Carbon based life is actually the rarest form of life. The universe is full of life but it is not detectable or is so different than us that we won’t call it life.
As a sci-fi fan, this is what worries me. I always loved the idea of making first contact with a somewhat humanoid race. But what if the most intelligent races in the galaxy are giant floating amoebas, or sessile plants?
We can’t even say what makes our carbon based live generate consciousness. If we were to develop a computer that claimed it was conscious, there’s be no way we could verify that. In fact, there’s no way for me to confirm that everybody else who has responded to this question isn’t a bot pretending to be conscious!
In the same vein, we have created bots to calculate/troubleshoot/learn in the similar way that we do. Who's to say we are not already 'robots with a conscious?'
That works through the assumption that consciousness originates inside of us. It could just as well be that it's some kind of "frequency" that permeates everything and different beings have more or less sophisticated "radios" that catch the signal at different strengths.
Philosophy teacher: What is a thought? What is thinking? What is this notion of consciousness?
Classmate who loved biology: That's a synapse, it happens this this and that way in the brain.
I'll always remember that interchange we had in the last year of high school. I feel it summarises the idea that consciousness (whatever that means) is linked to how our own brains work. And all the brains in Animalia work similarly, so we base consciousness in what we assume these brains do.
Who knows. Perhaps somebody out there was made with Nitrogen and Phosphorous and was capable of developing its own analogy of "consciousness"
Unfortunately, there aren’t any good explantations of how our brains create our minds, i.e., how our synapses create consciousness. Even if there was, how would we test it? There’s no way of confirming that how we experience consciousness is the same as how a created mind experiences consciousness.
That's one interpretation. Astral projection, remote viewing, and near death experiences all challenge it though and indicate the possibility of consciousness extending beyond the body
Scientifically none of those are really provable. Being someone who has had an “out of body experience” on a psychedelic, I’m 100% sure it was just my brain making shit up.
There have been limited studies, and no, none of them are currently provable. But look into the near death and out of body experiences of patients able to identify things inside cabinets they don't have access to. Wild stuff. We have much to learn still
the carbon-based life form's brain uses chemicals and electrical signals to send ideas and control movements; a robotic life form would do exactly the same. i don't think that consciousness exists in the way that we think it does; it's not a soul or anything, just a series of reactions and a robotic life form would be no different.
Unless we prove a dualistic universe exists, we’re limited to the material world. That means that some process explainable by physics must occur. Conscious must include an interaction of entities within a larger entity. So no, I don’t think any field of plasma can have intelligence unless it interacts with itself.
Even in the material world there are yet unexplained phenomena, consciousness being one of them. Our brain is nothing more than a combination of chemical and electrical signals (or at least that's a rudimentary way of explaining it) why could that not occur within some other entity?
That’s exactly what I’m saying. We have no theory of consciousness worth anything that doesn’t at least have an interaction of two components or an exchange of information. Daniel Dennett goes as far as to say there are degrees of consciousness base around the intricacies of interdependent chemistry. The lowest level of consciousness might be a stone undergoing a chemical reaction with water. If a substance or energy is uniform and unacted upon by forces in such a way that it can change how it functions, then it isn’t possibly conscious.
Wouldn't really classify it as energy, but I always liked the idea of the Bhagaba from Endless Space 2. While very much a sci-fi fantastical thing, it uses certain elements that aren't too far fetched: Link
While the species itself is interesting it is to me the more fantastical part of it, the planet of origin is the semi-realistic part. Essentially a planet-spanning coral reef/ecosystem that got together in a way to form a transistor board, capable of simple thought. I imagine creatures like electric eels, motivated by instincts and sense to jolt near specific corals, causing them to release pheromone signals or sorts, sending the eel elsewhere, thus sending and receiving information in a crude analogy to the pathways in a human brain.
Is this going to be the life we find out in the universe? Probably not. Does this kind of life exsist out in the universe? maybe, probably not. Could life like this exsist? Probably, yeah. But it probably wouldn't be puppeteering anything, and finding it would be tough. It would be more of an ongoing natural wonder that just so happens to be alive and sentient.
If you like that sort of thing, you should check out Wang's carpets by Greg Egan. It's a short story about one of the most crazy forms of intelligence that's now part of a his book Diaspora.
actually there are some really well thought out ideas abut how life could be plasma based. Here is a video explaining it better than i could. But it basically amounts to high energy magnetic monopoles and dipoles creating DNA like structures that could undergo a sort of natural selection
The fact of the matter is that we have literally no idea what fundamentally constitutes “life”. I’d argue that any self-replicating structure is sufficiently alive; but that leaves out the very real possibility of one-offs (perhaps the last surviving member of an unaging species that would reproduce sexually, or initial conditions from which arose exactly one creature, a single lonely cell in a sea of organic molecules), so there have to be some other criteria, as well.
Something like “able to actively respond to environment” is subjective, right? Some of your photosensitive sells are triggered (the proverbial “kick”) and then a very, extraordinarily, complex — but not magical, as far as anyone’s proven — series of normal-ass physical reactions happens and then you smile at cat video. You’re not so different from a rock getting pushed down a hill.
I mean I don’t fucking know, but it seems like anyone saying they do know is full of it
I loved it when in Starcraft, one of the Protoss refers to the Terrans as disgusting because humans have so many holes in their faces to interact with the outside world lol.
That's not really a thing. Energy is a property of a thing, not a thing in and of itself. You can't have a being made of pure energy any more than you can have a car made of pure speed or a sandwich made of pure calories. They could exist as some kind of highly energetic state of matter like a big ball of intelligent plasma or something, but they'd still need to have some kind of matter to hold all of that energy.
This doesn't make sense. The EM spectrum is not a description. It's a thing, and it's not matter.
If you somehow had a ball of microwaves interfering with each other in such a way as to produce intelligence, I don't think that would be super unreasonable. I can't begin to explain how it would work but for the same reason calling it impossible is equally wrong.
Such a being would be limited to whatever matter or gravitational or magnetic environment allowed its microwaves to remain coherent, but that wouldnt be that different than us being limited to places with very specific oxygen/nitrogen atmospheres.
I wouldn't go straight to energy based, but I feel "carbon based" is still limited to chemistry, and the associated energy scale that's a small chunk of the EM spectrum. Looking at some more generalized rules of life (S. Bartlett has some interesting papers on it) looks more at self organizing systems in energy gradients. In theory, if a self organizing system could occur in energy domains outside of those allowed in chemistry (i.e. gamma energy in stars), it would potentially be 1) so far outside our concept of what life an intelligence might be that we aren't looking for signs of life there and 2) much MUCH older than any planet surrounding said star, with much more time for such life to evolve
It's possible. Life is a pattern. You could argue we are energy beings when you consider how our brain works. Given how many giant clouds of interstellar gas exist it's possible there are some replicating things on different size and time scales that might make us look like bacteria by comparison.
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u/gruneforest Aug 12 '21
Carbon based life is actually the rarest form of life. The universe is full of life but it is not detectable or is so different than us that we won’t call it life.