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I find ants and bees and such interesting in this regard. They work together more seamlessly than humans do and arguably have a higher form of sociality.
Especially in Western cultures, we humans like to think of the individual and compare ourselves to the individual of other species. But that is a logical fallacy.
Are you smarter than an ant? Sure. But are you smarter than a human-sized ant hive? That's a far trickier question to answer...
I think about the same stuff lately.
How we live on a planet like microbes live on our eyes.
How our body is made out of a bunch of cells and that those cells could all have an idea of a self but still are so influenced by their surrounding that they act like they should.
That the planet could be an Organismus with a conciseness so vastly different from ours that we can't even entertain the idea that it exists.
That small things have a faster life cycle and maybe experience time slower than bigger things.
Just that endless recursion of life existing as part of other life. That we all are building blocks for something bigger and at the same time made out of smaller life.
Maybe we are to the universe what gut bacteria is to our stomach?
Congratulations, you have discovered philosophy.
do I get a prize?
Only if you can at the same time consider that getting a prize should be a universal law.
Yes, but what isnthe prize? Is the prize real? Or is it just a construct that we imagine because we expect it? Can you even truly experience the prize?
Once you can define the word "prize," we can discuss whether or not you receive one - or, in fact, if receiving one is even possible.
You are what we humans consider as the least intelligent life there is
Yeah. I get that a lot.
The longer I live, the more I start to think that maybe the "intelligent life" are the creatures frolicking in the woods, not knowing what "fascism" or "rent money" means.
Douglas Adams considered much the same idea...
Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake coming down from the trees in the first place, and some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no-one should ever have left the oceans.
...and...
on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.
Until they get a scratch, it gets infected, and they end up dying a slow, painful death from sepsis.
The grass is always fucking greener.
Scientifically we don't even know what life is.
Kurzgesagt has a great video on this topic. It's called the language of life, I think.
The architect and accidental inspiration for the idea of Object Oriented Programming, Christopher Alexander has some fascinating ideas on this subjet even if they lack scientific rigor.
The essence of his ideas, which I agree with (while recognizing there isn't any scientific rigor to disprove or prove his ideas yet) is that life is not a property of a body that the body either possesses or does not. Life is a pattern of arrangement of material in space, and Christopher to his credit is as precise about this as he can be from the lens of architecture. He defines several aspects to "living" architecture (which he means quite literally he... in a fascinating way that is actually kind of hard to argue against) such as deep interlock between borders, good negative space, imperfect but stable repetition, detail at different scale levels, centers that make other centers more vibrant in a work of art rather than draw all the focus etc....
All this to say, I think life must be an analog value, the universe doesn't have binary aspects to bodies where they are either ARE or ARE NOT something unless you are talking really fundamental physics and even then... and I agree then that life is a set of patterns that were and are woven together from a prexisting diversity and dynamism that opened the door to the genesis of what we would confidently call life.
Consider some recent research on categorizing all of the minerals on earth and how surprising or perhaps unsurprising it is that life has massively increased the diversity of geologic minerals on earth, and this is a two way street, the geologic diversity from active plate tectonics on earth provided the necessary conditions for life to form.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/life-helps-make-almost-half-of-all-minerals-20220701/
All of this leads me to think.. Life isn't a thing it is a style that things can have. Intelligence then.. is just the idea of life made meta and integrated into conscious action by the body that perceivees instinctually that it is alive.
Wow, I didn’t know what. Life probably is an “analog value”, since things like viruses exist where they don’t perfectly slot into our method of categorizing what is and isn’t life. This might be a question that will be asked until the end of time, what is life really?
Yes but I think Life is a question, and it can be answered by many different methods some of which are very difficult to prove if they fully answer the question or not.. or impossible to prove at this moment.
Here is a blog post that I think does a good job of describing Christopher Alexander's (he says non-exhaustive and that the number of properties isn't overly special, these can be divided or smushed together into more or less rules depending on your perspective) properties of things that have life.
https://iamronen.com/blog/2018/03/24/christopher-alexander-the-fifteen-properties-in-nature/
Don't treat this as pseudo-science trying to masquerade as science, treat this as a very intelligent architect (as in building architect) making some very compelling points through the lens of art in a way that I think has scientific implications once people figure out how better to translate these ideas into hypotheses that can be tested and such.
We know for sure there is "alien life" life bacteria os microbes. What we don't know (except my brother, he knows) is if there is inteligente life that would know how to communicate and build enough to come here
Sure it is.
We literally have to be very careful of how we definie "life" so we don't accidently include too much stuff we don't want to be life. That's why viruses are usually not considered to be life, even though some people think they should be included.
It takes a tremendous amount of energy to run our own OS. That energy needs to come from somewhere. We're driven to convert other living things into that energy. You can't just shrink that down and expect to produce the same results. It's like saying why can't I build a little tiny generator that can power my Bitcoin mining farm. There's things that come with scale and we're kind of in a sweet part I think. Kind of like how earth is in a sweet part of the solar system. Nature sorted us out to be what is needed to do things we do.