New Life

Life on Earth appears to be in a unique position in its five billion year history. Species seem to be becoming extinct at a huge rate, which has happened on a few occasions before (even so, perhaps not as quickly), but also for the first time, new and different forms of life are being developed at a high rate too. Perhaps, I thought, plants and animals are being replaced, rather than destroyed by human activity. If this is the case, are humans being replaced too?

My definition of life is: a system of organising and ordering information. Consider the complex structures of trees, ant colonies, bee-hives, the structures of cells that make up the human body, the social and political structures of humanity. These form ordered patterns. Consider the look of planets without life; they have no order, their forms are essentially random and haphazard, messy. If life does anything, it is to sort and order. Tidying up is the ultimate activity for living things; and all living things, down to cellular level, collect, sort and organise things.

The inverse token is death, the liberation of ordered information into chaos, a messy collapse.

Earth appears to be unique in the universe by being filled with life, and life has been symbiotic with its environment since almost the foundation of the planet, 4.5 billion years ago. I believe in fate, that if we were to go back to any point in time, the same outcome would occur (although, at the same time, I think that existence is relative to each observer; if time is relative, then each iota of thing must experience things differently - this complex discussion can wait for another time). I wondered if the complex changes that are taking place on Earth are a result of some natural evolution or balance, something that was always destined to occur and something which would naturally evolve on any civilised planet anywhere. It appears that the atmosphere itself is become more conducive to machines, and less so for animals. Perhaps technology is simply replacing biology in some natural way.

By my definition of life, computers are alive. They do not posses 'intelligence'. What might intelligence, or free-will (its more grand relative) mean? We know what intelligence means on an instinctive level, but different people have defined it differently over time. If life orders information, then perhaps we can define intelligence as the ability to locate disorder to order it. Perhaps hunting for food, perhaps all avarice, is the manifestation of this universal drive. All animals do this, perhaps even objects like stars do, in a way, the way that they order dust clouds into spheres of energy; stable for millions of years, that are born and die, like living things.

Perhaps free will is exactly this ability, and if so, computers lack intelligence because they are not free to locate disorderly information by themselves; we operators ultimately still need to supply the data to machines for them to order, and perhaps the measure of intelligence in a machine is its ability to hunt for disorder for it to order.

The functions of animal life have gradually been replaced by machines, as is obvious, from oxen to plough fields and cars instead of horses, to just about every other utility, and the functions of humans are replaced even moreso. I wondered if this loss of organising power, the loss of animal life in the Earth was being offset by a founding of new life by machines. Every new computer program, even the internet itself, is a new form of life, as is every device that processes and orders information. Perhaps intelligence is the key missing factor in those, but people do that job for the machines at the moment. Perhaps the level of order processing of a system, a measure of the 'life quotient' can be calculated and, when applied to the earth as a whole, we can measure the true nature of the health of our world.

In many ways, 'work' is organising, tidying, filing, classifying. We need food, shelter. Perhaps we could say that the work of people is for this, but the vast majority of humanity have these things, yet we still work, and more than ever. This work is ordering. The work animals do is organisational and a quest for subsistence; which comes first? Do we organise to subsist, so perhaps food and shelter, love and happiness becomes nature's reward for organising. Disordered people do not thrive, not do disordered space clouds. It appears that order is the key measure of success in the universe itself.

Mark Sheeky, 5 January 2020