by Jochen Szangolies
The previous essay in this series argued that, given certain assumptions regarding typicality, almost every sentient being should find themself part of a ‘galactic metropolis’, a mature civilization that either has extended across the galaxy, or filled whatever maximal habitat is attainable to capacity. That this is not our experience suggests a need for explanation. One possibility is impending doom: very nearly every civilization destroys itself before reaching maturity. Another is given by the simulation argument: almost every sentient being is, in fact, part of an ‘ancestor simulation’ studying the conditions before civilizational maturity. Both succeed in making our experience typical, but neither seems a terribly attractive option.
Hence, I want to suggest a different way out: that we stand only at the very start of the evolution of mind in the universe, and that the future may host fewer individual minds, not through extinction, but rather, through coalescence and conglomeration—like unicellular life forms merging into multicellular entities, the future of mind may be one of streams of sentience uniting into an ocean of mind.
If this is right, the typical individual experience may be of just this transitory period, but this does not entail a looming doom—rather, just as the transition from uni- to multicellular life, may mean an unprecedented explosion in the richness and complexity of mind on Earth.
It is clear that this would solve the conundrum of our implausibly young civilization: the arguments above hinge ultimately on a faulty generalization to the effect that because human existence up to this point was one of individual minds locked away in the dark of individual bony brain-boxes, that would always be the case. But perhaps, a mature civilization is one in which every agent partakes of a single, holistic mind, or few shifting coalitions of minds exist, or the notion of individuality is eroded to the point of obscurity.
As it stands, this surely seems a fantastical suggestion. While it may receive some credence thanks to explaining the puzzle of our existence during this age of civilizational infancy, that alone seems hardly enough to justify belief in such a far-fetched scenario. Moreover, to many, the prospect might seem scarcely more attrative than that of living in a simulation—or even, that of near-term doom: don’t we loose what’s most important about ourselves, if we loose our individuality? After all, who wants to be the Borg?
Yet I will argue that there are good reasons to take this scenario seriously beyond its solution of the likelihood problem. Mostly, I believe that we are seeing signs of this development even now: it is not always easy to define the boundary between distinct minds, and recent innovations of both social and technological nature (the invention of trans-personal entities such as corporations and nation-states, or the creation of high-throughput information interchange media like the internet) serve to further blur it. Furthermore, there are arguments, starting from thermodynamic principles, that the evolution of life works towards higher levels of complexity—extending this to the level of mind seems a well-motivated generalization. Finally, being a lonely little nugget of ego isolated from a world of such nuggets may not, in the end, be all that it is cracked up to be: in many contemplative traditions, the overcoming of the self is seen as a key to alleviate the suffering of human existence. Selves, after all, lead to selfishness, and one need only cast the most cursory of glances at the present state of the world to conclude that we might need to tone that down a notch or two.
Thus, I want to investigate the more hopeful option: that it is our destiny not to peter out, like a brief swarm of sparks lighting up one small corner of the universe, only to be snuffed, but instead, to merge, to integrate within a grander ecology of mind, transition from isolated streams of selfhood into an ocean of being. We live in the estuary delta of being, where the stream of consciousness splits into countless branches, and to our future lie vast seas of mind.
The Paradox Of Life
Taking care of a house and tending a garden are two curiously opposite tasks. A house needs to be kept in repair—the paint needs freshening up, the roof fixing, the old, rotting fence poles need to be replaced. In the garden, on the other hand, you find you spend most of your time cutting back excess: mowing the lawn, trimming overenthusiastic creeping vines, pulling weeds. The house seems to follow the dictates of entropy: left untended, its ordered structure gradually decays. The garden, on the other hand, sprouts new structures over and over. Indeed, a house deserted eventually becomes overgrown by vegetation.
The point can be made more generally. While our technology needs constant maintenance, life creeps into every corner of its own accord. As soon as the artificial stops receiving a constant, directed energy influx (the work performed in its upkeep), it succumbs to the vital power of the natural. No wonder, then, that it once was common to ascribe to life a special force, an élan vital, that sets it apart from the technological fruit of human ingenuity. How else should we explain its near-magical ability to overcome the thermodynamic pull towards disorder and disintegration?
Today, life is no longer believed to be different in kind from the matter comprising inanimate nature. Thus, the second law of thermodynamics, the increase of entropy in every closed system, must apply to it as much as it does to houses, steam engines, and other artifacts of human creativity.
This seems to pose a kind of paradox. Entropy increase, generally, is thought to entail the increase of disorder. A few drops of milk in a cup of hot tea rapidly disperse, until both fluids are inseparable. My desk may start the week in an immaculate state, and is a mess of papers, books, coffee cups, and other assorted flotsam by Wednesday. How does life—the most complex, highly ordered system there is—avoid this fate?
According to Jeremy England, a biophysicist at Bar-Ilan University, it doesn’t. Or rather, life’s highly complex organization allows it to act as an effective entropy maximizer—a hypothesis he terms ‘dissipation-driven adaptation’. Take a bunch of atoms driven by an external source of energy (like, for instance, the sun) while in contact with a heat bath, i.e. a large reservoir to dump waste heat (such as the ocean, or the atmosphere), and it will restructure into a highly ordered form that maximizes energy dissipation. As he puts it pithily, “you start with a random clump of atoms, and if you shine light on it for long enough, it should not be so surprising that you get a plant”.
Far from flouting the rules of thermodynamics, life then would seem to be their near inevitable consequence (which, incidentally, throws the question of where all that life is hiding in much sharper relief). Moreover, life, in order to become ever more efficient at producing entropy, also becomes ever more complex: from humble beginnings, perhaps strands of self-replicating RNA sheltered in the porous walls of geothermal vents at the bottom of the oceans, eventually we get cells, eukaryotes, and the modern diversity of flora and fauna.
One crucial driver of this increase in complexity is the merging of distinct lineages. The history of life has often been cast in terms of metaphors of struggle, strife, and division: of war ‘all against all’, beasts ‘red of tooth and claw’ ready to devour each other, of ‘splitting’ evolutionary lineages, of species at the branch-tips of the ‘tree of life’—or else, if extinct, as fallen leaves upon the ground. Today, however, we know that life is just as much a story of collaboration, of symbiosis and the joining of distinct streams. The same narrative that plays out to entice individual atoms to organize, cluster, and form compound entities repeats again and again, on various levels of organization. Nature loves to recycle: a good trick will be applied wherever it works.
The process of endosymbiosis is a particular example of such merging. An idea first proposed by the Russian botanist Konstantin Mereschkowski, it was the tireless—and often thankless—work of Lynn Margulis that brought the idea into the mainstream, overcoming considerable resistance. Endosymbiosis is a process by which one unicellular creature absorbs another, without, however, breaking it down into its constituents to be used as resources (that is, eating it). Rather, the endosymbiont continues its life within the confines of its host, both forming a lasting partnership to the advantage of either. An example of this is the incorporation of mitochondria when a primitive organism known as an archean absorbed a bacterium roughly 2.2 billion years ago, retooling the latter’s physiology to eventually become the main energy supplier in all modern animal cells.
Another driver of increased complexity and organization is the invention of multicellularity. Again, we observe a maximization of entropy based on the clustering of a certain kind of building block, allowing a more efficient dissipation of energy than an unstructured heap.
Life, then, springs from disorder as a means of efficiently routing environmental energy, explaining its resilience: life goes with the flow where technology seeks to stem the tide. Thus, the natural thrives where the artificial is eroded—a judo-like trick of redirecting the force of the attacker. Among its strategies, a story replayed again and again is that of merging, of creating greater complexity by the suitable arrangement of simpler building blocks. But still, as greatly complicated assemblies of trillions of cells, both of our own genetic lineage and of countless symbiotic bacteria, fungi, and other microorganisms, we remain individuals, clearly distinct from one another. The merging of the streams of life only seems to go so far.
Proud To Be A Lichen
But is that really the last word? Once we try to define fixed boundaries between one organism and another, we find our taxonomic instinct thwarted in a confounding number of ways. Take the humble lichen: here, we find a macroscopic composite of algae and cyanobacteria enmeshed in fungal tendrils, with the former providing energy via photosynthesis to the whole ensemble. Three different kingdoms of life here co-exist as a single evolutionary unit. Furthermore, this does not seem to be the exception, but rather, the norm: in a widely discussed article, biologists Scott Gilbert, Jan Sapp, and Alfred Tauber argue that there is no well-defined notion of ‘biological individuality’— and that, instead, the focus should be on the ‘holobiont’: the multicellular eukaryote with its colonies of persistent symbiotes. After discussing various notions of individuality in turn—anatomical, developmental, physiological, immunological, genetic, and evolutionary—and finding each wanting, the article ends with the declaration that ‘we are all lichens’, organisms famously composed of conglomerates of algae, bacteria, and funghi.
To give some examples of how seemingly clear-cut boundaries break down, in the mealybug Planococcus, the genetic information needed to make enzymes needed for the synthetization of certain amino acids is distributed among it and two bacterial symbionts, so neither species has a complete genome of its own. Maturity in some species is dependent on the care of another—thus, the larvae of the butterfly Maculinea arion mimic the smell of those of a particular species of ant, who then carry them into their nest, rearing them amongst their own. Even the immune system, whose job it is to distinguish between self and other, cannot function properly without the aid of resident microbiota.
Reproduction, it seems, might be a more clear-cut case: typically, at least in mammals, two individuals of opposite sexes come together to produce offspring. But, as David Griffiths highlights in his article ‘Queer Theory for Lichens’, such reproduction is really just a small corner of the total reproductive activity going on both within and around us: livers and stomach linings are reproduced in a regular cycle, and the entire human body is “a teeming multispecies ecosystem that is constantly engaged in reproduction, connections and transfer outside of the narrow understanding of sexual reproduction in heteronormative public discourse”.
We are then a bristling structure of variegated reproductive activity, and the traditional ‘reproduction’ of producing offspring becomes a rare, special instance of this, perhaps akin to the founding of a new city. Why should this event be given such special status as to lead to the production of a new individual, when all that other reproductive buzzing fails to do so? Or to put the issue the other way around, most of my cells are several reproductive cycles distant from those comprising my body when I was a teen, so by what token am I now the same individual I was then?
Or take the case of the humble salp, a barrel-shaped marine invertebrate. It has two reproductive stages, starting out life as a solitary, asexual being, then forming a chain of exclusively female entities, which eventually transition to male. Older chains release sperm to fertilize younger ones, that again produce asexual, solitary offspring. Which is the individual: the solitary being or the chain?
Even the body does not allow for a clear delineation of the individual. The philosopher Emanuele Coccia points to the metamorphosis of the butterfly in his eponymous book: starting out life as a caterpillar, crawling along leaves and stems, eventually, an almost magical transformation literally gives it wings. The one life of the butterfly is spread across two distinct forms, calling the notion of a clearly delineated ‘life-form’ into question: met with either on separate occasions, one would hardly consider them the same species, much less the same individual. Indeed, life may not be wedded to any definite form at all—under many of the usual criteria to tell living from dead matter, the soil that nurtures our plants is itself a living entity.
Wherever we seek to confine life to a container we could brand with the notion of ‘individual’, it overflows and outruns our attempt at categorization. Rather, a single individual seems to split into multiples, and multiple individuals join into one, as a matter of course—indeed, in a sense, this splitting and joining may be what life is all about. Life on Earth is not a collection of individual life-forms, but a conjunction of all that partakes of it—a sum exceeding its parts.
Mind The Matter
If any of the above arguments and examples are on the mark, then life does not as easily lend itself to a notion of individuality as usually supposed. Moreover, the tendency towards greater complexity that is life’s origin and motor also leads to the creation of compounds, of entities that have given up their claim to individuality to merge into a greater whole.
But here, a note of discord must ring: what makes us us, we protest, is not the individuality of our bodies, not the form we have, but what animates that body, the self that surveys the world from behind our eyes. We are not the sum of our cells, our symbionts, our organs—we are the locus of thought and sensation that gets to experience all of this life as a particular individual. Giving this up would be to give ourselves up—and hence, scarcely better than the doom foretold for us by J. Richard Gott’s reasoning.
I want to make the case that this, too, is not as clear-cut as it seems. Drawing the boundaries around an individual mind is not necessarily any easier than drawing them around an individual life; and life’s tendency towards ever greater complexity may find its latest expression in a further blurring, and perhaps eventual extinction, of such boundaries. Finally, we may question whether this individuality—this essential distance between us and all the rest of the world—is even something that we ought to want to perpetuate.
The reason that mind is insular in the present day is precisely the same life was insular before the evolution of multicellularity: it is still new. In the stacking of complexities that started all the way back when that first clump of molecules figured out how to more effectively route solar energy through itself, it is just the final, thin crust, the icing on life’s layer cake. Individual minds, locked away from the destabilizing influence of the surrounding medium in the dark of individual brain-boxes, are like those first conglomerates of RNA-strands in rock pores at the bottom of the ocean, yet looking to fashion themselves a membrane to contain their fragile being and venture out into the world.
But I am getting ahead of myself. While it seems we have grounds to believe in the growth of complexity via entropy maximization in life, it is not obvious that mind should follow that trend. Life, after all, is concerned with physical systems acting in the physical world: metabolizing suitable parts of it, engaging in reproductive activity, in short, the full four ‘F’s. The second law of thermodynamics is a physical law, however, and the relation of mind to the physical is a point of continuing discussion. Even if we believe (as the present author is inclined to do) that mind is no non-physical second Cartesian substance, it is not obvious why mind should recapitulate life’s tendency towards increased complexity. What, if anything, is it that brings the two into lockstep?
The connective tissue between mind and life is entropy: as arrangements of matter have an associated entropy by means of their configuration, so too do bits of information; and information is the clay of the mind. Shannon entropy, named after the pioneer of information theory, Claude Shannon, measures the uncertainty attached to data transmitted through a communications channel—and with it, its information carrying capacity: more unexpected values carry a higher amount of information than predictable signals. A signal you already knew you would receive will not be able to tell you anything.
Both the entropy attached to configurations of physical systems and to information carrying signals then measure a certain lack of knowledge: about the precise microscopic state in the physical case, and of the next signal to expect for Shannon entropy. That the two are, in fact, equal was then first proposed by physicist E.T. Jaynes in two influential papers in 1957 that marked the beginning of the use of maximum entropy methods in thermodynamics (I, II). In the next entry in this series, we will thus use this identification as our guiding star, and propose that, like life itself, mind evolves towards greater complexity; and like life, it does so by transforming itself from a collection of individual instances into a scintillating congeries of compounds, undergoing processes akin to symbiosis, metamorphosis, and convergence.
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