This idea is explored by Robert Charles Wilson in his Sci-Fi trilogy. He calls these being Hypotheticals and they operate over time frame and distances uncomprehensible to human mind.
The article makes the argument that intelligent life a couple orders of magnitude larger than human would think very slowly, since the time for a single message to cross a brain 10 times the size is 10 times longer. This necessitates that every thought traverses the entire brain.
But, taking not too much poetic license, we can argue that human society at a whole is a 10^6m scale intelligence (well, more like 10^3 if we are only counting the pile of human brains, but the distances are still in the 10^6 scale). It furthermore has incredibly slow thought transmission outside of very small "fast" nodes. Yet it solves the problem by not requiring most signals to propagate very far. Only a few ideas need to be globally known by humankind, the intermediate filtering is still mostly local.
So, a galaxy-sized "brain" can exist, it just needs to be very hierarchical, since any global consensus would take hundreds of thousands of years to formulate, even at the speed of light. In computing / distributed system terms: locality matters.
Yes, and also, who cares how long it takes to think?
The article points out:
> If our brains grew enormously to say, the size of our solar system, and featured speed-of-light signaling, the same number of message crossings would require more than the entire current age of the universe, leaving no time for evolution to work its course.
but this argues that stellar-scale life doesn't exist yet, not that it can't exist.
The universe is extremely young, ~10^10 years. Stars will continue to form for 10^14 years - ten thousand times longer than the universe has existed so far. And the universe will continue to evolve for many many orders of magnitude after that. There is plenty of time.
That argument also assumes that such an intelligence must evolve. If you were to build it out of individual cells, that seems reasonable. But such an intelligence could also be an emergent property of civilizations of intelligent beings, for example. We know too little of what sentience involves to be able to rule out such hive minds.
That's right. We humans are individualized at the organism level and tend to think entirely from the perspective of a single organism.
However it seems clear to me that networked intelligence, of the sort that has only existed on Earth for a couple of decades, is actually a new form of intelligence than individual intelligence.
Networked intelligence on Earth is extremely new and weak, however I am confident that in my lifetime we will recognize it as an "emergent intelligence".
With all the GPUs and cheap memory these days, I wonder why I am not reading about more attempts to evolve life in a computer than trying to design it.
Or even billions of years, if you consider bacteria. They span enormous areas and reproduce so quickly that it does in effect act as a broad information network, just not in a way we would call sentient intelligence.
I was referring to " the sort that has only existed on Earth for a couple of decades." That's why I said that ;)
Actually my mistake was here, where I wrote:
> actually a new form of intelligence than individual intelligence.
should have probably said "actually a new form of intelligence on top of human sentience." since I was referring specifically to the emergent intelligence of a sentient species able to encode our intelligence and transmit it throughout the network at near light-speed.
We already have artificial intelligence, in the form of any sufficiently large organisation. Corporations are intelligences of a sort - they take in information and respond to it using defined rules, and by co-opting meat computers as needed.
Human society is certainly a distributed intelligence. Elements of collective memory are external and persistent, and communication between individual units can be both remote and highly abstract.
Unfortunately it's not a very bright distributed intelligence. Memory has scaled successfully, but the strategic insight needed to guarantee self-preservation hasn't.
>So, a galaxy-sized "brain" can exist, it just needs to be very hierarchical
Or it could just think very slowly. For an entity that big there probably isn't any real hurry or much need to worry about external threats. Slow thinking also means that the speed of light stops being a problem.
It's a huge problem for humans because we don't live very long. If we lived for millions of years at one millionth of our usual pace we wouldn't find it limiting at all.
Well essentially thats how a hive mind works but I think it's a stretch to classify, idk say a bee colony, as constituting a single organism.
Considering my lacking but informed understanding of the fundamental requirements of life as it exists here on earth, I see a fundamental flaw with the idea that a galaxy sized organism could sustain the engine of life, protein folding.
There has to be some source of external energy that is fueling these organisms and galaxy sized anything make even the most massive stars in the galaxy look infitismally tiny in comparison.
Perhaps gravity of a super massive black hole could kick-start and spin some sort of electric turbine like biological organ or something to get things put into motion but considering life starts small such a scale would hit hurdles.
Of course this is assuming that life on distance planets all use the primarily carbon based deoxyribonucleic acid system of life.
> idk say a bee colony, as constituting a single organism.
Humans try to classify collections of matter into coherent objects. Otherwise there would be no way we'd be able to understand the world without that abstraction. But you live in that world long enough, and you begin to believe that reality neatly fits into the categories, however the categories exist only in our minds. But you can always make the categories break if you push them far enough. Plenty of philosophical discussions are really just about definitions of words and not anything 'real': Does life begin at conception? Is Theseus' ship the same? Is a bee colony a single organism?
> Outside of math there's a limit to how far you can push words; in fact, it would not be a bad definition of math to call it the study of terms that have precise meanings. Everyday words are inherently imprecise. They work well enough in everyday life that you don't notice. Words seem to work, just as Newtonian physics seems to. But you can always make them break if you push them far enough.
The concept of being right only makes sense across a dialectic of (perceived) truths. Obviously absolute truths about the state of the universe are still utterly inaccessible, and a priori truths never required consensus to begin with.
I can't help thinking about one of my favourite SF ideas - that the rules of computation vary depending on where in the galaxy you are (Vinge's "Zones of Thought").
That speed limit for biological activity might not exist in the universe if you consider the interesting natural "applications" of quantum phenomena. The ability for a particle to travel infinite paths simultaneously has been shown in photosynthesis, and fascinating examples of entanglement are in the literature. So it makes you wonder if distance has anything to do with the capabilities such a large brain.
It's hard to say whether those kinds of mechanisms could evolve for such a large organism. Photosynthetic molecules with interesting quantum effects developed while piggybacking on early bacterial evolution which was extremely fast because of the abundant radiation and their rapid reproduction. The chemical reactions in space might not be fast enough and may not have enough reaction energy (near absolute zero temperature) to evolve molecules with interesting effects.
But "it" would think at its own, regular pace (which might, in turn, be very fast for an even larger entity). In regard, we humans may not even be a perceptible event on this time scale.
It's a matter of metabolism and of perception of time: we, as humans, think & react very slowly for smaller animals (and are even slower on the time scale of basic chemical reactions).
Well, the speed of thinking and control must be roughly related to the speed of actions. If you look at the giraffe, it's probably near the upper limit for an animal that still can run. Not about the muscles, but the brain couldn't be much further from the hooves or it would trip a lot, because the signals take so long to travel and there are limits to local "automation". Larger animals can exist, but they can't run, they must walk or swim slowly. Or the neural pathways would need to evolve into something faster.
If you look at human society, once we industrialized and developed things like strip mining, synthetic fertilizers, plastic bags, chlorofluorocarbons, trawling or nuclear technology, it's clear that our capability of doing things multiplied. Sometimes the thinking and values part to actually control what we're doing comes a little bit belatedly.
But some part of running requires vision since you must see obstacles and plan your footings. More the bigger and more fragile you are. So there would need to be another set of eyes and some basic processing then as well. And then, what about 3d perception, moving obstacles, predator recognition? You have to know what's just tall grass and what's a rock.
You'd be better off moving the brain down and just having a really long mouth / snout / tongue. And then you'd have an elephant...
You can only have very basic processing near the actual actuator.
But why couldn't you have specialized processing... "brains"... near the sensors, and then have these send a simple binary signal back to some central "ok this is what we'll do"-brain?
Another Alastair Reynolds short story in the same vein is "A Murmuration" that I read (on my Kindle) in Interzone #257. In the story a flock of birds exhibits intelligence independently from the individual birds.
You still can't call that a meaningful organism. The speed of light still means it can't have had more than a few dozen "clock cycles" since the galaxy stabilized enough to permit it, and it doesn't have all that many more "cycles" before the galaxy will be too dead to sustain it. There is no activity it could set itself out to do and then actually do it that would not be literally at least tens of thousands of years behind the stimulus that produced it, and that would be an incredibly quick reaction. There is no force of "evolution" or anything else that could drive this entity. It's just not useful to model it as an "organism".
Even human society can only be analogized to an organism. It isn't one either. It's not enough to point out there's vague similarities but ignore the multiple-orders-of-magnitude differences in the various scales.
And there's no need for "everything to be an organism". There's no physical reality to that idea. It's merely a reflection of our own predisposition towards weak analogical thinking when we should be dealing with things on their own terms. For human society, analogical thinking can easily lead us astray; for galactic scale society it's even harder to get away from analogical thinking because there isn't one (so far as we know) from which we can derive any observations at all, so there's no concrete facts in which we can ground our thinking.
As a stepping stone, "human society as an organism" may be the beginning of understanding. But when you start doing things like bemoaning its lack of self-preservation instinct, it's a sign you've gone too far with the analogy at the expense of dealing with what is really there.
It argues almost the opposite of your points re: "everything is an organism." One of the things the author talks about is the possibility that our universe (and just about everything in it) is exposed to evolutionary forces. It even deals with your "distances too large to form a feedback loop" issue (by taking the relativity of distance and time to logical extremes).
You seem to be assuming that an intelligent organism would have uniform thoughts across their entire body. Cephalopods, at least, don't entirely match that description. Different parts of their bodies act on their own, often with no need for central organization. A larger intelligence could perhaps work like that. Maybe then you would consider just a single section that is still intelligent when severed from the rest to be the "organism" and the rest to be some sort of "colony", but what if the borders aren't clear. What if any cubic meter chunk of alien flesh was sentient, no matter where you cut it from?
> Even human society can only be analogized to an organism. It isn't one either.
Why not?
An organism can reasonably be defined as the minimal subset of a gene's phenotype that is actually capable of reproducing. On that view, an ant (for example) is not an organism, an ant colony is the organism. This neatly solves the puzzle of how it is possible for evolution to produce ants, since the vast majority of individual ants are sterile.
On that view, the minimal possible organism for a sexually-reproducig species is a mating pair. But a single pair of humans would not survive in the wild. At a minimum it takes a village (as they say). So a human village can reasonably be taken to be an organism, just as an ant colony can. But a village can't produce a technological society. At best, a village can subsist. So why is it unreasonable to consider (say) a city-state as an evolutionary advance on the village, and hence an organism in its own right even thought it isn't minimal? And so on through the Roman empire, the British empire, and the modern nation-state and multinational corporation, all of which are no less examples of the human genome's phenotype than the human body itself.
Isolated families surviving does happen indeed. A good example is the Lykov family who were completely isolated for over 40 years. [1][2] However they brought with them tools made by others before starting their isolated life, like steel axes. They also imported education & language. I haven't heard of any isolated family success stories that start without any external help.
> they brought with them tools made by others before starting their isolated life, like steel axes
Exactly. This is just a piece of an organism (society) "budding off" and surviving for a while on its own, not unlike an individual ant wandering away from the colony, or Henrietta Lacks's cancer cells (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henrietta_Lacks). AFAIK there is not a single example of a human mating pair completely cut off from all technological artifacts and successfully reproducing.
While I do believe this hasn't really happened, surely there's a strong observational bias involved ("AFAIK" - but why would you know? :) If they're isolated, chances of learning about them would be very slim by definition)
It's not a well controlled experiment, but it's data. Even in that minimalist scenario they have some tools. Because it's just obvious that if you had no tools your odds of survival are pretty frickin' low. People die in the wilderness all the time even with tools.
Humanity survived with nothing more than stone hand axes for thousands of generations, and there are plenty of instances of individuals, even in modern times, surviving in the wilderness, alone, without significant tools for an extended period of time. People have been stranded and survived on deserted islands, alone, for extended periods of time. With a plentiful food source and decent shelter, it's been done many times. It's both harder and easier than you imagine.
I am not aware of even a single instance where a single pair of humans with no technological support successfully reproduced (by which I mean: raised a child until it was old enough to survive independently. Just having a baby doesn't count.) If you know of such a case, please give me a reference.
What are you talking about? You are completely out of touch with reality. Society is great and is humans natural state... the vast majority of people are going to eventually experience psychological issues due to being alone and will lose the will to live. However being able to successfully hunt and gather enough sustenance to survive without a larger group, is not particularly 'impossible'...
It's not enough to hunt and gather and survive. You have to be able to reproduce. And you have to do it without any tools or clothing or shelter that was produced by civilization. That is very, very hard. It might not be impossible, but AFAIK it has never been done.
From the puzzle: how can it be that evolution produces a creature (ants) where 99% of the individuals are sterile? And the answer: ants are not the organism, the ant colony is the organism. This idea was introduced by Dawkins in "The Extended Phenotype".
> there are numerous examples of single families surviving in the wild
Not without some external support. At a minimum they went into the wild with some clothing and tools.
> From the puzzle: how can it be that evolution produces a creature (ants) where 99% of the individuals are sterile? And the answer: ants are not the organism, the ant colony is the organism. This idea was introduced by Dawkins in "The Extended Phenotype".
That has nothing to do with the definition of the word organism. Maybe you want another word for the unit of reproduction, but the word /organism/ already has a specific meaning, independent of reproduction.
That's news to me. AFAIK, the meaning of "organism" is inextricably bound to the concept of life, which in turn is inextricably bound to reproduction. But please do enlighten me: what is this established meaning of "organism" that has nothing to do with reproduction?
I don't think so. What really matters is the information that is being replicated. In the case of humanity, that information is encoded in our DNA and in our artifacts. But the planet exists independently of any information that is encoded on or in it, so I don't think it would be fair to say that the planet has reproduced. But it's arguable.
This mostly depends on whether the planets where life originates are anything like each other.
We just assume that every life-harboring planet will have water and trees and blue skies, but even the "dead" planets that we've seen so far are nothing like each other.
However if Earth is the only place with leafy green trees, for example, and we go on to plant these on Mars and other planets, we will essentially be making copies of Earth (which would otherwise be the only example of itself) by replicating its attributes and variables on other worlds as much as we can, for our own comfort.
Over a large enough scale of time and space, Earth could be seen as a successful organism that managed to replicate itself. It doesn't need to have any direct agency over its reproductive components (us) any more than we have any agency over our own sperm and eggs.
That's a good argument, but it depends entirely on whether we (earth life) adapt new planets to suit our preconceptions of life, or whether life from earth adapts to the conditions in finds on other planets and becomes very different from what it once was. In the former case, yes, I would totally accept that earth had replicated. But I think the latter scenario is more likely.
First, the vast majority of people who survive in the wild take tools and clothing with them. And second, it's not enough to just survive. You have to reproduce. And it's not enough to just make a baby, you have to raise it to the point where it is capable of independent survival.
You have a very very mistaken view about the level of sophistication necessary for reproduction. Its just not based in fact. There are still multiple stone age level tribes on the earth. take a woman and man from such a society with no tools and clothing, and put them in a environment similar to what they are used to and they will build the tools and clothing they need and reproduce.
Most modern humans are completely disconnected from this lifestyle and probably would not be able to adjust quickly enough... but its not some impossibility of biology.
Do you think a gorilla or chimpanzee male and female couple placed in an appropriate habitat with a reasonable amount of luck could survive to reproduce?
> There are still multiple stone age level tribes on the earth.
Yes, of course. The key word there being tribe. Not isolated breeding pairs.
> take a woman and man from such a society with no tools and clothing, and put them in a environment similar to what they are used to and they will build the tools and clothing they need and reproduce.
Maybe. But even if this were true, the couple would still be relying on knowledge gained through their upbringing in the tribe. That's the reason doing this experiment with humans not raised in a stone-age tribe would almost certainly fail.
> And there's no need for "everything to be an organism". There's no physical reality to that idea. It's merely a reflection of our own predisposition towards weak analogical thinking when we should be dealing with things on their own terms.
This. I look forward to a future where science is made by machines. What we know so far has the imprint of human values and limitations. I am very suspicious when a theory 'makes too much human sense'. Reality has no obligation whatsoever to be intelligible. What really is, outside from the human mind, has a structure that is unfathomable complex: human knowledge is necessarily a reduced representation of a tiny slice of such underlying reality. And most science is pragmatical science for human purposes, not fundamental work towards the comprehension of the inner workings of reality. This is a task for superior intelligent beings, not for us.
You still can't call that a meaningful organism. The speed of light still means it can't have had more than a few dozen "clock cycles" since the galaxy stabilized enough to permit it
Signals inside the cerebral cortex were cited as traveling as slow as 7mph. (I think I'm getting that from the old Cosmos series.) So a brain could be at least 95 million times larger. So Marvin the Paranoid Android's complaints referencing his "brain the size of a planet" could be realized in theory. In Michael Swannick's Vacuum Flowers the Earth had been taken over by a hive mind called "The Comprise" but it couldn't grow any larger because of lightspeed delays. Attempts to do so would result in "mitotic division" into rival sub-entities, one of which would kill the other.
You still can't call that a meaningful organism. The speed of light still means it can't have had more than a few dozen "clock cycles" since the galaxy stabilized enough to permit it
Signals inside the cerebral cortex were cited as traveling as slow as 7mph. (I think I'm getting that from the old Cosmos series.) So a brain could be at least 95 million times larger. So Marvin the Paranoid Android's complaints referencing his "brain the size of a planet" could be realized in theory. In Michael Swannick's Vacuum Flowers the Earth had been taken over by a hive mind called "The Comprise" but it couldn't grow any larger because of lightspeed delays. Attempts to do so would result in "mitotic division" into rival sub-entities, one of which would kill the other.
(op cites 300 kph as neural transmission speed, but this is primarily true for long nerve fibers. In the brain, it's much slower, IIRC.)
Well if it's too local it kinda begs the question of whether it's one brain or multiple brains loosely linked together just as in your example it's not clear if the human society as a whole is a planet scale intelligence or a bunch of human scale intelligences bundled together.
a galaxy size brain would disagree with itself a lot.
My skull size brain is alreayd disagreeing with itself plenty.
It also makes a dangerous assumption : that all forms of life is designed according to our idea of what life is. But life may very well exists outside of the concept of thoughts, or may not be constrained by space, time or causality. Or maybe span on severeal spaces/times.
For what we know anything could be alive, we just have now way to be verify it. Our concept of "life" is very limited, because it's limited to what we can perceive or imagine.
> or may not be constrained by space, time or causality
If something isn't constrained by causality, can we even classify it in the same "life" bucket that we define ourselves to be in? Can we even reason about it?
Well, the life bucket we define ourselves in may very well not be causal either. Maybe we just see it that way because of our limits. It's impossible to prove.
This is the limit of our condition: at a certain point, everything is a believe. I believe in causality because I have been perceiving the reality this way. And this believe is strong enough to prevent myself from jumping outside of the windows, fearing the consequence of my action.
But nothing proves that the universe is causal. You can imagine a non causal universe, and some mecanismes making us not see it.
You can imagine many totally randoms universe, but our conscienciouness only focus on the one we think make sense.
You can imagine that each individual live in it's own universe, but none of them are influencing each others.
You can imagine no universe and just a dream, or a virtual one projected to get a restult.
You can imagine a universe that is created and dying at every moment, replaced by another one in order to try to find the perfect combination or particules or to restore some kind of balance.
If you want to read a sci-fi exploration of a similar idea, pick up Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie. (I can't say more than that without spoiling things.)
Or maybe within the brain of this large organism, the signals do propagate one end to another but through wormholes, thus not being limited to speed of light.
It takes more than one traversal to make a thought. It probably takes a volume of brain to process a thought. So the speed might decrease geometrically with size? It could take 1000X as long.
Human nerve impulses travel at ballpark of 1e-7 c though, so limits of physics let you keep the relative signaling speed constant while making the system between enormously larger in radius. And the volume (and hence number of neurons) of course grows approximately as a cube of radius!
Intelligence maybe, but sentience? We haven't made any progress in that. We don't even know if science will ever be able to figure that out. See: the hard problem of consciousness.
The Universe is expanding, and some parts will never interact with other parts, because not even light could make the trip. One could say they are now in separate universes. So that's one limit I can think of.
I read somewhere that there is a universe in each scale. For example, there is a whole world in the atomic scale. Similarly there are billions of bacteria in our mouth alone. They couldn't make sense of their host. Sometimes I think it is possible that the entire universe is some body part of a giant organism which we couldn't comprehend.
Given the fractal nature of the Universe (almost everything in nature is a fractal at some scale), then it's quite possible.
Every particle contains the whole Universe and the Universe contains all particles.
But there's an interesting property of fractals (please correct me if I'm wrong) - at every level, a fractal is self-similar but not an exact copy of itself.
If we connect the two ideas, then every particle contains a similar but not identical Universe - a "parallel Universe"..
So then every particle is a gateway towards a parallel Universe in which there might be parallel versions of us, but slightly different. And every Universe contains every other parallel Universe inside itself.
This reminds me of Look to Windward, a Culture novel which features behemotaurs, creatures much larger than whales which are near immortal and have a very very slow metabolism.
Also Algebraist by the same author Ian Banks - there is a species living so slowly, that star travel is practical for them, so they are ubiquitus in the whole known universe.
Also one of the intelligences encountered in Diaspora by Greg Egan.
Actually, they just meet a localised handling agent that explains that they work for a star-spanning sentience - which is something the characters had been considering as a way of making themselves robust against civilisation-destroying gamma ray bursts, but dismissed on the grounds that it made everything so slow - though that links into the other theme in that book of simulated beings existing on very different timescales.
It depends on how you define life, which the article doesn't cover. If by life you mean 'demonstrates complex emergent behaviours', the answer might be 'perhaps, although it would take a very long time for anything to happen'. However, if 'living' means 'self organised, maintains its integrity and can reproduce', then the answer is more likely to be 'probably not'
>'living' means 'self organised, maintains its integrity and can reproduce'
I like the definition of life being something that can reproduce. But self organized, I'm not sure. All life depends on non-biological environmental factors for its organization and reproduction.
A lot of research suggests that the human brain has about an 80ms time window within which events are roughly considered "simultaneous". Interestingly, that's about the same amount of time for nerve signals to travel from your furthest extremities to your brain.
If we were to scale up our brains and bodies with upgraded speed-of-light transmitters, then 80 light-milliseconds is about 24,000 kilometers, or almost exactly twice the diameter of Earth. Thus a similarly time-scaled fully integrated conscious experience is probably limited to that volume.
Obviously, brains have lots of localized computation and subsystems that are smaller and have lower cycle times. Planetary brains could have very fast local regions but the integration time across subsystems is probably what contributes to the perception of time in consciousness.
In a book by Bertalanffy (50s System Theory) they also measure frequency limits (my blub) in animals. Anything faster than that wasn't registered by said animal. Like waving a a stick 20 times per second would be invisible to him. While at 15 "fps" it would runaway.
When discussing these issues I have always the impression that we have a too strong anthropomorphic view. For example, we assume that life needs a liquid for support, but maybe it can work with other substance (gas, plasma, ...). We think that watter has magic properties, but maybe another material works better - we simply do not known about it. Why? Because Earth does not contain enough material to produce and study the compound, or because Earth simply does not have the conditions which make the substance perform at its optimum level (maybe millions of degrees, or extremely high pressures).
I think we barely know anything about chemistry: the universe offers so many options, that restricting outserlves to life as we know it is bound to make us miss most of the real alternatives.
I agree that we have too strong an anthropomorphic view, but disagree that water and carbon are bad assumptions.
There are only a finite number of elements, and these elements are prouduced in similar ways due to radioactive decay and stellar processes. Of these, a simple study shows that carbon is best. Also, life requires some kind of chemistry to reproduce - this is easiest in a liquid, and water is the best, most abundant liquid for the process.
Perhaps a complex molecule is superior to carbon in some way. Or perhaps something could exist and reproduce as a plasma. These materials and conditions may exist somewhere in the universe, but are not nearly as likely as carbon and water.
> There are only a finite number of elements, and these elements are prouduced in similar ways due to radioactive decay and stellar processes. Of these, a simple study shows that carbon is best.
Maybe another element (or compound) performs better in certain conditions or in the presence of certain catalizators than carbon. We have not detected this because we do not have the conditions to perform the experiments, or maybe we haven't found the right proportions of catalizator to compound, or maybe we have not even tried that specific combination.
There are maybe other stables elements that we have not yet discovered, with >1000 protons in the nucleus: another isle of stability which we do not know about because the stars do not easily reach it when going supernova.
Maybe there are other organization structures (not atoms) for matter that do not occur in this part of the universe. "Chemistry" would be very different then.
There are too many variables: humankind is very young, science is in its infancy, we have a very limited spectrum of the possible conditions / materials at our disposal, and anyway the possibilities that the universe offers are way too big for us to make any final statement.
The universe has been running for a long time, in a massive parallelized manner: it sure has found possibilities that we do not even dare of dreaming about.
> These materials and conditions may exist somewhere in the universe, but are not nearly as likely as carbon and water.
You can be right there, but what is more likely: carbon and water or "the rest of possible alternatives"? It could be that carbon+water is the most common option, but still most life in the universe is based in lots of different alternatives.
There is also the limitation of our 5 senses. Perhaps another sense could lead us into a entirely new conception of life. Furthermore we really have no distinct line between biology, chemistry, and physics.
Exactly, and as far as I am aware, we haven't really got much clue what consciousness is or where it comes from. It doesn't seem to be physical and we can't measure it or observe it (brain activity yes, but not consciousness).
You are turning the tables here: it is not me the one postulating the existence of an non-falsifiable entity; quite the contrary: I am assuming that all phenomena in the universe is based on measurable quantities.
You are advocating that consciousness derives from non-physical entities ("it doesn't seem to be physical". To whom doesn't it? To you? To me it seems quite physical!). Which could be very well be true, but that statement is non-falsifiable, like God.
I am assuming the simplest thing (Occam Razor): that all we have is the material world, and there are no invisible pink unicorns. Which could be wrong of course, but then be careful because it is behind your back.
So, maybe you are right or maybe you are wrong. If you are right, we can stop talking right here, since your statements are not based on reason, and can thus not be argued (for or against): you can always postulate the pink unicorn wherever you see fit.
If you are wrong, we do not need to discuss anymore either, since that's the end of this topic.
>It’s likely that the first true artificial intelligences will occupy volumes that are not so different from the size of our own bodies, despite being based on fundamentally different materials and architectures, again suggesting that there is something special about the meter scale.
That's circular, it's begging the question. Assuming that there's something special about the meter scale, then using that to reinforce the notion that there is something special about the meter scale.
Sure. Another level of conscience. Materialism accepts that things are neither white nor black, but gray; the world is more complex than what we want it to be; simplifications take you only so far.
Rabits are more conscious that amoebas, and less than men. The consciousness of the US is probably not comparable to the consciousness of men - they are basically different things, with some common properties.
So yes, the US is conscious, for some definition of consciousness.
I think the author of that paper is leaning more on the 'phenomenological consciousness isn't true' case than the 'united states is conscious' case.
I land in the max tegmark 'information probably is the same as consciousness' camp. It makes sense that a guy who studies simultaneity would ascribe magical properties to information that is partitioned like spacetime.
But I can't argue with the critics -- we don't yet have a measurable physical quantity for consciousness, much less a definition. Dave Chalmers says the 'hard problem' is why we have qualia. I think the hard problem is even more fundamental -- it's really hard to formulate questions about consciousness in a way that communciates the problem to someone who hasn't already thought of it.
You can say the behavioral evidence (i.e. measurable quantity) for consciousness is that we're having a conversation about it, but that feels like a copout.
Speed isn't a problem if everyone else at your scale are equally slow.
If you are at the size of a galaxy you aren't being affected by humans ability to be faster just as little as individual cells mostly aren't affecting humans even though their ability to deal quickly with things at the cellular level react way faster than your entire body do.
In fact most studies about the human mind seems to suggest that we are actually more like tourists than captains on our own ship.
So the update frequency of the whole system can vary. The most important part is that it's a pattern-recognizing feedback loop which can store past cycles.
After recently finishing The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin, the sci-fi trope of life at different magnitudes is fascinating to think about. Without spoiling too much, there's a chapter where an entire universe rich with intelligent life is discovered as scientists "unfold" a single proton.
Who cares about how long it takes for the thing to think? It seems such large thing would have no predators, therefore it is not in a hurry to decide whether to fight or fly.
This can be followed up by an even "crazier" question: If so, is our Galaxy a living creature ?
Going in the other direction, are cells in our bodies "living creatures" ? They sure do exhibit all the qualities of the larger organisms. If that's true, then our body is a conglomerate of 100 trillion living beings locked together in a biological ecosystem, each individual cell or collection of cells having probably no concept of the larger system they are part of.
So then we (our bodies and other animals) could also be locked together in a biological ecosystem (The Earth) and we would be oblivious of the fact by default.
Is Earth a "living creature" ? The "overview effect" that astronauts report upon seeing the Earth from orbit seems to be related to exactly this realization - that the planet is one big living organism. There's a fantastic short documentary about this - https://vimeo.com/55073825
We are just beginning to see the complex interconnection of things and beings in the biosphere so there's a lot of circumstantial evidence that the planet might be a huge living organism - not quite fits in our definition of "organism", but then it might mean that our definition is a bit too narrow.
Ancient shamans and the modern day "psychonauts" repot the same "overview effect" after tripping on various psychedelic plants and fungi - that everything is alive, including the planet, the stars and so on.
The idea of a "soul" - as the differentiating property of living things - has been around since .. forever.
And if we touch the idea of soul, then we're entering the realm of the Holy and the idea of God.
If all living beings have "souls" and if the Galaxy is a living being that it results that it too has soul. Interestingly that it's the "soul" that allows us to "grasp" the "being part of" thing.. So if cells have souls, they feel Us with it, if the Planet has soul, we feel it with our souls and so on...
Oh well, this is a infinitely long discussion, so I'll just pause here and contemplate on some C++ code :)
This can be followed up by an even "crazier" question: If so, is our Galaxy a living creature ?
I like this, a galaxy-scale Gaia Hypothesis. Why not?
Our perspective is so small and our life span is so limited, would we be able to recognize or even comprehend the thought processes of a galaxy sized organism?
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It's turtles all the way down.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down
But, taking not too much poetic license, we can argue that human society at a whole is a 10^6m scale intelligence (well, more like 10^3 if we are only counting the pile of human brains, but the distances are still in the 10^6 scale). It furthermore has incredibly slow thought transmission outside of very small "fast" nodes. Yet it solves the problem by not requiring most signals to propagate very far. Only a few ideas need to be globally known by humankind, the intermediate filtering is still mostly local.
So, a galaxy-sized "brain" can exist, it just needs to be very hierarchical, since any global consensus would take hundreds of thousands of years to formulate, even at the speed of light. In computing / distributed system terms: locality matters.
The article points out:
> If our brains grew enormously to say, the size of our solar system, and featured speed-of-light signaling, the same number of message crossings would require more than the entire current age of the universe, leaving no time for evolution to work its course.
but this argues that stellar-scale life doesn't exist yet, not that it can't exist.
The universe is extremely young, ~10^10 years. Stars will continue to form for 10^14 years - ten thousand times longer than the universe has existed so far. And the universe will continue to evolve for many many orders of magnitude after that. There is plenty of time.
However it seems clear to me that networked intelligence, of the sort that has only existed on Earth for a couple of decades, is actually a new form of intelligence than individual intelligence.
Networked intelligence on Earth is extremely new and weak, however I am confident that in my lifetime we will recognize it as an "emergent intelligence".
Or 120 million years, if you think that ants fit the description.
(some examples: https://www.biofilm.montana.edu/node/2438 & http://www.nature.com/articles/npjbiofilms20156 )
Actually my mistake was here, where I wrote:
> actually a new form of intelligence than individual intelligence.
should have probably said "actually a new form of intelligence on top of human sentience." since I was referring specifically to the emergent intelligence of a sentient species able to encode our intelligence and transmit it throughout the network at near light-speed.
Are we, though? Isn't an individual human actually a large colony of co-operating cellular organisms?
But it's only at the level of a brain that the illusion of consciousness appears.
Unfortunately it's not a very bright distributed intelligence. Memory has scaled successfully, but the strategic insight needed to guarantee self-preservation hasn't.
>So, a galaxy-sized "brain" can exist, it just needs to be very hierarchical
Or it could just think very slowly. For an entity that big there probably isn't any real hurry or much need to worry about external threats. Slow thinking also means that the speed of light stops being a problem.
It's a huge problem for humans because we don't live very long. If we lived for millions of years at one millionth of our usual pace we wouldn't find it limiting at all.
That doesn't mean we should think of society as a singular "living creature".
I like the idea.
We are a collection of, among other things, much smaller living creatures...
People's social circle, the subculture they belong to are the first meta-organism.
Society as a whole is then a meta-organism made from subcultures.
Considering my lacking but informed understanding of the fundamental requirements of life as it exists here on earth, I see a fundamental flaw with the idea that a galaxy sized organism could sustain the engine of life, protein folding.
There has to be some source of external energy that is fueling these organisms and galaxy sized anything make even the most massive stars in the galaxy look infitismally tiny in comparison.
Perhaps gravity of a super massive black hole could kick-start and spin some sort of electric turbine like biological organ or something to get things put into motion but considering life starts small such a scale would hit hurdles.
Of course this is assuming that life on distance planets all use the primarily carbon based deoxyribonucleic acid system of life.
Humans try to classify collections of matter into coherent objects. Otherwise there would be no way we'd be able to understand the world without that abstraction. But you live in that world long enough, and you begin to believe that reality neatly fits into the categories, however the categories exist only in our minds. But you can always make the categories break if you push them far enough. Plenty of philosophical discussions are really just about definitions of words and not anything 'real': Does life begin at conception? Is Theseus' ship the same? Is a bee colony a single organism?
From http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html:
> Outside of math there's a limit to how far you can push words; in fact, it would not be a bad definition of math to call it the study of terms that have precise meanings. Everyday words are inherently imprecise. They work well enough in everyday life that you don't notice. Words seem to work, just as Newtonian physics seems to. But you can always make them break if you push them far enough.
Very slowly for us humans, at our scale.
But "it" would think at its own, regular pace (which might, in turn, be very fast for an even larger entity). In regard, we humans may not even be a perceptible event on this time scale.
It's a matter of metabolism and of perception of time: we, as humans, think & react very slowly for smaller animals (and are even slower on the time scale of basic chemical reactions).
If you look at human society, once we industrialized and developed things like strip mining, synthetic fertilizers, plastic bags, chlorofluorocarbons, trawling or nuclear technology, it's clear that our capability of doing things multiplied. Sometimes the thinking and values part to actually control what we're doing comes a little bit belatedly.
Or the head-brain could farm out the running to a different control point - a second brain that controls running.
It seems like we may have already done this, ourselves: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/gut-second-brain/
You'd be better off moving the brain down and just having a really long mouth / snout / tongue. And then you'd have an elephant...
You can only have very basic processing near the actual actuator.
Found. "Glacial", Galactic North anthology.
Even human society can only be analogized to an organism. It isn't one either. It's not enough to point out there's vague similarities but ignore the multiple-orders-of-magnitude differences in the various scales.
And there's no need for "everything to be an organism". There's no physical reality to that idea. It's merely a reflection of our own predisposition towards weak analogical thinking when we should be dealing with things on their own terms. For human society, analogical thinking can easily lead us astray; for galactic scale society it's even harder to get away from analogical thinking because there isn't one (so far as we know) from which we can derive any observations at all, so there's no concrete facts in which we can ground our thinking.
As a stepping stone, "human society as an organism" may be the beginning of understanding. But when you start doing things like bemoaning its lack of self-preservation instinct, it's a sign you've gone too far with the analogy at the expense of dealing with what is really there.
Let's build one:
(1): plasma
(2): plasma cloud contained by EM
(3): Charged particle flows in context of a network of causality.
It argues almost the opposite of your points re: "everything is an organism." One of the things the author talks about is the possibility that our universe (and just about everything in it) is exposed to evolutionary forces. It even deals with your "distances too large to form a feedback loop" issue (by taking the relativity of distance and time to logical extremes).
Why not?
An organism can reasonably be defined as the minimal subset of a gene's phenotype that is actually capable of reproducing. On that view, an ant (for example) is not an organism, an ant colony is the organism. This neatly solves the puzzle of how it is possible for evolution to produce ants, since the vast majority of individual ants are sterile.
On that view, the minimal possible organism for a sexually-reproducig species is a mating pair. But a single pair of humans would not survive in the wild. At a minimum it takes a village (as they say). So a human village can reasonably be taken to be an organism, just as an ant colony can. But a village can't produce a technological society. At best, a village can subsist. So why is it unreasonable to consider (say) a city-state as an evolutionary advance on the village, and hence an organism in its own right even thought it isn't minimal? And so on through the Roman empire, the British empire, and the modern nation-state and multinational corporation, all of which are no less examples of the human genome's phenotype than the human body itself.
Where did this definition come from?
> But a single pair of humans would not survive in the wild.
Not true; there are numerous examples of single families surviving in the wild.
--
[1] http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/for-40-years-this-russ...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tt2AYafET68
Exactly. This is just a piece of an organism (society) "budding off" and surviving for a while on its own, not unlike an individual ant wandering away from the colony, or Henrietta Lacks's cancer cells (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henrietta_Lacks). AFAIK there is not a single example of a human mating pair completely cut off from all technological artifacts and successfully reproducing.
http://www.discovery.com/tv-shows/naked-and-afraid/
It's not a well controlled experiment, but it's data. Even in that minimalist scenario they have some tools. Because it's just obvious that if you had no tools your odds of survival are pretty frickin' low. People die in the wilderness all the time even with tools.
And a community of other humans.
> it's been done many times
I am not aware of even a single instance where a single pair of humans with no technological support successfully reproduced (by which I mean: raised a child until it was old enough to survive independently. Just having a baby doesn't count.) If you know of such a case, please give me a reference.
From the puzzle: how can it be that evolution produces a creature (ants) where 99% of the individuals are sterile? And the answer: ants are not the organism, the ant colony is the organism. This idea was introduced by Dawkins in "The Extended Phenotype".
> there are numerous examples of single families surviving in the wild
Not without some external support. At a minimum they went into the wild with some clothing and tools.
That has nothing to do with the definition of the word organism. Maybe you want another word for the unit of reproduction, but the word /organism/ already has a specific meaning, independent of reproduction.
"the material structure of an individual LIFE form"
"a whole with interdependent parts, likened to a LIVING being"
So let's go on to look up "Life":
"the condition that distinguishes animals and plants from inorganic matter, including the capacity for growth, REPRODUCTION..."
We just assume that every life-harboring planet will have water and trees and blue skies, but even the "dead" planets that we've seen so far are nothing like each other.
However if Earth is the only place with leafy green trees, for example, and we go on to plant these on Mars and other planets, we will essentially be making copies of Earth (which would otherwise be the only example of itself) by replicating its attributes and variables on other worlds as much as we can, for our own comfort.
Over a large enough scale of time and space, Earth could be seen as a successful organism that managed to replicate itself. It doesn't need to have any direct agency over its reproductive components (us) any more than we have any agency over our own sperm and eggs.
Most modern humans are completely disconnected from this lifestyle and probably would not be able to adjust quickly enough... but its not some impossibility of biology.
Do you think a gorilla or chimpanzee male and female couple placed in an appropriate habitat with a reasonable amount of luck could survive to reproduce?
Yes, of course. The key word there being tribe. Not isolated breeding pairs.
> take a woman and man from such a society with no tools and clothing, and put them in a environment similar to what they are used to and they will build the tools and clothing they need and reproduce.
Maybe. But even if this were true, the couple would still be relying on knowledge gained through their upbringing in the tribe. That's the reason doing this experiment with humans not raised in a stone-age tribe would almost certainly fail.
Life really isn't constrained to any of our neat categorizations; life really is whatever works over time.
This. I look forward to a future where science is made by machines. What we know so far has the imprint of human values and limitations. I am very suspicious when a theory 'makes too much human sense'. Reality has no obligation whatsoever to be intelligible. What really is, outside from the human mind, has a structure that is unfathomable complex: human knowledge is necessarily a reduced representation of a tiny slice of such underlying reality. And most science is pragmatical science for human purposes, not fundamental work towards the comprehension of the inner workings of reality. This is a task for superior intelligent beings, not for us.
Signals inside the cerebral cortex were cited as traveling as slow as 7mph. (I think I'm getting that from the old Cosmos series.) So a brain could be at least 95 million times larger. So Marvin the Paranoid Android's complaints referencing his "brain the size of a planet" could be realized in theory. In Michael Swannick's Vacuum Flowers the Earth had been taken over by a hive mind called "The Comprise" but it couldn't grow any larger because of lightspeed delays. Attempts to do so would result in "mitotic division" into rival sub-entities, one of which would kill the other.
Signals inside the cerebral cortex were cited as traveling as slow as 7mph. (I think I'm getting that from the old Cosmos series.) So a brain could be at least 95 million times larger. So Marvin the Paranoid Android's complaints referencing his "brain the size of a planet" could be realized in theory. In Michael Swannick's Vacuum Flowers the Earth had been taken over by a hive mind called "The Comprise" but it couldn't grow any larger because of lightspeed delays. Attempts to do so would result in "mitotic division" into rival sub-entities, one of which would kill the other.
(op cites 300 kph as neural transmission speed, but this is primarily true for long nerve fibers. In the brain, it's much slower, IIRC.)
a galaxy size brain would disagree with itself a lot.
My skull size brain is alreayd disagreeing with itself plenty.
For what we know anything could be alive, we just have now way to be verify it. Our concept of "life" is very limited, because it's limited to what we can perceive or imagine.
If something isn't constrained by causality, can we even classify it in the same "life" bucket that we define ourselves to be in? Can we even reason about it?
This is the limit of our condition: at a certain point, everything is a believe. I believe in causality because I have been perceiving the reality this way. And this believe is strong enough to prevent myself from jumping outside of the windows, fearing the consequence of my action.
But nothing proves that the universe is causal. You can imagine a non causal universe, and some mecanismes making us not see it.
You can imagine many totally randoms universe, but our conscienciouness only focus on the one we think make sense.
You can imagine that each individual live in it's own universe, but none of them are influencing each others.
You can imagine no universe and just a dream, or a virtual one projected to get a restult.
You can imagine a universe that is created and dying at every moment, replaced by another one in order to try to find the perfect combination or particules or to restore some kind of balance.
Can anyone elaborate? What is the evidence that sentience and intelligence requires this?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_length
It was written in 1930's, but in some ways it's still incredibly refreshing and thought provoking.
Every particle contains the whole Universe and the Universe contains all particles.
But there's an interesting property of fractals (please correct me if I'm wrong) - at every level, a fractal is self-similar but not an exact copy of itself.
If we connect the two ideas, then every particle contains a similar but not identical Universe - a "parallel Universe"..
So then every particle is a gateway towards a parallel Universe in which there might be parallel versions of us, but slightly different. And every Universe contains every other parallel Universe inside itself.
Mind bending indeed.
Actually, they just meet a localised handling agent that explains that they work for a star-spanning sentience - which is something the characters had been considering as a way of making themselves robust against civilisation-destroying gamma ray bursts, but dismissed on the grounds that it made everything so slow - though that links into the other theme in that book of simulated beings existing on very different timescales.
I like the definition of life being something that can reproduce. But self organized, I'm not sure. All life depends on non-biological environmental factors for its organization and reproduction.
If you consider your brain as the brain of the galaxy, and the rest of the galaxy as its limbs, then certainly :)
The fact that the brain has only little control over its limbs (through very weak forces of gravity and electromagnetics) doesn't really matter.
If we were to scale up our brains and bodies with upgraded speed-of-light transmitters, then 80 light-milliseconds is about 24,000 kilometers, or almost exactly twice the diameter of Earth. Thus a similarly time-scaled fully integrated conscious experience is probably limited to that volume.
Obviously, brains have lots of localized computation and subsystems that are smaller and have lower cycle times. Planetary brains could have very fast local regions but the integration time across subsystems is probably what contributes to the perception of time in consciousness.
I think we barely know anything about chemistry: the universe offers so many options, that restricting outserlves to life as we know it is bound to make us miss most of the real alternatives.
There are only a finite number of elements, and these elements are prouduced in similar ways due to radioactive decay and stellar processes. Of these, a simple study shows that carbon is best. Also, life requires some kind of chemistry to reproduce - this is easiest in a liquid, and water is the best, most abundant liquid for the process.
Perhaps a complex molecule is superior to carbon in some way. Or perhaps something could exist and reproduce as a plasma. These materials and conditions may exist somewhere in the universe, but are not nearly as likely as carbon and water.
Maybe another element (or compound) performs better in certain conditions or in the presence of certain catalizators than carbon. We have not detected this because we do not have the conditions to perform the experiments, or maybe we haven't found the right proportions of catalizator to compound, or maybe we have not even tried that specific combination.
There are maybe other stables elements that we have not yet discovered, with >1000 protons in the nucleus: another isle of stability which we do not know about because the stars do not easily reach it when going supernova.
Maybe there are other organization structures (not atoms) for matter that do not occur in this part of the universe. "Chemistry" would be very different then.
There are too many variables: humankind is very young, science is in its infancy, we have a very limited spectrum of the possible conditions / materials at our disposal, and anyway the possibilities that the universe offers are way too big for us to make any final statement.
The universe has been running for a long time, in a massive parallelized manner: it sure has found possibilities that we do not even dare of dreaming about.
> These materials and conditions may exist somewhere in the universe, but are not nearly as likely as carbon and water.
You can be right there, but what is more likely: carbon and water or "the rest of possible alternatives"? It could be that carbon+water is the most common option, but still most life in the universe is based in lots of different alternatives.
Exactly: other environments would push evolution (in whatever form happens in other ecosystems) in complete different ways.
> Furthermore we really have no distinct line between biology, chemistry, and physics.
Right, those are human classifiers, which are mostly well defined, except when they are not.
You are advocating that consciousness derives from non-physical entities ("it doesn't seem to be physical". To whom doesn't it? To you? To me it seems quite physical!). Which could be very well be true, but that statement is non-falsifiable, like God.
I am assuming the simplest thing (Occam Razor): that all we have is the material world, and there are no invisible pink unicorns. Which could be wrong of course, but then be careful because it is behind your back.
So, maybe you are right or maybe you are wrong. If you are right, we can stop talking right here, since your statements are not based on reason, and can thus not be argued (for or against): you can always postulate the pink unicorn wherever you see fit.
If you are wrong, we do not need to discuss anymore either, since that's the end of this topic.
That's circular, it's begging the question. Assuming that there's something special about the meter scale, then using that to reinforce the notion that there is something special about the meter scale.
http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/USAconsci...
Rabits are more conscious that amoebas, and less than men. The consciousness of the US is probably not comparable to the consciousness of men - they are basically different things, with some common properties.
So yes, the US is conscious, for some definition of consciousness.
I land in the max tegmark 'information probably is the same as consciousness' camp. It makes sense that a guy who studies simultaneity would ascribe magical properties to information that is partitioned like spacetime.
But I can't argue with the critics -- we don't yet have a measurable physical quantity for consciousness, much less a definition. Dave Chalmers says the 'hard problem' is why we have qualia. I think the hard problem is even more fundamental -- it's really hard to formulate questions about consciousness in a way that communciates the problem to someone who hasn't already thought of it.
You can say the behavioral evidence (i.e. measurable quantity) for consciousness is that we're having a conversation about it, but that feels like a copout.
If you are at the size of a galaxy you aren't being affected by humans ability to be faster just as little as individual cells mostly aren't affecting humans even though their ability to deal quickly with things at the cellular level react way faster than your entire body do.
In fact most studies about the human mind seems to suggest that we are actually more like tourists than captains on our own ship.
So the update frequency of the whole system can vary. The most important part is that it's a pattern-recognizing feedback loop which can store past cycles.
This can be followed up by an even "crazier" question: If so, is our Galaxy a living creature ?
Going in the other direction, are cells in our bodies "living creatures" ? They sure do exhibit all the qualities of the larger organisms. If that's true, then our body is a conglomerate of 100 trillion living beings locked together in a biological ecosystem, each individual cell or collection of cells having probably no concept of the larger system they are part of.
So then we (our bodies and other animals) could also be locked together in a biological ecosystem (The Earth) and we would be oblivious of the fact by default.
Is Earth a "living creature" ? The "overview effect" that astronauts report upon seeing the Earth from orbit seems to be related to exactly this realization - that the planet is one big living organism. There's a fantastic short documentary about this - https://vimeo.com/55073825
We are just beginning to see the complex interconnection of things and beings in the biosphere so there's a lot of circumstantial evidence that the planet might be a huge living organism - not quite fits in our definition of "organism", but then it might mean that our definition is a bit too narrow.
Ancient shamans and the modern day "psychonauts" repot the same "overview effect" after tripping on various psychedelic plants and fungi - that everything is alive, including the planet, the stars and so on.
The idea of a "soul" - as the differentiating property of living things - has been around since .. forever. And if we touch the idea of soul, then we're entering the realm of the Holy and the idea of God.
If all living beings have "souls" and if the Galaxy is a living being that it results that it too has soul. Interestingly that it's the "soul" that allows us to "grasp" the "being part of" thing.. So if cells have souls, they feel Us with it, if the Planet has soul, we feel it with our souls and so on...
Oh well, this is a infinitely long discussion, so I'll just pause here and contemplate on some C++ code :)
I like this, a galaxy-scale Gaia Hypothesis. Why not?
Our perspective is so small and our life span is so limited, would we be able to recognize or even comprehend the thought processes of a galaxy sized organism?