die for their beliefs, however ludicrous, and I prefer to keep mine a little more open and amenable to change and revision...), is that there seems to be an orderly, scalar property to the universe, that suggests to me, well, that it might be "intelligent". 

Allow me to explain.

The physicist sees the universe as subatomic particles, quarks, muons, higgs-boson, etc. Then again as atoms, then molecules, then as immutable principles and algorithms, laws that govern both the microscopic and macroscopic universe.

The biologist, as far as they've looked, bacteria, or viruses (although by definition they are not strictly speaking alive) finds life. From bacteria, through to cells, then organisms (simple cellular blobs, algae, plants, jellyfish, etc), organs, animals and beings, and from here some have gone further, we now have things like anthropologists, sociologists, ecologists, all of them find some and even all of the traits we use to define life in the larger organisms we refer to as cities, states, countries, ecosystems, societies, wherever you choose to draw the line...

We live at the scale of people and animals, it's easy for us to draw the imaginary line and say that we can see the properties of life in another individual, in an animal, some will even generously concede that while we disagree that a "group" of people are alive (society), or a "herd of animals" is possessed of the qualities of life, maybe it is...

And there are those extremists that suggest Gaia.

We do, however, seem to favor the notion that "big=better", insofar as life is concerned, that people are smarter than dogs, that dogs are smarter than cells, that cells are smarter than bacterium, it's our anthropomorphic egoism, but if we accept this, then...

I suspect that the qualities to satisfy the criterion for life, vague as they are, are more than answered in the life-cycle of a city, or a state, or a country, or a herd of animals, or an ecosystem, but to take it even further I'd suggest that as far as we can see there are the proofs of life, the farthest nebula and galaxies are the merest synapses of thoughts, that as we pan out from the universe we'll see that more and more of the criterion for life are satisfied...

Which raises some questions. Is this life intelligent? Do you feel that any cell, bacterium, organ in your body is qualified to identify you as intelligent? If you trusted your brain when you said "yes" you might be wrong...that's ego, not intelligence. Imagine, now, that we're judging the universe, from as far below it as the smallest bacterium is beneath us, no more able to understand what it's "purpose" or "reason" is than a fingernail is able to understand yours, why, then you've taken the first step of the way...