This is an extract from an old AI forum I was on, and my reply. Thought you might find it interesting in this section of the forum:

longmenshan wrote @ 1/31/2011 5:48:00 PM:

"the word conscious , intelligent is not what you have being thinking about

my idea is that true intelligence does not exist

but the traditional concept of intelligence still work, it is not so sacred ,holy as you may think to be, any thing(except man made machine) which we called life, should be called intelligent, because life is different from none-life materials"


life is different from non-life materials?

well... your saying a single cell organism is intelligent, or if not, at least alive?

where do you draw the line?

before single cell life there presumably was DNA, RNA, and organelles (little "organs" within cells) such as mitochondria, peroxisomes, lysosomes, nuclei and golgi apparati. all these are made of proteins, which are made of molecules, made of atoms, made of protons, neutrons, electrons etc.

these in turn are made of quarks etc.

given that the organelles themselves are in fact very complex structures and we keep splitting "fundamental" particles smaller and smaller, whereupon it is actually impossible to see their structure, could all these things be conscious, aware, intelligent, and/or complex in structure?

scientists have difficulty fitting viruses into their definition of life.

animism, one of the oldest religions on the planet held that all matter (rocks, trees, air, etc.) had a spirit.

there is nowhere to draw a line between life and non-life, and therefore intelligence and non-intelligence.

and i have no belief that intelligence or even life or myself is sacred and holy. EVERYTHING IS. or is not.

???




HOPE YOU ENJOY. see you around. 5DN

I tend to think along these lines. Imo, everything, including ourselves are bathed in a sacred form of awareness. Every rock, plant, animal, cloud, person, etc is steeped in this awareness. Whether this be sacred awareness, consciousness, spirit, or whatever you'd like to call it, we are part n' parcel with IT.

Not to veer too much off topic, but I feel when we do a solid dose of a psychedelic, such as DMT, we are temporarily perceiving this awareness. Like a multi-facted jewel with MANY different sides, and psychedelic giving you a particular vantage point based on what particular neurochemistry is being tweaked, etc. Perceiving what is always there.

much love,
tat

Most interesting....



The above particularly so. I sat in my garden and took a nice dose and very deep, open eyed journey. At one point I stared at the brown/white flat rock, directly below and in front of where I sat cross legged, only to watch it turn grey/black and start oozing out deep purple fractals..

I reckon I could be one of the newest converts to one of the oldest religions

IMHO, YES.

On some grand scale, you, me, all biological life, all matter is alive. Alive in the sense its all a part of one big cosmic recycling bin of atoms, particles, and what lies beyond.

The life, is in the chemical characteristics, atomic characteristics, and physics of it all. And how the system organizes on all scales observable, and interacts as a whole. All is one, and one is all.

Man made stuff has life too. Made from natural stuff, made by hand, made with love--that type of man-made item has spirit. Mass produced stuff is different....in a bad way. imbalanced, hollow, lacking in spirit. Generally speaking though, rocks, cells, clouds, plants, chemical processes--it all seems conscious to me.

yes, you could also argue, if at one point (pun intended) we were an infinitely dense point of singularity, to the point where space and time cease to exist.

Then all matter, all energy, you, me, that rock, and that star on the otherside of the galaxy, are all the same.

Is the Universe sentient?

It keeps telling me so, and I keep trying to listen.

Of some interest on this topic may be the work of Dutch philosopher Spinoza (1632 – 1677). Albert Einstein once famously said when asked if he believes in god, "I believe in Spinoza's god".

Roughly, Spinoza described the universe as a single substance and all things inside the universe as modes or attributes of the same single substance. I (think) he would argue that life is an attribute of the one substances, not necessarily that everything is alive. Life is one of the things that the one substance (universe) does...

in this viewpoint, there are really no nouns outside of our mental constructs. All things in existence are verbs (including us), they are the actions of the one substance... temporary and always changing/moving verbs.

Alan Watts often expressed a similar thought. I think he probably got the idea from the Buddha.

thanks for all the feedback guys. you all make good points and its nice to know that most people here agree with me

I always get pantheism during my trips, even plants, rocks, and leaves, like individual leaves, have communicated to me that they are just as aware of me as I am of them. Electro magnetism throughout nature, no different than a hard drive, imagine then how much rocks could share?

This is a common perceptional breakdown towards how the word 'intelligence' is defined as.

"Intelligence has been defined in many different ways including, but not limited to, abstract thought, understanding, self-awareness, communication, reasoning, learning, having emotional knowledge, retaining, planning, and problem solving."

A rock does not have abstract thought, understanding, problem solving skills.
A beach towel can not use communication or learn.
A shoe has no self-awareness.

However, just because the level of skills listed towards what intelligence is based on that definition doesn't mean intelligence is nonexistent in these materials. As far as we know, every atom (along with every microscopic molecule that exist within the protons and electrons of an atom) that exist in this reality can be a form of 'life' with it's own form of 'intelligence' (even if it's an extremely low level) if you perceive it to be that way.

With that being said, words like 'spirit' and 'holy' are subjective umbrella words and every single one of us perceive the meaning of those words in different ways. Many of us, find them to be words of fiction. So the idea of the world being alive unfortunately is a paradoxical way of thinking when there is no one way to think or perceive of what has a 'soul' or 'spirit' to begin with except besides what you think those terms mean.

It is quite possible that everything could be alive, but the level of awareness and intelligence is at a higher level with animals and plants (in contrast to inanimate objects) and when cells form organs that make up an organism.. well that's when we label something as being alive, scientifically speaking.



Quite possibly so, I've gotten this same vibe or belief while under the influence of psychedelics. Inanimate objects appeared alive and gave off a self awareness. At first I was convinced these ideas/things I was experiencing were real in some way, and perhaps they were. Now though, after years of psychedelic adventures I can only try and convince myself that is the truth, and go by the fact that I was hallucinating on drugs. It will always be one of those concepts I can never reason with fact, but can only predict in combination with my imagination and a small bit of reasoning.

Interesting concept nonetheless.

I disagree with the shoe thing. I had a deep meaningful subconscious conversation with a shoe on dmt, true story

The more i dabble the more it seems like consciousness permeates everything, in a sense

Its funny how hostile some people are to the notion like say "atoms may have a rudimentary form of consciousness"...when materialists are essentially saying that "consciousness is a complex arrangement of atoms."..doesn't sound very different at all when you put it that way

I like that Alan Watts bit about how the universe or earth "peoples" (verb) just like an apple tree "apples"

I've said this a few times, but I think it's because of the definitions people use for consciousness.

Personally I've started relating to it all as awareness where consciousness is nothing more than a highly refined level of awareness. In this model everything in the universe is in fact physically aware of itself. gravity, the nuclear force, electrostatic forces, etc, etc are all various forms of awareness.. Drop an object and it will become aware of the earth immediately as it drops.

Bacteria are aware at a higher chemical level. Plants higher than bacteria (maybe/maybe not), animals even higher. Humans appear to be operating at the highest level.

This is pretty much what I meditate on these day's. The fully interconenctedness of this life force. This rudimentary awareness. It's how I get my daily 'AWE' on.

Peace

Well, a shoe has a sole...

Brilliant!

Evolution is a nice word here i think, or it being the effect of a force that has caused the complexity and what we call life, of what could be a sea of unorganized particles, to exist. Whatever that push is, i like to think thats what the interconnected sense of being some people, or most people, feel. We all just choose our own language to describe it, and its kinda hard to communicate in the first place, so, you get what you always get.

Seemingly random, spontaneous, attempts to grasp this, to know it, to communicate it, to feel it. Thats also evolution, pushing our minds, the collective mind of not just humans, but all things, to find a more perfect model. Parallels haunt your every thought on the matter (in a good way) when trying to comprehend this. This is a huge element of my belief that there is no abstract individuality, just relative. Each (possibly just random energy fluctuation) tweak/modification to the systems potentially gets lucky. Could just be causality and mathematics. Could be anything.

Perhaps in an oscillatory manner, there's room for a big bang here (not personally convinced...yet). Spinoza > Descartes, dualism feeds the belief of an event unobservable, the big bang. Its a convenient/comforting rationalization of what happened beyond our tools of perception, and I'd rather not know than be overconfident in a theory that has a observation wall, beyond which is pure theory as to how what we see came to exist as such. And to me, an action without causality is heresy. The big bang can not be the beginning of all things, the earth was not created in 7 days, in my most humble and personal opinions/beliefs.

But that means, something started the whole circus. Possibly random, with such rich conditions to form what is now, the quantum relativity side of the argument, and probability/evolutionary forces, evolution as math. You could even think as the random fluctuations of energy, as the basic framework of the system at a whole. And i would call that alive.

To ramble on a bit more, this could all be residual energy from entropy due to these quantum fluctuations. Cyclical, perhaps when the system reaches absolute, or a degree of thermodynamic equilibrium, the conditions arise for random fluctuations of varying intensity to develop into fractalesque systems. Cosmic reincarnation, so many ways to look at this subject.

The mass of it all, the sum of possible infinite systems, and subsystems complex and simple, and how much in parallel i can see in myself to those observations, i can only assume my role somewhere in the system. Be it a cell, organ, organism, atom, particle, molecule, energy, or what not. My place is not something we know, but we can feel something is fundamental. Something ties it all together.

Einstein-





That analogy pretty much sums up my beliefs. The order and structure, complexity, even if of spontaneous origin, with the right advantages to continue (evolution), is what this awareness, consciousness, aliveness, sentient awareness, etc, is. We just hack the meaning out of something that is in all likelihood, incommunicable. But i think everyone, most everyone if not all, feels this. They rationalize the force to evolve in different ways, but its the fundamental reason why everything exists.

Natural laws make things fall in their place with a certain elegance and beauty, simplicity. And the parallels to life on earth in any form, justified my faith that everything is "alive" in that sense. Things just choose the path of least resistance, so long as it has an advantage, propagates. If i am to claim i am alive, exist, and can be defined as conscious, i cannot ignore the parallels i see on scales of limitless dimensionality. The system is alive, interconnected, just as i am, but the maps of the boundaries of these subsystems, is in its infant stage, and in all likelihood not permanent/separate.



/End metaphysical ramblings

Well, if one were looking at consciousness in a linear and qualitative context, then this makes perfect sense. Personally, I'm looking at consciousness like hyperspace itself. Constantly changing....humans emerge out of the jimjam, proclaim themselves to be genious whilst destroying their environment, and then dissolve back into it. I'm really not so sure about humans being at the "highest level".

I suspect that humans once, perhaps a few thousand years ago, were among some of the most advanced of physical organisms to inhabit this planet. Along with dolphins, primates, octopi and others, but then the human race became insane. And anyway, assuming our race is the most conscious life form on earth, it just assumes way too much. Take ants and bees, for example. The hive is one mind, each ant is not truly an individual...more like a cell in one very active brain, each ant in pheromonal/subtle electric/psychic contact with the hive. And that's only one example of a possible way in which nature has invented a consciousness that "exceeds" our own. Man, I doubt it's a race. It's all integrated. We are just the tinkering part of a larger entitie's brain. And the tinkering part, is going all haywire and running amok.

I do not believe that constantly creating new and exciting gadgets is the height of consciousness. In fact, I think that that is missing the point entirely. Nature, and nature itself is conscious and is made of consciousness, likes to make things beautiful, healthy and integrated...is that what humans are doing? intelligence is not the same thing as consciousness or awareness. Intelligence is just one aspect of consciousness--and right now, intelligence is looking pretty stupid.


^imho, at this particular moment.

Sure. Why not?