The recent full moon may or may not have turned someone into a werewolf, but it did remind me that the moon can influence the behavior of animals, just like the sun can. Both are part of the daily cycle of day and night as well as the rising and falling tides. There are many cyclic processes in nature, interacting with each other. Many are such a part of our lives, that they have been given names as if they were people. For example, Jack Frost has recently visited my neighborhood. Treating complex natural phenomena as intelligent beings could just be poetic license, but maybe the basic idea is not so far-fetched. Could “nonliving” natural processes have intelligence or even be a form of life?
Obviously, it has already happened. Life as we know it, including every last human, is based on a collection of interacting processes. We believe we are intelligent, so yes, nonliving processes can work together to produce life and intelligence. Life as we know it, including human intelligence, is a special case of interacting processes. Various processes occur in us and all round us, whether we give them special status or not. What I’m really asking is whether there is something apart from known life, that we are missing, something that should also be classified as alive and/or intelligent.
We humans have been attributing human and animal qualities to natural processes for millennia. Granted, a certain amount of that is for convenience or the sake of art, like with metaphors and poetry. But our ancestors made sacrifices to various nature gods. Did they know something we don’t? Occam’s Razor insists we look for simpler explanations first. Maybe – like metaphors – myths help characterize the subject, in this case nature. But the sacrifices? That’s a form of interaction, like we humans expected something in return. Were we possibly just looking for a change in ourselves? But we humans did not necessarily affect nature to the extent requested, not at great distances or scales at least.
We modern humans still attribute human qualities to nonliving things, but this is typically done more with our digital devices than with nature. We might speak about the intention of a device, maybe really referring to its programming, which can be seen as a proxy of the human software developers for the device. And then there is our so-called artificial intelligence (AI), which gets a lot of media exposure these days. The ability to seemingly understand human language, answer questions, and carry out requests made with human language is really impressive. It seems like the birth of true AI is right around the corner, if not already here.
But for all the processing power that goes into this AI, it still is probably not enough to accurately describe and predict the behavior of atoms and subatomic particles in one cubic inch of matter, such as from a turbulent river or from the sun. Nature – even that relatively small amount of matter – is in some way superior to all that digital hardware and software, the same hardware and software that can seem intelligent. And there is a lot matter in nature. Computer technology becomes more sophisticated over time, but being roughly 4.5 billion years old, the Earth wasn’t exactly born yesterday. In all that time, maybe the Earth has learned a thing or two, to put it mildly.
So with life and our human intelligence being a special case of the various natural processes on Earth, I see no reason there could not be some kind of intelligence or life in the processes we currently consider nonliving. Now the apparent assumption of our ancestors, that natural phenomena could think and understand us, does not seem so unrealistic. I’m still not sure about the sacrifices, but on the other hand, I haven’t tried it. Nor have I tried interacting with nature gods. I suppose it’s possible they are trying to interact with us, maybe complaining about pollution and global warming. We should try harder to listen.
(c) Copyright 2023 by Mike Ferrell
Odd STEM 