Are We a Blog? oh the irony....

Oh the irony. I decided it was time to post another thought which has occurred to me for some time, and probably to many others, and was confronted with a deliciously ironic search result.

To start with - the thought in question is simply this:

Is it not possible that "we" (the reason for the "quotes" will become obvious very soon) are already in communication with alien intelligence?

When I say "we" what I mean is "we" as a planetary phenomenon - not just the human race using machines to search for messages and to send their own specific messages, but "we" as part of a biosphere, and "we" as including the machines we have deployed. And could not the entirety of the transmissions and emissions that our planet now produces constitute deliberate messages to other similar "beings"?

E.O.Wilson has argued strongly that ants are best understood as a superorganism - his point is that the behavior of individual ants is insufficient to describe the richness of the behavioral activities of ant colonies as a whole.

This argument could be applied to our 6.69 billion strong colony of humans, or to the five million trillion trillion bacteria thought to exist in and on earth, but for the purposes of my position the colony i am thinking of consists of a combination of the both, plus everything in between, plus our machines.

Of course to argue that the entire biosphere merits consideration as a single entity is not new, but to consider it as one capable of communication may be. In fact it's even more contentious than E.O.Wilson's position - he has spent decades peering at ants whereas I am lounging in my musty old philosophers' arm chair, fumbling down the back for loose change. But bear with me.

Consider for a moment our broadcasts as encoded information about a biosphere - not just about humans and their interests, but both directly and incidentally about the nature of the earth as whole - it includes data on gravitational strength, biological history, chemical composition and more. In short, the human oeuvre is a holographic representation of the planetary reality, deeply compressed and only just beginning to be transmitted as data.

But there is more data than just what we capture in our own messages - there is (undoubtedly) data in the patterns of interaction between all of the systems of our biosphere which are much more abstract. and perhaps all the parts of this earth system I am talking about come together to create a total much, much greater, one which is rich enough to in fact have a sentience capable of information processing and information creation at a level utterly unintelligible to us. The ebbs and flows of the ages, the seasons, the animal kingdoms, air traffic, and the TV schedule may all work in combination to process data and to think about things entirely alien to individual human consciousness. And it may want to make its opinions on these obscure matters known, and even to ask questions.

If this is the case, "we" may in fact already be replying to a message from alien intelligence. "We" may be part of an elaborate interstellar society. "We" may even be at war.

What is the irony of all this? Well, when I thought to write this down I thought it best to perhaps search for a SETI blog and see if the idea was already out there... and I found a blog called "Are We a Blog?"

I'm still not sure it what the people running that blog meant by their title, but whether it is or it isn't there intention to suggest we are the blog of a Gaia-like superintelligence, the fact that the idea can be discerned elsewhere in the biosphere, albeit in holographically transformed ways, does (ironically!) support my thesis!

Chatting with Gaia

If Gaia can be defined as a "consciousness" then it should follow that Gaia would like to communicate with "like minded" entities. Individual humans do not in any way possess minds which are like Gaias'. But it might be fair to say that humanity as a whole increasingly does.

Here is another way of putting it. If we envisage a "consciousness space", in which each point in the space represents a set of parameters which gives rise to consciousness, then the point which represents a Gaia consciousness, and the point which represents the global human consciousness (including all peripherals such as the internet etc) are closer to each other than a human consciousness is to Gaia. It might also be reasonable to say that the global human consciousness is traversing through points towards the point which is Gaia.

If we accept this then we can also ask - is there any way to communicate with Gaia? What kind of things are interesting to such a being? How would a message be transmitted? Are we capable of composing such a message?

We can for instance visualise Gaia as a closed consciousness only aware of itself. But this leaves it with no communication channels. If we make it dimly aware of its surroundings, then we can imagine it perceving positive and negative gradients towards and away from things which are good and bad for Gaia.

If we increase its awareness further then we can perceive of it forming plans, developing strategies and holding opinions, and so on.

Once we start looking at Gaia this way we can put humanity into a similar perspective.

A physical metaphor might be that humanity consciousness is a kind of phase-change for Gaia consciousness, like when a liquid turns into a gas. This transformation could be a runaway transformation towards a new. completely different, stable state.

Using a biological metaphor, perhaps humanity is like a malignancy; a consciousness which has evolved and now flourishes within a larger one, and has now reached a point where is it breaking the bonds and causing effects great enough for Gaia to detect.

If the physical metaphor is most accurate, then Gaia and humanity consciousness are not entities capable of communication but instead points along a reaction cycle.

If the biological metaphor is correct then maybe Gaia and humanity consciousness are able to communicate, in the same way a cancer makes itself known to its host. As the cancer becomes more evident and the host suffers, then the host can in turn communicate by attempting to cure the cancer.

I dont believe either metaphor is adequate. The concept of Gaia by necessity presupposes physical and biological systems as a basis. If Gaia was not something qualitatively more than a physical or biological system, then there would be no use for the concept.

You can see as we move from the physical to the biological metaphor that the level of communciation possible between Gaia and humanity consciouness increases. This means that if Gaia's relationship with humanity is richer than just biological, as I have suggested, then the potential for communication is also higher.

But I don't know what exactly it is.