Alien Scientist 29: Anthropocentric Games
Stephen Marshall, a former resident of Tsukuba, has been writing Alien Scientist articles for the Alien Times since 2001. Even though he no longer lives in Tsukuba, he is still a regular contributor to the magazine. Here is his latest intergalactic report.
Faced with the prospect that we are 'just' animals, we humans seem to console ourselves with the belief that we are yet superior to other species, usually because of our intelligence. This apparent anthropo-chauvinism means that we still set ourselves above all our terrestrial relatives, and can only imagine alien life-forms as our potential equals in the universe, with whom we might discuss the finer points of particle physics or inter-galactic politics.
Certainly, intelligence is important - to us - and we are especially good at 'human-like' intelligence. But to use intelligence to claim our superiority over all other species would, to an impartial observer, surely seem self-serving - and self-deluding.
It would be as if the Swiss - who are, say, the world's finest watch-makers - were to claim that watch-making was the ultimate indicator of a nation's superiority. Or, as if the Scots claimed that the ultimate indicator was making the finest Scotch whisky (when Scotch is by definition only made in Scotland). Humanity's claims for the supremacy of intelligence - and, in particular, human-like intelligence - would seem just as suspicious, to an impartial observer - such as an alien member of an Inter-Galactic Species Supremacy Claims Committee. It is true that intelligence has certain qualities that seem to indicate the superiority of a species - but only because that superiority is defined from an anthropocentric perspective.
For a start, we tend to think that our intelligence makes us somehow nobler than 'brute animals'. But if an artificial intelligence ever surpassed our own, one can imagine we would simply redefine intelligence as 'human-like' intelligence, somehow nobler than the intelligence of 'brute machines.'
We also value our intelligence because it comes with a sense of self-awareness that makes us feel superior to our pea-brained and no-brained comrades. However, it would be difficult to prove that we have a richer self-awareness than a butterfly (tasting everything it touches with its feet) or a bat (who might dream in sonar). Similarly, we may think that our ability to play space invaders or trace our family tree gives us a superior quality of life to other creatures. But who is to argue with the happiness of the proverbial pig in pigshit, or the satisfaction of a spider catching a fly?
Perhaps a spider gets no satisfaction, as such, from catching a fly, because it simply acts instinctively: it does not have that special feeling of fore-thought, effort and reward that a satisfied human fly-catcher would have. But to judge a spider's quality of life according to what makes us tick is precisely the issue. We cannot say we are superior to spiders because we build world-wide webs, rather than just fly-catching ones. After all, it is only humans' complicated social life, lurid imagination and restless inventiveness that makes building a global web of human communication either desirable or possible. But our crazy brainy preoccupations might be regarded by other animals - or aliens - as self-indulgent party tricks, no more impressive than a peacocks' tail feather display, or a mooning baboon.
Since we can’t easily compare the superiority of being a mooning baboon or human, it might be that we have to judge the success of species by our reproductive success. Like GDP as a measure of a nation's success, this may be crude, and miss some of the subtleties important to particular individuals, but it is one criterion that can be compared across a diversity of cases. So, while other species may care nothing of humanity's successes in the sciences and (so-called) humanities, they may have grudging respect for humans' swarming population, and our colonisation of every corner of the Earth, that would make a rat or cockroach proud. But they don't necessarily respect the means by which we have done it (via big brains, boats, book-keeping, etc.), any more than we respect the reproductive ingenuity of rabbits or carrots. So, if we limit ourselves to reproduction - a game that all living things play - we are reduced to fighting for evidence of success alongside any other species, in a game we won’t necessarily win.
All that said, it may be unnecessarily human-like to even care about other species' points of view. In the end, we are the only species properly capable of grudging respect or chauvinism; or properly conscious of the struggle for life, and our place in it. It is only we who make this a 'game': the other species may be hardly more aware of their participation than the pixels in a space invaders game. So we shouldn't worry that we are somehow cheating the other species by claiming superiority through intelligence; we are only deluding ourselves that we are meaningfully 'winning' a game - that of being successful humans - that no one else is attempting to play. In the end, imagining that others are playing our game is no more than a harmless fantasy for lonely sentients in an otherwise dark, unconscious cosmos.
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Alien Scientist 30: The Alien You And Me
Stephen Marshall, a former resident of Tsukuba, has been writing Alien Scientist articles for the Alien Times since 2001. Even though he no longer lives in Tsukuba, he is still a regular contributor to the magazine. Here is his latest intergalactic report.
Imagine waking to materialise in an alien landscape that is at first little more than an incoherent mass of colours, incomprehensible sounds and unaccustomed sensations. Your mind whirls trying to grasp your strange new environment, where you cannot be sure any more which way is up or down, where unidentified objects seem to move about in apparently capricious, unprecedented ways, and where cause and effect are as yet alien concepts. To have arrived in this world, you can imagine having left the safety and creature comforts of some mother ship, and are now having to survive in a new kind of outer space. Or put more simply, you have just left your actual non-metaphorical mother, and for the first time exposed to the alien air and light of your new habitat.
From before birth, a new human is the centre of its own world. Inside the womb, the knowable world is not only an all-surrounding cosmos but is physically an extension of the self. One can imagine that there is no distinction, in a baby’s initial experience, between oneself and the rest of the world: between what is ‘me’ and what is ‘not-me’. It takes some time and experience to work out that the outside world exists separately from oneself, being full of objects which have independent existence, behaving according to some external but nevertheless discernible laws.
From the realisation that ‘I am not all there is in the world’, there is still quite a distinct conceptual step to recognising that ‘I am not the centre of the world’. This is the start of a yet longer conceptual journey that leads us to understand that not only am I not the central focus of the universe, but neither is my family, home town, species or planet.
At some point, having noticed that the this exterior world is filled with other objects, an infant starts to classify those other objects into things that are animate agents, and things that are inert. Although not strictly a scientific observation, one could say that some objects obey the laws of physics more than others: a plate or toy pushed off the table will fall to the floor and stay fallen, whereas a cat pushed off the table will tend to leap away, get back on the table, or willfully resist being pushed off in the first place.
Of the animate objects we recognise in the world, we can further distinguish people – such as one’s family – from pets, wild animals and creepy-crawlies. To recognise other humans as persons implies certain assumptions, such as that other persons have minds that think, just like oneself. So, as one goes through life, one learns that it is useful to assume that other people are not zombies or humanoid automata, but are sentient beings with the equivalent of another ‘I’ installed inside each one.
To ‘me’, ‘you’ is the fundamental badge and first degree of alien-beingness; and the person denoted by ‘you’ is the first alien. You are an alien being in the sense that you are not me, but (unlike an ‘it’) you are another being, like me. I look at you, looking at me with your alien eyes, and think about you, and your inscrutable alien mind inside, thinking about me.
In fact, not everyone recognises other people in quite such a familiar, reciprocal way. In How The Mind Works, Steven Pinker points out that autistic people seem not to relate to other people in the ‘normal’ way, but may regard them as just another part of the landscape. For example, they may touch, smell and walk over other people as if they were part of the furniture. This behaviour might conventionally be regarded as ‘lacking in social skills’, but it goes deeper than having a lack of social nurturing, to the way the mind itself is ‘wired’. If you are ‘mind-blind’ – not recognising other people as sentient being like yourself – it would be perfectly rational to treat other people in a way not much different from other objects. In such a case, one might find oneself looking around the room one is in (as the psychologist Alison Gopnik has suggested), perceiving bags of skin draped over chairs, and stuffed into pieces of cloth, making unpredictable and incomprehensible noises and motions.
This kind of view could give us an insight into how an alien would view our ‘normal’ world, or how alien our view of an extraterrestrial world would seem to the natives. Either way, one might say that recognising and getting inside the minds of others is the first step to understanding the alien.
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Alien Scientist 31: Science Alien To Common Sense
Stephen Marshall, a former resident of Tsukuba, has been writing Alien Scientist articles for the Alien Times since 2001. Even though he no longer lives in Tsukuba, he is still a regular contributor to the magazine. Here is his latest intergalactic report.
Scientific revelation is perhaps most satisfying – and most welcome – when it confirms our common sense view of the world. While it does not take a qualified astronomer to predict that the sun will rise tomorrow, it is somehow comforting to know that the experts’ calculations provide reassurance that it will do so. So the revelation of an underlying order to the cosmos is not only somehow psychologically appealing but is practically useful for understanding why things are the way they are, and predicting what might happen next.
However, scientific propositions can be unsettling and even unwelcome where they suggest things that are difficult to conceive, believe, or otherwise contradict common sense.
The ability for science to confound common sense is evident when we consider phenomena beyond the extremes of normal human experience. This can easily be seen when we consider our range of standard human units: we are comfortable with millimetres and kilometres, but not nanometres or Gigametres; we relate to seconds and years, but not nanoseconds or Gigayears. But it is not only the extremities of phenomena that may confound us, but the degree to which those phenomena are analogous to our everyday experiences as fairly slow-moving, roughly metre-high, mostly aqueous-bodied medium-gravity-planetary-surface-creepers. As a result, concepts far from the range of human experience are harder for us to grasp than those that have ready analogues in our everyday lives.
For example, if we learn that a diamond or grain of salt is made up of a crystal lattice structure, however invisibly small, we can still easily imagine it as being analogous to a human-scale structure, like a building, where there are different connections and different configurations possible, that can make the structure stronger or weaker, or otherwise behave in different ways.
But when it comes to, say, relativity, it is not really analogous, and not at all intuitively obvious, that one should expect to get heavier, become foreshortened or experience time running more slowly, as one approaches the speed of light. These eventualities are so remote from our ordinary experience – say, travelling on the Joban Expressway – that it would be as easy or difficult to believe the opposite effects to occur with increasing speed. (Conversely, an ethereal alien tourist used to travelling close to the speed of light might be surprised to find itself lighter, more elongated and perceiving time to run more quickly, as it approached zero velocity in a Tokyo traffic jam.)
That said, at least with relativity we can relate to the basic concepts of mass, energy, velocity and time, and equate them however crudely with things like people observing clocks on moving railway carriages – as Einstein did to help get his point across – even if the magnitudes of the physical properties are too extreme for us to comfortably relate to.
However, the same cannot be said for the quantum-mechanical world of sub-atomic particles, where particles with properties such as ‘colour’, and ‘flavours’ – that might be ‘up’ or ‘down’, ‘strange’ or ‘charmed’ – have almost no meaningful analogues in the human world. (Perhaps ironically, these are short and sweet terms for abstruse properties, in contrast to the way that science has traditionally tended to invent complex words for rather simple everyday things, like sodium chloride or homo sapiens). The world of sub-atomic particles is in some ways so bizarre and antithetical to common sense – where normal rules of cause and effect seem not to apply – that it must be one of the most difficult areas of science to explain in normal human language (as opposed to say, the abstract language of mathematics, or the surreal prose of James Joyce).
Yet the alien nature of scientific revelation can also pertain to things more related to the familiar human-scale world – such as the origin of the human species itself. Darwin’s ideas on descent with modification were hard for some to accept partly because people had difficulty imagining the impact of very small (often invisible) changes occurring over extraordinarily long periods of time; and partly because phenomena such as speciation and natural selection are not as directly demonstrable as, say, dropping weights from a tower, or dissolving salt in water. But perhaps an additional confounding factor is that the theory of evolution has made a claim for an intellectual territory already occupied by established beliefs and assumptions, in a way that theories of quarks or mass-energy equivalence did not. In other words, it may be those areas in which a common sense view of the world is most firmly established that science’s claims seem most alien or difficult to accept.
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Alien Scientist 32: Gaian Life
Stephen Marshall, a former resident of Tsukuba, has been writing Alien Scientist articles for the Alien Times since 2001. Even though he no longer lives in Tsukuba, he is still a regular contributor to the magazine. Here is his latest intergalactic report.
How to define what we recognise as 'life' must be one of the most intriguing questions of science - alien or otherwise. It is tantalising to ponder if celestial bodies might harbour biochemical phenomena recognisable as alien life - proto-organic spores in comets, primitive microbes in the Martian soil, or good old-fashioned spacecraft-eating monsters. But the question of how to recognise a life-form also applies closer to home - even to Earth, the planet, itself.
According to James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis (or theory), the biological, chemical and physical components of planet Earth are part of a single system, which we could identify as a single life-form or super-organism. For example, planet Earth can be seen to be self-regulating, in the sense that it tends to maintain its temperature in the face of external influences. As John Gribbin notes in his book Deep Simplicity, life on Earth has not just boiled away as the sun has got hotter, but the planet's ecosystem has adapted to maintain what we would regard as a habitable temperature. In this sense, planet Earth could be viewed as being analogous to a 'warm-blooded' organism.
Perhaps planet Earth really is a living 'organism', at least if we allow an expanded, generalised concept of 'life' that could accommodate any kind of alien life-form that might conceivably inhabit universe. That is, if we imagine coming across some alien entity somewhere in outer space, we would attempt some sort of objective test to see if it was in any sense alive. For example, does it show signs of self-regulating chemical activity, exhibit local entropy reduction, or eat spacecraft with monstrous relish?
Our own planet, viewed from afar by some alien intelligence, could also qualify using the same credentials of life. The existence of the Gaia 'organism' could be apparent to an alien scientist that had its own 'test for life' applied to distinguish living from non-living entities.
The Gaia hypothesis has sometimes been (mis)interpreted as having mystical, even quasi-religious overtones, as if the self-regulating, apparently organism-like status makes the planet a kind of Mother Earth or even Earth-Goddess. However, this should not obscure the serious scientific issues that the concept of Gaia addresses.
The idea that planet Earth is self-regulating has sometimes been interpreted as if the planet were somehow self-consciously looking after itself. In this case, Gaia might grow alarmed at humanity's harmful tampering with the eco-system, and might consider redirecting - or punishing - its wayward offspring for the good of the planet as a whole.
But rather than Earth's children, perhaps we are more like Gaia's bacteria, who may be beneficial, harmful or neutral with respect to our host. In this case, Gaia might be no more aware of us than we are of our own corporeal bacteria: not really knowing or caring about us, unless we cause trouble. (Conversely, if our host really were somehow conscious, then we should not expect to be any more aware of this than a bacterium inside us would be aware of our own human consciousness.)
The idea of Gaia as Mother Earth seems rather like trying to give an inanimate object human qualities - an anthropomorphic projection on an astronomical object, like wishfully interpreting the image of a 'man' in the moon (or deities in the constellations).
But the original suggestion that planet Earth could be a life-form - of its own kind - could actually challenge the anthropocentric assumption that sees creatures 'like us' as the primary models for defining life, and sees creatures that are less like us (algae, viruses, and so on) as less worthy of the status of life. It could be that this anthropocentric conceit hinders us from recognising life in the more universal sense. So recognition of Gaia as a living thing could potentially be more outward looking and scientifically revealing than any sentimental notion that the lump of rock we call home is somehow consciously caring for us.
So, the idea of our Earthly Gaia might open our eyes to the potential diversity of life-forms elsewhere in the universe. We could imagine alien beings not only as microbes or monsters, but in the form of 'Gaian aliens' - planetoid beings with cool self-breathing atmospheres and funky biotic body-fauna. Instead of just looking for living beings on other planets, we could look for other planetary beings. Perhaps an intelligent alien planet is already gazing at Gaia from afar, wondering whether she is worth a closer look.
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Alien Scientist 33: Alien Vegetable Technologies
Stephen Marshall, a former resident of Tsukuba, has been writing Alien Scientist articles for the Alien Times since 2001. Even though he no longer lives in Tsukuba, he is still a regular contributor to the magazine. Here is his latest intergalactic report.
Imagine an alien observer of the early Earth, seeing a plant emerging from the ground for the first time. Up until now, the observer’s telescopic sights have only picked up a dull rocky landscape of greys, ochres, browns and blacks. But now, as if out of nothing, a green shoot appears: curvy leaves unfurl, expanding upwards and outwards to form an unearthly shaped, curiously smooth body, coloured all over in a lurid green. More shoots sprout, creating leaf after leaf, and branch after branch, until soon a strange-looking multi-tiered construction emerges, looming improbably over the ground, as if in defiance of the laws of gravity and entropy. So strikingly and indescribably unlike the rocks and minerals of the planet’s natural state, this newcomer might seem like an arrival from a science-fiction fantasy.
But the new arrival is not necessarily some alien organism crash-landed from outer space, or an aberrational geometry emerging from a hidden dimension, but is simply an earth-born vegetable technology that makes itself up as it goes along.
The characteristic structures – the fractal-like branching of stems and veins, the unwinding spiral angles of the leaves and petals, and the intricate reproductive apparatus – were all somehow pre-programmed and packed inside a tiny little seed.
The plant is almost like a natural little autonomous machine, transporting nutrients up from the soil, breathing in and out oxygen and carbon dioxide, and unfurling its leaves like solar panels collecting energy from the nearest star.
Consider its engineering ingenuity: the leaves carefully cantilevered out from the stem, the stem itself that must bear all the weight of the plant, and transmit it to the ground, and the roots that keep the whole plant anchored in the soil. The plant’s fibre has a great strength to weight ratio, that can outperform human-made materials. Consider the bamboo, with its hollow circular stem, that allows it to be as strong as possible in resisting bending in any direction, while minimising self-weight. It is no wonder that bamboo – and timber – are used by humans in their constructions: one might imagine that these natural materials were ‘ready-made’ for humans to assemble into useful things.
We routinely take for granted these miraculous vegetable constructions, that are so handy for human purposes. But just imagine an alternative, alien world in which there was only one kind of living being. Then, everything this alien being would wish to make would have to be constructed – ‘alien-made’ – from alien-invented materials, the alien equivalents of bricks and glass and steel and concrete. And the aliens would also need to invent for themselves something like a tree if they wanted a kind of branchy feathery airy thing to stand outside their alien house for shading against harsh starshine, for cleaning the air, for leaning gardening tools against, or for hiding in. Earthlings are blessed, in that nature has provided us with many readily useful plants – like building-material-plants and garden-carpeting-plants and ornamental-plants – that we can make use of, without having had to dream them up and construct them first.
But we can also imagine another kind of alien world, which has a greater exploitation of its natural resources, by breeding, evolving and otherwise genetically engineering a whole new range of living things to serve their purposes.
Imagine an alien society that grows itself not only plants for food or construction, but for any kind of consumer product. So, sport-loving aliens can play football not with a pig’s bladder, but a specially evolved pig’s-bladder-plant – or a soccer-tree whose fruits are footballs. Scholarly aliens can write using bird-free genetically engineered feathers, dipped in organic ink, on the surface of the continuous-harvest paper-scroll plant.
And instead of cutting down organisms and chopping them up to create buildings to live in, they can simply grow their own homes. A range of house-plants is available, which start growing as posts and then sprout joists and roof-beams. A separate species of rooftiles grows on the roof as naturally as moss on a tree trunk; tatami-plants grow over the floor, while the ceilings hang with light-emitting lamp-fruits.
To such an alien civilisation, this level of vegetable technology could be seen as the hallmark of advancement. But by this standard, humans might be seen as mostly stuck back in one of the pre-organic technological eras – the stone age, the iron age, or the silicon age.
The Earth may be mostly made of stone, iron and silicon, but to an alien observer, the arrival of strange green organisms on the planetary landscape must surely be the most significant visible indicator of the planet’s technological advancement.
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