maxxworld

Astronomers and cosmologists have been pondering for decades just how unique intelligent life is in the universe. While there may be other planets (possibly thousands) that are hospitable to some form of self-organizing matter, evolving intelligence is another issue. Coupled with this question is just how to define intelligence. Even more perplexing, how do you test intelligence? Suppose an alien race landed on Earth. They seem to be pretty sophisticated, because they built an UFO aircraft to travel millions of light-years. But does this mean they are intelligent? Perhaps they have evolved without consciousness, and are more like very complicated and sophisticated robots.

I was thinking about this for a while, and I came to the conclusion that human intelligence is most probably unique in the universe. First, it seems to me that our form of intelligence is pretty useless when it comes to evolution. If humans had evolved to be highly sophisticated machines, programmed to reproduce, eat, and nurture our offspring, we may have faired much better (by evolutionary standards, that is). But instead we have gained consciousness, and we have to deal with emotional and intellectual baggage. Now one might argue that this baggage, in the end, helped us develop technology which, in turn, made us “win” the evolutionary war. This might be true, but this goes against evolutionary principles. Evolution does now “plan ahead”. If a newly evolved feature has no instant advantage, it dies out. We seek meaning and purpose. What other life form may do that, anywhere in the universe? Meaning and purpose may also be unique in the universe.

I suppose it is a little grim to say that there is no ultimate meaning in the universe, but that’s what the sciences seem to be telling us. Of course, this does not mean that we cannot create our own meaning in life. While Dawin may tell us the ultimate purpose of organisms is to reproduce, humans can do better. Because we have been endowed by evolution (perhaps accidentally) with emotion, intellect, and purpose-seeking, we ought to take advantage of it. We have superseeded evolution and the immutable laws of the universe (in some sense). When the human race is gone, there just may be no meaning left in the universe at all.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 1st, 2007 at 9:15 am and is filed under Philosophy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.