If we find life out there, and it’s not us, we will deem it not intelligent, but what
may be equally as likely is that we find life that is vastly more intelligent than we are.
If that’s the case, we are putty in their hands.
Our greatest thoughts are things that their toddlers do.
And so they would run circles around us, and some fun science fiction stories portray earth
like this has already happened.
Earth is just their zoo.
We are just a zoo for these intelligent creatures and if they are smart enough, they can construct
a zoo where we would never even know we are in one.
Isn’t that kind of what we do in our zoos?
Penguins are in a place where you paint some icebergs; we think that they don’t know.
If we find some creatures, not as smart as we are, I think they would make interesting
subjects to explore what they are made of, how they work, what’s their biology, what
do they eat, do they eat, maybe they just receive sunlight.
There is a famous science fiction story, forgive me, I forgot who wrote it, called “They’re
Made Out of Meat.”
These were aliens who came to visit earth, they found humans not only being made of meat
but they eat other creatures on the planet.
And we take that for granted, we eat other life.
But given the sun is an energy source, in principle, you can use the sun as energy.
That’s what we sort of do, that’s what it means to get energy from plants and in
fact, we are all solar powered in that sense.
But very indirectly so.
And imagine another species where they power their body from sunlight.
They come and see us gnashing on each others’ ribs for food.
It makes us look pretty primitive.
You know ethics, there are a lot of kinds of ethics that people think of.
I’m glad that there is an entire branch of philosophy that addresses this; it can
get a little intractable in the frontiers of their journals, but I think their heart
is in the right place.
There ought to be ways to think about your behavior as relationship to others, and to
nature, and your environment.
Plus ethics have changed over the years depending on prevailing social mores.
There was a day where it was surely ethical to beat your slaves; first to have slaves
in the first place and then beat them if they didn’t obey your command.
Why?
Because they were less than human.
And in our Constitution, they were three-fifths human; even down to mathematical fractions.
So ethics cannon does evolve as a means of thinking about how to treat others.
So I think everyone should have some sense, some ethical sense of the world.
Otherwise, what would the world be?
There would be no civilization if it were not for some ethics, that we require, that
we think about, that we deduce.
The built in.
And so the extent to which people do not exhibit ethics of some kind, is often the unraveling
of that civilization.
Ethics evolves as we come to learn about the natural world and our relationship to it.
And I’d like to think it’s evolving in the right direction.
In a sense that we are not apart from but participants in a great, unfolding cosmic
story.
And I see that not simply as a consequence of an ethical perspective, I come to it from
a cosmic perspective.
When I look at the commonality of the chemistry of life, chemistry of the universe, our origin
and elements traceable to the universe, there’s a connectivity there that gives me the sense
of participation and belonging to the universe; not a sense of being apart from it where it’s
my duty to mord over it.
All of this matters, I think.
And chances are that if there is a kid with a distorted attitude about how to treat others,
you go and knock on the door and speak to the parents.
And then it is within the behavior of the parents.
So maybe it’s the reeducation of the adults, rather than the concern for the kids that
matters here.
The fact that someone can find themselves in the position of saying, “it’s just
a dog,” harps back to me hearing people just saying, “oh, it’s just a…” and
put your nationality there, or your religion there.
Whatever it is, “it’s just…” that and then people justifying wanton slaughter
of each other.
I think that it’s deeper within the species that just whether one person treats a dog
one way or the other.
And to me that’s disturbing.
One of the more fun segments that I had the privilege of participating in was the PBS
show NOVA Science Now, was on animal intelligence.
And one particular segment was on canine intelligence, and so I got to hang out with Chaser, a Border
Collie who had memorized at least a thousand words for toys, trained by his owner.
And you can’t even believe it until you do the experiment yourself, which I did.
You can’t ask, “Find all thousand;” it would take too long and it would be a boring
experiment for television.
So I took the mound of thousand, pulled out ten at random.
The dog did not see me do this.
We took the dog, basically blindfolded it, put it up on the second story.
I pulled out ten, put them on the couch, and one by one said “Find me Inky.”
It was the name of the octopus and he found it.
I said, “Find me Butch,” the name of the little Booser animal, stuffed animal.
And the real clever one was, we put a stuffed animal there that Chaser had never seen, nor
even heard the name of.
There was a little puppet of Darwin, so I put it back and said, “Find Darwin.”
Never heard the name before.
Took twice as long, but Chaser found Darwin.
Inferring that among the toys she could identify, that was not among them.
That must be what I sent her to get.
And so, what I’ve noticed over the years, over the decades, that I’ve paid attention
to this, is the other animals in the animal kingdom, whenever we presume some level of
intelligence for them further research shows that they are smarter than we ever thought.
Or cleverer than we ever gave them credit for being.
In the next generation, I don’t think the concept of “birdbrain” will survive, because
birds are showing remarkable intelligence, remarkable acuity of thought, and so that’s
a lost phrase.
I don’t think I’ve heard it for years …”You birdbrain,” Hey thanks for the
compliment!
Birds are looking pretty good.
So I think society can change.
And part of why we think animals are stupid or limited is I think hubris.
We don’t want anything to rival what we define as our own intelligence.
So we feel better if we say, “Oh they will never figure that out.
They can’t do it.”
And then they do.
And so, I think a lot is going on in the minds of these creatures.
A little bit more research will tell us more.