The search for “alien” intelligences isn’t only looking to outer space: some biologists are convinced that weird and wonderful forms of intelligence already exist right here on earth, and that they hold the key to understanding intelligence itself. In the first of a two part series, Michael Levin tries to shake us out of any assumption that intelligent beings must be embodied in a conventional way. Instead, he suggests, patterns in a medium might be intelligent, and any distinction between thinkers and thoughts is in the eye of the beholder. Read part two of our series here.

SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, is a scientific endeavor with two key things going for it. First, it would have obvious and enormous impacts on our world if it were to succeed. And second, regardless of whether any extraterrestrial intelligence is found, it’s fascinating in and of itself because it forces us to ask fundamental questions in science and philosophy:

• What exactly are we looking for, and how do we know if we’ve found it?
• What is intelligence, and how do we define it broadly enough that we can uncover it even in truly alien forms?
• Do minds require a specific kind of physical embodiment, or is it all about patterns – organized flows of energy, information, and self-referential causality?
• If we encounter an intelligence that’s different enough from ourselves, will we be capable of understanding it?
• Could even our wildest science fiction fail to prepare us for the breadth of possible minds we might meet? Conversely, would we be shocked to find that all intelligences have a set of familiar traits in common?
• Would intelligence automatically mean life, or could there be intelligent entities that we would not call “alive”?
• If there are intelligences that are not “alive,” will they have to have been engineered by natural beings, and does their origin story matter for the inevitable moral questions it would raise?

While we don’t know when we might confront extra-terrestrial intelligence, these same 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. These include 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.

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Right here on Earth, there are already “aliens” among us that stretch and often break our familiar ways of thinking about Self and Other.

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We now find ourselves engaged in an endeavor that I like to call SUTI, the Search for Unconventional Terrestrial Intelligence. I believe that truly, right here on Earth, there are already “aliens” among us that stretch and often break our familiar ways of thinking about Self and Other.

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But this article is not about aliens, or 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.

There are many parameters along which intelligences may be unfamiliar and hard to recognize: their material, their origin story, their scales of both size and time, and more. But here I’d like to focus on one parameter that’s especially interesting and (thus far) unbreachable: the apparent distinction between persistent patterns in a medium and what we would consider to be proper physical beings.

When we think about the nature of thoughts as dynamic patterns within a cognitive system such as a brain, it often feels as though there is a fundamental distinction between “real” systems, such as brains and computational hardware, and the flows of energy and information that represent their thoughts. It seems as though real beings are tangible, permanent things and they think and feel by rearranging the fleeting patterns within their cognitive medium. But it’s important to remember that nothing is permanent and even relatively long-lived humans are patterns of flux of metabolic energy and molecules which enter and leave the Ship of Theseus that is a living body. If we, as flows of temporarily-stable and self-reinforcing order within our environment, are true agents with preferences, goals, and memories, could other patterns – within us and within other media – be somewhere on the agential spectrum as well? What if thoughts can also be thinkers – what if the distinction between thoughts (patterns within a cognitive system) and thinkers exist on a continuum, seen differently by different kinds of observers? (The background for this speculative idea is described in detail here).

Imagine the following scenario.[1] Creatures exist at the core of the earth; they are super dense. At one point they come up to the surface. To them, everything above earth’s crust is so rarefied that it’s more like a gas or thin plasma. They view the world by way of gamma rays, which of course go right through us, which means they can’t see us or any of our “solid” objects. As they move about, they unwittingly destroy both animate and inanimate objects here at the surface, in the same way that you and I disrupt subtle chemical patterns as we move around in our atmosphere.

Let’s call them Core Creatures. They make use of highly sensitive equipment, and over the course of their scientific investigations one of them discovers that there are patterns here on the surface within this gas, this plasma, that seem to hang together for a bit and move in ways that suggests active, non-random behavior. Patterns that not only cohere and persist as they interact, but that exhibit behaviors and transformations that almost suggest a degree of agency.

The Core Creature scientist knows that making a determination on goal-directedness cannot be done from purely observational data, so they perform perturbative experiments using instruments that send signals, implement barriers, and enact disruptive interventions. They then observe how these patterns (namely, us) react to their disruptions in ways well-described by models from behavioral science. They clearly see that we exhibit preferences, problem-solving, and other responses indicative of beings at a level higher than passive matter.

Next, perhaps in the spirit of Ilya Prigogine, they formulate the astonishing hypothesis that temporary patterns in a thin gaseous medium might actually be real and active agents in their own right.

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Naturally, when they present their findings at their Core Creature Conference, they’re met with staunch skepticism. Critics point out that these temporary patterns barely last 100 years. For long-lived Core Creatures, that’s hardly a flicker. They point out how the cold temperature here on the surface would make life impossible, certainly life as they know it. They argue that to take this seriously amounts to a belief in ghosts, 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.

There’s a gulf that separates us from the Core Creatures, and 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 those of us living here on earth’s surface are short-lived, and exhibit (to the Core Creatures) an alien physiology.

No, it’s much worse than that. These Core Creatures could very well learn good English and initiate meaningful conversations with us – ones where both sides are enriched and benefit; that still won’t convince them. The doubters among them will insist that physical processes like pattern-completion dynamics in artificial neural networks, or even networks of beer cans and string, can give rise to passable conversations. And that, they’ll claim, would be enough to convince the gullible into thinking that there’s someone in there. “No such pattern dynamics could ever be real,” they’ll say. “Not in the way that we proper, dense, ultra-hot beings are.”

So they’ll formulate neat models of energetic dynamics that perform pattern completion (i.e., next-word prediction) and then use those as evidence against our realness here on the surface. At best, they may recognize our ecosystems as at least a possible agent of the right temporal scale, but they’ll only see 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 as the cognitive home of these propagating, parasitic patterns.

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So how do we convince the Core Creatures that we are in fact real?

For this we have to ask: 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 and I are also a kind of temporary (metabolic) pattern. As we know, it feels like all sorts of things. But it’s a very hard concept to internalize. This is what a conversation between more and less dense beings might be like:

Core Creature: I feel as though I’m going crazy. I was doing a simple analysis of energy patterns in the gas surrounding our planet, and now I’m conversing with what seems to be a sentient pattern in the atmosphere. 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?

CC: 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 complex physical structure of our bodies and brains. You are but a temporary disturbance within an excitable medium, like a whirlpool or standing wave in water; or maybe like a soliton, or even a Glider in a cellular automata simulation. You have no independent existence, and will disintegrate after a relatively short time. How can you have any degree of memory or agency?

Raudive: My name is Raudive, named after one of my ancestors who likewise tried to communicate with 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 scoff at the idea of intelligence in the patterns of a truly rarefied medium such as the solar plasma.

CC: I will keep working on it – a framework for recognizing intelligences in highly unconventional guises. Maybe I can convince my people that we, who come 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. But 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.

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Perhaps, as William James said, “thoughts are thinkers”.

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The Core Creatures story serves as a warm-up for shaking the foundational assumption that there is a simple binary difference between thought and thinker. It frees us up to question the familiar dichotomy between (1) patterns on the one hand as passive data, and (2) agents on the other hand as the only real beings, which operate on that data as memories and thoughts. We can develop frameworks for understanding a full continuum between thought and thinker, for dissolving the barrier between data and machine, and for discovering highly diverse intelligence in truly unconventional forms.

Alan Turing formalized that gulf, by metaphors involving an active machine and passive data on which it operates. Programming languages like LISP blur the distinctions between data and program, and are a good early step toward overcoming those distinctions. But there is a lot more that can be done, which is as essential to advancing the biological sciences as it is to maturing our ethical frameworks.

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Specific new research programs in biology, computer science, and cognitive science are enabled by dissolving the binary distinction between thought and thinker into a continuum.

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Patterns can be self-reinforcing. Some patterns can spawn other patterns, in the same way that cognitive architectures generate thoughts. So perhaps, 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 in order to help perpetuate their existence or trigger transformation.

Perhaps there is a continuum like this:

Fleeting thought  ->  Intrusive thought  -> Dissociative identity “alter”  -> Full human mind -> ?

Specific new research programs in biology, computer science, and cognitive science are enabled by dissolving the binary distinction between thought and thinker into a continuum. The results are likely to impact bioengineering, information technology, ecology, and many aspects of society. Improving our ability to identify and communicate with other such impermanent, agentic, processual beings is a most exciting, and essential, frontier of our development.

https://www.drmichaellevin.org/

https://thoughtforms.life/

 Acknowledgements:  I thank Bryan Todd and Perry Marshall for helpful comments on the text. Core Creatures graphic by Jeremy Guay of Peregrine Creative Inc.