Martin LeFevre: What Is Intelligent Life?

Meditations - From Martin LeFevre in California

What Is Intelligent Life?

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Physicist Stephen Hawking experiences zero gravity
(Image: David Shapinsky, NASA)

One of the world’s premier celebrity brains, Stephen Hawking, says that humans should avoid contact with aliens at all costs. “I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.”

With all due respect to Hawking’s brilliance, that’s the best example of anthropomorphism and misanthropy I’ve ever heard.

In a recent Discovery Channel TV show, Hawking begins by pointing in the right direction, and then goes off in the wrong one. He says that we can do “field work” on extraterrestrial life right here on Earth. But then he indicates that any intelligent life advanced enough to visit us would probably be, ipso facto, rapacious enough to wipe us out.

“To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational,” he said. “The real challenge is to work out what aliens might actually be like.”

The consideration of extraterrestrial life is so fraught with fantasy that I’m surprised Hawking would even hazard his thoughts on it. But to expound such philosophically simplistic notions as he does makes me feel embarrassed for him.

“We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet. I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonize whatever planets they can reach.”

Thus Hawking puts his anthropomorphism and misanthropy on display. Insight is almost nonexistent, and his logic is lost somewhere in the oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico.

Rather than extrapolating from the history of human division, conflict, and conquest, wouldn’t it be much more intelligent to define the salient characteristics of sentient life—science, technology, art, and civilization--wherever they may exist? Rather than draw an analogy with how European ‘civilization’ nearly wiped out Native American peoples and cultures, shouldn’t we ask: What is ‘intelligent life?’

Fellow physicists no longer consider Stephen Hawking a major figure. Many don’t think he has contributed anything significant to the field in years. But as an icon of the super brain in a box, he makes a good prop for science shows.

The fear of extraterrestrials attacking Earth and wiping out humankind is purely self-projected. If and when truly intelligent life is contacted (contingent probably on Homo sap becoming intelligent ourselves), they will undoubtedly say that one intelligent species attacking another is a cosmic absurdity.

Humans, who are destroying the Earth and humanity, don’t qualify as an intelligent species. But instead of doing a little self-examination, Hawking displays an astounding failure of imagination.

Let’s begin with the plausible premise that the current state of human evolution is not the end of evolution in the universe. Further, let’s presume that the capacity for science and technology requires a brain in which ‘higher thought’ has evolved. And third, let’s simply acknowledge the fact that humans are making a royal mess of things on this planet.

Holding these three premises together in the mind, and standing still, there is this reasonable insight: Something greater is going on in the evolution of intelligent life than what we think of as intelligent life.

An axiom of not only neuroscience, but also science itself, is that “the human brain is the most complex object in the known universe.”

There is something at once mysteriously true and absurdly false in that statement. The mystery was hinted at by Emily Dickenson: “The brain is wider than the sky,/ For, put them side by side,/ The one the other will include/ With ease, and you beside.”

The absurdity arises from neuroscientists who understand little about themselves or the human condition, and yet who believe that expanding their knowledge about the brain will give them insights into the mind.

To my mind, the fundamental question with respect to the human brain is this: Is there only mechanistic evolution in the universe, or does the emergence of a potentially conscious brain on this planet have greater cosmic implications?

My own view is that given the right conditions and enough time, the universe, through a continually creative process of directional randomness, produces brains capable of symbolic thought, and that gives us so-called consciousness. But since thought is an inherently separative mechanism, it ineluctably generates the levels of man-made division and fragmentation we now see on Earth. The resolution of that crisis requires conscious transmutation.

At this point, most philosophers and scientists would say that I’ve waded into the tar pit of teleology. But to question whether the universe has a general direction is very different from believing that it has a specific end. Every scientist feels wonder at the design in nature, but most don’t posit a Designer.

Intelligent life, we must conclude, does not yet exist on Earth. But in sentient life, considering the question of what it is and whether it can exist on this planet, and on others, we voyage infinitely further than Columbus could have imagined.

- Martin LeFevre is a contemplative, and non-academic religious and political philosopher. He has been publishing in North America, Latin America, Africa, and Europe (and now New Zealand) for 20 years. Email: martinlefevre@sbcglobal.net. The author welcomes comments.

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