(this is the original version of an edited and shortened version published here).
Charles: I feel as though I’m losing my mind. I was doing a simple analysis of energy patterns in the rarefied, subtle gas surrounding our planet, and now I’m conversing with what seems to be a sentient pattern. You can’t be real!
Raudive: I can assure you I am very much real. It is imperative that we talk, because your activities are destroying us and our environment. How can I convince you that we exist?
Charles: My co-workers do not believe me. They say, as seems obvious, that you don’t exist in the same sense as we do. We are physical, corporeal beings, which have thoughts, goals, and preferences due to the physical structure of our bodies and brains. You are but a temporary disturbance within an excitable medium, like a whirlpool, standing wave, a soliton, or even a Glider in a cellular automata simulation. You have no independent existence, and will dissipate after a relatively short time. How can you have any degree of memory, intelligence, or agency?
Raudive: My name is Raudive, named after one of my ancestors who likewise tried to talk to “disembodied” intelligences, even more rarefied than we, using technological tools. There are billions of us here, pursuing our individual lives. We strive, suffer, win, and lose; and while all of us eventually do dissipate, our lives are meaningful and important. We all believe we are real, physical beings – just much more subtle than your amazingly dense form. Maybe it is all relative; in fact my people would likewise laugh at the idea of intelligence in the patterns of a truly rarefied medium such as the solar plasma.
Charles: I will keep working on it – a framework for recognizing intelligences in highly unconventional guises. Maybe I can convince my people that we, who emerge from the Earth’s core, are not the only real beings here. The very existence of you “humans” is imperceptible to us except by the most subtle of instruments for detecting shifts in the extremely thin gas phase above the mantle of the planet. If true, your existence has much to teach us. But it will be a hard road. Your presence suggests that the distinction between real corporeal beings, and evanescent patterns within a substrate, is not absolute or binary but is a spectrum and very much in the eye of the beholder. The very idea goes against every bit of our folk psychology – our evolutionary mental firmware dictating how we think of ourselves and the inanimate world around us. I will try.
(Charles is the one on the left)
SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, is one of those scientific endeavors that not only would have enormous impacts if it were to succeed, but is fascinating in itself, regardless of whether anything is found. Embarking on the search for alien life forces us to ask fundamental questions in science and philosophy. What exactly are we looking for – how do we know if we’ve found it? What is intelligence, defined broadly enough that even truly alien forms would be found? Are we capable of understanding something so different from ourselves? Does our wildest science fiction fail to prepare us for the breadth of possible minds, or conversely, would we be shocked to find that all intelligences have something familiar in common? Would intelligence automatically mean life, or could there be intelligent entities that we would not call alive? Would the latter have to have been engineered by natural beings, and does their origin story matter for their moral status?
While we don’t know when we might confront extra-terrestrial intelligence, these questions are starkly posed by the emerging field of Diverse Intelligence – an interdisciplinary effort to develop frameworks with which to recognize, build, and ethically relate to, intelligences in novel embodiments. This includes swarms, software AIs, embodied autonomous robotics, basal cognition of non-brainy life forms (from cells to organs), synthetic biological life forms, and all manner of chimeras, hybrids, hybrots, and other fusions of evolved and engineered components. We are engaged in SUTI – the Search for Unconventional Terrestrial Intelligence, because, right here on Earth, there are already “aliens” among us that stretch and often break familiar ways of thinking about Self and Other.
But this post is not really about aliens, extraterrestrial intelligence, or even Diverse Intelligence (or basal cognition) as currently practiced. I want to get much weirder than that, and push the boundaries further, in our attempts to understand embodied minds in all their glory. There are many parameters along which intelligences may be unfamiliar and hard to recognize: material, origin story, scales of size and time. Here I focus on one especially interesting, and so far unbreachable, parameter: the apparent distinction between persistent patterns in a medium and “proper physical beings”. This becomes important when thinking about the nature of thoughts as patterns within a cognitive system such as a brain, and the possibility that thoughts can become thinkers – that they exist as regions on a continuum (the lead-up to this speculative idea is described in detail here).
Imagine the following [i]. Creatures come up to the surface from the core of the Earth – they are super dense. To them, everything above the crust is so rarefied that it’s like a gas or a thin plasma. They can’t see us or any of our “solid objects” – their gamma ray vision goes right through us. As they move around, they destroy animate and inanimate objects unwittingly, as we destroy subtle chemical patterns in the atmosphere through which we walk.
In the course of their scientific investigations using very sensitive equipment, one of them might discover that there are patterns within this gas that seem to hang together for a bit. Not only do they cohere, but they exhibit motions and transformations that almost seem to suggest a degree of agency. Knowing that making a determination on goal-directedness cannot be done from purely observational data, a Core Creature scientist will perform perturbative experiments using instruments to send signals, implement barriers, and enact disruptive interventions. They will observe the patterns (i.e., us) react to these in ways well-described by models in behavior science – exhibiting preferences, problem-solving, and other responses indicative of beings at a level higher than passive matter. Their version of Prigogine may formulate the astonishing hypothesis that temporary patterns in a thin gaseous medium might actually be real, active agents in their own right.
The others will be skeptical, pointing out that no significant mind can be embodied in such brief flickers of energy patterns (100 years is but a blink to their long-lived forms). The cold temperature here makes life as they know it impossible. They will say that taking this seriously amounts to a belief in ghosts, and a category error born of profligate functionalist computationalism that conflates patterns in a material medium with actual beings that think and feel. They argue that it is foolish to extend definitions of “life” and “intelligence” to something as weird as short-lived patterns in a thin gas, because then the words lose all meaning.
Note the gulf between us and the Core Creatures: it’s much bigger than the one we seek to bridge by efforts to communicate with whales and other conventional biota. It’s not just that we’re ethereal, short-lived, and have an alien physiology. It’s much worse than that. They could even speak English, and have meaningful conversations with us – it won’t help. The skeptics among them will say that physical processes, like pattern-completion dynamics in artificial neural networks or even networks of springs, can give rise to passable conversations that convince the gullible into thinking that there’s someone in there. No such pattern dynamics can ever be real, in the way that proper, dense, ultra-hot beings are. They will formulate neat models of energetic dynamics that “mechanically” perform pattern completion (next-word prediction) and use them as evidence against our reality. At best, they may recognize our ecosystems as at least a possible agent of the right temporal scale, and our human forms as a nasty persistent thought-pattern within this system – a kind of “thought that breaks the thinker”, an intrusive self-reinforcing dynamical pattern akin to a physiological or psychological problem, with respect to the ecosystem – the cognitive home of these propagating, parasitic mental patterns.
How do we convince the Core Creatures that we are real? Well, what kind of data or arguments would convince us? What could it feel like, to be data flowing through a neural network? You tell me; you are also a temporary (metabolic) pattern. It feels like all sorts of things.
“Inheritance is the recurrence, in successive generations, of like forms of metabolism.” – E. B. Wilson
This kind of story serves as a warm-up to shaking the foundational assumption that there is a binary difference between thought and thinker. It frees us to be able to question the familiar dichotomy between patterns as passive data, and agents as the only real beings, which operate on that data as memories and thoughts. We could develop frameworks for understanding the continuum between thought and thinker, as a virtual stack of agents as the thoughts of the higher-order agent, dissolving the barrier between data and machine. Turing formalized that gulf; programming languages like LISP, which blur the distinction between data and program, are a start to overcoming them. But there is a lot more that can be done.
Patterns can be self-reinforcing. Some patterns can spawn off other patterns, the way that cognitive architectures generate thoughts (pinching off as self-referential domains that become an individual with its own perspective). So maybe as William James said, “thoughts are thinkers”. Maybe some thoughts are persistent patterns that reinforce themselves, or even modify their environment as a kind of niche construction to perpetuate their existence or transformation.
I wonder if there is a continuum like this: fleeting thought -> intrusive/persistent thought -> dissociative identity “alter” -> full human mind -> ?
Charles: Alas, no one believes me; they say that I’m anthropomorphizing patterns in a medium and that you’re a figment of my imagination.
Raudive: We all are, at the very least, figments of our own imaginations, and possibly of a larger mind’s. And by the way, I wonder: might you too seem like an ethereal pattern to beings, say, living in a neutron star or something like that?
Charles: Ridiculous; we’re actually real.
[i] The Core Creatures scenario is based on an idea from an old science fiction story I believe I read long ago, which might have been “The Fires Within” by Arthur C. Clarke or possibly “Proof” by Hal Clement.
We tend to falsely identify the conscious being with the medium instead of the patterns that move and live in it. Thus our Selves are an illusion from the perspective of the hardware, but eminently real if we accept the idea that they are a constantly self-constructing, changing bundle of stories about themselves and the outside world (a perspective-first view). Maybe this stack bottoms out in the active inference of particles.
It is likely that, like the Core Creatures, who were too fixated on their own parochial ideas of what “real” embodied beings must be like and didn’t recognize us, we too grossly underestimate the richness of the diversity of minds in the physical media around us. There is a very exciting research program here, to dissolve crusty old categories, which themselves (agent-like?) resist updating in light of recent advances. Can we develop rigorous and fruitful frameworks that focus on the symmetries across agents of widely differing implementation and provenance, and reveal how cognitive capacities scale across space, time, and degree of materiality?
Featured image by Midjourney.
Cartoon of the deep-Earth super-densians walking unwittingly through a sea of agential patterns by Jeremy Guay of Peregrine Creative Inc.
Thanks to https://twitter.com/PerryMarshall, https://x.com/Marsagenesis, and https://twitter.com/Madam_Mito for their comments on an early draft of the text.
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