Thoughts on the Nature of Intelligence

It is easy to conceive of a universe without anything. A universe without matter or space or time. This might not fit our definition of a universe at all, this great singular nothingness might be the absence of a universe. Some scientists believe that before the Big Bang, the universe was like this. They also believe that billions of years from now, our universe will be like this again.

However today we have a universe that is quite unlike this. Our universe, by luck or design, is full of matter. And once you have a universe full of matter, it is inevitable that things will happen to it. Survival of the fittest is used to explain the evolution of life--but its principles could be applied to inanimate life as well. Atoms that bond with each other to form molecules may be more likely to endure than solitary atoms. Particularly strong molecule configurations are more likely to form and endure than weaker ones. Eventually you will have planets and stars, brimming with oceans and rocks. The rules of physics inevitably favor some configurations of matter over others. In this sense, the universe itself guides inanimate matter into order.

The line between the animate and inanimate is not always clear. In many ways, a tree might have more in common with a rock than a primate. If we try and imagine a tree's thought process, we imagine like a rock it has none. The crucial difference between the two is that a tree is able to react to its environment in a way a rock cannot. The tree grows toward sunlight. It will store water in a drought. On some very basic level, the tree seems to have a brain. Or at least some internal process guiding it one way and not another.

I could argue that a mountain is guided in a similiar way. Like a tree that 'grows' towards the sun, a mountain might build up on the side away from the wind. But life is fundamentally different from the inanimate--and it becomes more obvious with more sophisticated forms of life (like mammals). That crucial difference is intelligence.

Intelligence allows configurations of matter to actively participate in their own survival. It seems inevitable that our universe favors intelligent life. In the war of survival of the fittest, an object that can stand up and move away from danger (say a tsunami) will do better than a stationary one. Likewise an object that can dig into the earth to stay put in a good place (like a tree's roots) will do better than one that floats around with every breeze.

The universe favors the strong to the weak, the enduring to the fleeting. The rules of physics are a powerful engine which guides development in certain ways. That engine guides all things towards a certain order: it produces solar systems and star, which produce life, which in turn has produced intelligence.