Re: A little offtopic

From: Brian Tung (brian_at_isi.edu)
Date: 06/07/04 

Date: Mon, 7 Jun 2004 21:12:46 +0000 (UTC)

Ioannis wrote:
> Assuming that a life form exists and has evolved over thousands of years,
> what exactly does it mean to say it has "higher intelligence"?

That's a good question, but one that is hard to answer when the only
civilization we definitely know of is ours.

I think the intuitive idea behind most uses of the phrase is something
along the lines of "more advanced." For instance, they may have
faster-than-light transportation, or be able to affect stellar
evolution. If technically feasible, these are not things that are
*inherently* beyond our capabilities as currently evolved. Rather, we
just haven't figured them out yet.

But something that really means "higher intelligence" is obviously harder
to capture.

Rather than using your example of state transitions for mercury, let's
take some classic problems from mathematics, like Fermat's Last Theorem
or the Riemann Hypothesis. FLT is hard in at least two different ways.
First of all, even now that the proof is presumably in hand, that proof
is difficult for us human beings to understand. Nonetheless, there are
at least hundreds of human beings who, if they put in the necessary
effort, could probably understand it well enough.

Secondly, and more importantly, we don't really understand how it is
that the proof came to be discovered. What are the thought processes
that led Wiles, Ribet, Taniyama, Shimura, Faltings, Kummer, and whoever
to construct the necessary steps? Hamilton was taking a walk with his
family when he figured quaternions out. Did something on his walk lead
to the right construction? We'll never really know.

Is it possible that human beings are limited in the ways that thinking
leads to solving such problems? Could other intelligences be higher
in that those limitations are lesser? Suppose we encountered beings
whose thinking worked on the same foundations as quantum computing.
Would they be able to figure things out that we never could, because
of our non-quantum brains?

Maybe we're hampered by our own reductionistic views of thinking. Are
there potentially beings who simply arrive at certain thoughts in
discontinuous ways? (I'm sure the Weekly World News believes so.) We
would probably have a hard time understanding anything such beings tried
to tell us.

Part of the problem is surely that it's almost impossible for us to
characterize thinking that is qualitatively "higher" than ours--even
harder than it is for us to think about what beings on other planets
would look like without contaminating it with what we know of life on
*this* planet.

Brian Tung <brian@isi.edu>
The Astronomy Corner at http://astro.isi.edu/
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