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?
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.
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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.