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4. Doc: The Universe A Cosmic Superorganism HD
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Could our universe's collection of stars, galaxies, and black holes follow the same rules of existence as biological life? The cosmos itself may be a superorganism, a collection of separate bodies that act like a single being — just like ants in a colony. One scientist believes cities are superorganisms and perhaps our universe is a super-scaled up version of these metropolises. One bold thinker hypothesizes that our universe may have emerged from a set of laws similar to biological evolution. Like we pass DNA from parent to child, the cosmos may also produce offspring that inherit its genetic make up. And the seeds of these cosmic births could exist inside black holes, the endpoints in the death of massive stars. If the universe is a replicating, living being, one visionary thinks he's found its pulse. Energetic particles called neutrinos may propel our universe to expand and contract every trillion years — like a slow beating heart — as it moves from one life cycle to another. And if it has a heart, it must have a brain. Our universe could function like a giant quantum computer, processing and storing information on everything we see around us. And we might be able to find its program. But could space and time be merely a physical illusion created by our own minds? One renegade researcher contends the universe is alive in our imaginations. Without us, it ceases to exist.
Extra: The Intelligent Universe by James Gardner (NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)
"James N. Gardner’s Selfish Biocosm hypothesis proposes that the remarkable anthropic (life-friendly) qualities that our universe exhibits can be explained as incidental consequences of a cosmic replication cycle in which a cosmologically extended biosphere provides a means for the cosmos to produce one or more baby universes. The cosmos is “selfish” in the same sense that Richard Dawkins proposed that genes are focused on their own replication."
In two books—Biocosm and The Intelligent Universe—and in scientific papers published in the International Journal of Astrobiology, Acta Astronautica, Complexity and the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society—I have begun to articulate a novel (and concededly radical) cosmological vision which suggests that in attempting to explain the linkage between life, intelligence, and the biofriendly qualities of the cosmos, most mainstream scientists have, in essence, been peering through the wrong end of the telescope. My work asserts that life and intelligence are, in fact, the primary cosmological phenomena and that everything else—the constants of inanimate nature, the dimensionality of the universe, the origin of carbon and other elements in the hearts of giant supernovas, the pathway traced by biological evolution—is secondary and derivative. In the words of British Astronomer Royal, Martin Rees, my work embraces the proposition that “what we call the fundamental constants—the numbers that matter to physicists—may be secondary consequences of the final theory, rather than direct manifestations of its deepest and most fundamental level.” Rees’s insight yields a glimpse of a new kind of cosmology that views the oddly biofriendly qualities of our anthropic universe—a universe adapted to the peculiar needs of carbon-based living creatures just as thoroughly as those creatures are adapted to the physical exigencies of the universe—not as an irksome curiosity but rather as a vital set of clues pointing toward a radically new vision of the basic nature of the cosmos. The essence of my vision is that the emergence of life and intelligence are not meaningless accidents in a hostile, largely lifeless cosmos but are at the very heart of the vast machinery of creation, cosmological evolution, and cosmic replication. The hypothesis that I developed—called the Selfish Biocosm hypothesis—was based on a set of conjectures put forward by Martin Rees, John Wheeler, Freeman Dyson, John Barrow, Frank Tipler, and Ray Kurzweil. Their futuristic visions suggested collectively that the ongoing process of biological and technological evolution was sufficiently robust, powerful, and openended that in the very distant future, a cosmologically extended biosphere could conceivably exert a global influence on the physical state of the entire cosmos. Think of this idea as the Gaia principle extended universe-wide. A synthesis of these insights lead me directly to the central claim of the Selfish Biocosm hypothesis: that the ongoing process of biological and technological emergence, governed by still largely unknown laws of complexity, could function as a von Neumann controller and that a cosmologically extended biosphere could serve as a von Neumann duplicating machine in a conjectured process of cosmological replication. I went on to speculate that the means by which the hypothesized cosmological replication process could occur was through the fabrication of baby universes by highly evolved intelligent life-forms. These hypothesized baby universes would themselves be endowed with a cosmic code—an ensemble of physical laws and constants—that would be life-friendly so as to enable life and ever more competent intelligence to emerge and eventually to repeat the cosmic reproduction cycle. Under this scenario, the physical laws and constants serve a cosmic function precisely analogous to that of DNA in Earthly creatures: they furnish a recipe for the birth and evolution of intelligent life and a blueprint, which provides the plan for construction of offspring. I should add that if the fabrication of baby universes, which is the key step in the hypothesized cosmic reproductive cycle that I just outlined, sounds like outrageous science fiction—an “X-file too far,” in the words of one of my critics—please be aware that the topic has begun to be rigorously explored by such eminent physicists as Andrei Linde of Stanford, Alan Guth of MIT(the father of inflation theory), Martin Rees of Cambridge, eminent astronomer Edward Harrison, and physicists Lawrence Krauss and Glenn Starkman. This central claim of the Selfish Biocosm hypothesis offered a radically new and quite parsimonious explanation for the apparent mystery of an anthropic or biofriendly universe. If highly evolved intelligent life is the von Neumann duplicating machine that the cosmos employs to reproduce itself—if intelligent life is, in effect, the reproductive organ of the universe—then it is entirely logical and predictable that the laws and constants of nature should be rigged in favor of the emergence of life and the evolution of ever more capable intelligence. Indeed, the existence of such propensity is a falsifiable retrodiction of the hypothesis. A fasifiable prediction of the SB hypothesis—and a key feature of my cosmological paradigm that is directly relevant to the putative exercise in memetic engineering that I have proposed here—is that the process of progression of the cosmos through critical thresholds in its life cycle, while perhaps not strictly inevitable, is relatively robust. One such critical threshold is the emergence of human-level and higher transhuman intelligence, which is essential to the scaling up of biological and technological processes to the stage at which those processes could conceivably exert an influence on the global state of the cosmos. The conventional wisdom among evolutionary theorists, typified by the thinking of the late Stephen Jay Gould, is that the abstract probability of the emergence of anything like human intelligence through the natural process of biological evolution was vanishingly small. According to this viewpoint, the emergence of human-level intelligence was a staggeringly improbable contingent event. A few distinguished contrarians like Simon Conway Morris, Robert Wright, E. O. Wilson, and Christian de Duve take an opposing position, arguing on the basis of the pervasive phenomenon of convergent evolution and other evidence that the appearance of human-level intelligence was highly probable, if not virtually inevitable. The latter position is consistent with the Selfish Biocosm hypothesis while the Gould position is not. In my books and scientific papers I suggest that the issue of the robustness of the emergence of human-level and higher intelligence is potentially subject to experimental resolution by means of at least three realistic tests: SETI research, artificial life evolution, and the emergence of transhuman computer intelligence predicted by computer science theorist Ray Kurzweil and others. The discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence, the discovery of an ability on the part of artificial life-forms that exist and evolve in software environments to acquire autonomy and intelligence, and the emergence of a capacity on the part of advanced self-programming computers to attain and then exceed human levels of intelligence are all falsifiable implications of the Selfish Biocosm hypothesis because they are consistent with the notion that the emergence of evermore competent intelligence is a robust natural phenomenon. This idea is similar to what Steven J. Dick has called the Intelligence Principle, which he describes as follows: "The Intelligence Principle: the maintenance, improvement and perpetuation of knowledge and intelligence is the central driving force of cultural evolution, and that to the extent intelligence can be improved, it will be improved." Because this is a cosmological vision that predicts the emergence of transhuman artificial intelligence, it would seem to be congenial to those brainy AIs on whose activities and cogitations the fate of the universe is hypothesized to depend. But what is there in this vision that would perturb the cultural environment in which an AI is likely to emerge so as to encourage friendliness with that AI’s less brainy human progenitors? That is the most difficult issue of all: why would human beings matter at all in a transhuman, postbiological universe?
We know from Einstein’s theories and from experimental evidence that time is not the absolute, invariant, and universal tick-tick-tick process that Isaac Newton envisioned, but rather a kind of elastic and malleable phenomenon, slowing down to a crawl in a spacecraft approaching the speed of light or in the presence of a super strong gravitational field. Many scientists conjecture, based on the pioneering work of Kurt Gödel, J. Richard Gott III, Kip Thorne, and others, that past and future states of the cosmos can loop together in an unusual configuration called a closed timelike curve (CTC). In a paper published in Complexity, I offered a riff on the CTC themes of Gödel and Gott in order to offer a possible explanation for what many observers regard as the major unanswered question raised by my Selfish Biocosm hypothesis: how did the cycle of life-mediated cosmic reproduction get started in the first place? Here is the CTC-derived scenario that I put forward in an attempt to answer that question: For purposes of the present inquiry, the key perspective is offered by what physicist John Wheeler calls the superCopernican principle. Derived from the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics, this “principle rejects the now-centeredness of any account of existence as firmly as Copernicus rejected here-centeredness.” According to this principle, the future can have at least as important a role in shaping the present moment as the past. The most important aspect of Wheeler’s insight is not that we must embrace the specific mechanism of retroactive causation favored by Wheeler and the advocates of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics (the retroactive impact on quantum phenomena of observer-participancy), but rather that we should be open to counterintuitive notions of causation, if they appear to be consistent with novel yet mathematically plausible accounts of physical reality. In particular, the vision of the cosmos as a closed timelike curve that allows at least limited information flow across the putative Big Bounce threshold offers a new paradigm that may allow us to formulate radically novel theoretical possibilities concerning the origin and nature of biological information and of the specified complexity it exhibits. According to this paradigm, the process of biological information generation can be viewed as an essentially eternal autocatalytic process in which past and future temporal states are linked in a coevolutionary relationship. The wave of causation moves from what we call the past to what we call the future and back again to the past across the Big Crunch era to a new Big Bang era without disruption (but, we shall see shortly, with possible causal filtering). Causation defines the relationship between all points on the CTC, but the relationship of cause and effect is not temporally restricted in the sense we naively perceive. As Wheeler put it with uncanny prescience (though with a different causal mechanism in mind), the history of the cosmos “is not a history as we usually conceive history. It is not one thing happening after another after another. It is a totality in which what happens ‘now’ gives reality to what happened ‘then,’ perhaps even determines what happened then.” Because the CTC is curved and timelike and closed and unblemished by a final singularity, each point on the CTC is, to at least a limited degree, both the cause and effect of every other point. Time flows in only one direction in this scenario but because the CTC unites past and future at the Big Crunch threshold, the two temporal states can coevolve. The CTC that is hypothesized to be our cosmos thus may be a classic autocatalytic set, what Wheeler ventured to call a “self-excited circuit” and a “grand synthesis, pulling itself together all the time as a whole.” The implication for the origin of biological information should be apparent: not only the universe but also the life-friendly cosmic code and indeed life itself (and the specified complexity it embodies) could conceivably be its own mother under this scenario.
The relevance of this concededly speculative scenario to the present inquiry is this: if our cosmos is indeed a CTC—or if our multiverse is a series of branching CTCs—then the human-dominated past will continue to exert a causal effect on a transhuman future, long after humanity ceases to be the dominant form of intelligence on planet Earth. Likewise, the transhuman future will exert a causal relationship on prior states of the cosmos, including the era of human intellectual supremacy. In the inimitable phrase of John Wheeler, this exotic scenario envisions the whole shebang of past, present, and future not as a traditional sequential history but rather as a “self-excited circuit” and a “grand synthesis, pulling itself together all the time as a whole.” This notion, strange and counterintuitive as it may be, might conceivably offer the cultural foundation for a credible and sustainable vision of a transtemporal cosmic community. And that vision might itself be the key cultural attractor that could ensure a benign fate for humanity in a strange new world—a world that may be mere decades away—in which human beings will no longer constitute the dominant form of intelligence. What is it about this particular cosmological vision that might make it the key cultural attractor with regard to the task at hand and thus render it an appropriate tool for memetic engineers seeking to ensure a human-friendly future in a world dominated by AI? I suggest that the primary utility of the vision consists of its status as an encompassing cosmology that defines a complementary cosmological role for both human and transhuman artificial intelligence. This novel scientific worldview places life and intelligence (both biological and postbiological) at the center of the vast, seemingly impersonal physical processes of the universe. This unique aspect of the vision may conceivably offer the best hope for meeting the challenge of engineering the emergence of human-friendly AI. The essence of this cosmological vision is that we inhabit a cosmos that is a kind of ecosystem-in-waiting—a universe custom-made for the purpose of yielding life and ever-ascending intelligence. Central to this idea is the notion that every creature and every intelligent entity—great and small, biological and postbiological—plays some indefinable role in an awesome process by which intelligence gains hegemony over inanimate nature. This notion implies that every living thing and every postbiological form of intelligence is linked together in a joint endeavor of vast scope and indefinable duration. We soldier on together—bacteria, people, extraterrestrials (if they exist), and hyper-intelligent computers—pressing forward, against all odds and the implacable foe that is entropy, toward a distant future we can only faintly imagine. But it is together, in a spirit of cooperation and kinship, that we journey hopefully toward our distant destination. In summary, the concept of an intelligent universe populated by a transtemporal cosmic community encompassing both biological and postbiological forms of intelligence may turn out to be the key tool with which memetic engineers can build the cultural foundation for a benign cosmic future in which human beings no longer play the dominant role.
Ever since human beings first lifted their eyes to the heavens, visions of the cosmos have served as powerful cultural attractors, shaping not only concepts of the nature of the universe but also of humanity’s role within it. Now a seismic cultural event may loom just over history’s horizon: the emergence of transhuman artificial intelligence. In the aftermath of what some futurists call a cultural singularity, humans will—assuming these predictions are correct— be displaced as the dominant form of intelligence on planet Earth. Will humanity be able to shape this portentous transition so as to ensure a human-friendly (or at least human-tolerant) future? The answer may depend on whether we can figure out how to engage in a novel exercise in memetic engineering—developing and disseminating a powerful new cosmological paradigm that will prescribe complementary roles for human and transhuman forms of intelligence—before singularity judgment day arrives and the human race confronts the unnerving prospect of being swept aside by an uncontrollable tsunami of runaway AI.
{Source: http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20100003017_2010003039.pdf}