The perception of our universe has been like a stream of river. Perceived by an individual according to individual’s own thinking and personality. There are painters, there are scientists. There are musicians and there are speakers. They all give a different version, or should I say, their own version of what universe supposedly is.
The story of evolution of life is very long. Actually, there is probably no start. Or at least, the life started at the Big Bang, talking about the limits of present human knowledge. But as far as I can perceive of the universe, the code of our universe seems to have an iteration that seemingly is programmed to run for all eternity. From the appearance of first cell on this planet to the appearance of first human, there has been a loop of code which seems to expand the entire universe in the coming eons of time. We are just a small fraction of this loop game.
The first cell that started dividing itself on this dust-like planet had only one thing in it’s code - To Survive. And it did. This gave rise to further complexities only to nourish its hunger of survival. The evolution of organs and complete organ systems in higher animals came only as consequences of this initial hunger of survival of the first cell which bore us all. And now we are humans walking on this planet boasting that we have actually conquered this planet in a way never been done before by any other species to exist in the entire history. Evolution has given us hands which are too weak to break a piece of stone, but strong enough to move mountains and destroy this planet.
In my post “Ecological Succession and us”, I discussed how the expansion of life throughout the universe is being done by the tool universe created through Evolution which walks on its hind limbs and uses it’s forelimbs to master the art of creating space shuttles and methods to broaden its horizons beyond Earth. Nothing is boastful of us at all. We are being a puppet of our universe to expand ourselves into the universe for the same reason that cell divided into two for the first time.
For the very same reasons, evolution brought our species into existence. And for the very same reasons, we are creating the machines you see all around you and those which are yet to come. The Artificial Intelligence and creation of self-independent thinking devices are purposed to give us immortality and so actually root themselves to the hunger the first evolved cell had in itself - The Hunger for Survival. Some 150 years ago, there was nothing on this planet to be known as “thinking device” but it all came into existence very recently. And since then it has been modified, developed and has been renamed over and over again to be finally what we see in our smart phones. Or should I say the first computers have been made to evolve to look like what our latest laptops and phone models do. Plus, the expectation ends nowhere. Artificial Intelligence are expected to reach human intellect level in coming 50-60 years transcending the limit as the time passes by.
If you know what ‘Law of Accelerating Returns’ is, then the fact is that apart of machines, humans too have been subjected to it. The development of language and complex thought sharing mechanisms in human society has evolved exponentially since the dawn of our civilization, just like the machines we build have developed through time. I guess one cell dividing into two and the two dividing into four is again an exponential growth. So where did it all start? I again don’t know. But one thing is clear. We all have our roots bound to that first primitive cell which managed to divide and redivide so as to bring us into existence on this very day. And the only code which drove this exponential growth of both life and intelligence is the hunger for survival.
A single cell which is unconscious strives for survival. And so do we. I can therefore clearly say that biological life and intelligence (pattern of signals in neural network) are one and the same thing. Both try to survive, both try to grow and expand. When it comes to physical realm, we are building space-shuttles to expand ourselves beyond this planet and colonize other planets. And when it comes to intellect, we are building Artificial Intelligence to expand ourselves more into non-biological world of Silicon and atoms. If the singularity prediction of 2040 comes to be a reality, then who knows those machines which hold an equivalent intellect of a human being will actually invent, build and develop machines for themselves out of logic transcending beyond atoms, just like we built them out of logic that transcended the logic of biological neurons. And so the expansion of intellect is as inevitable as the expansion of life.
I don’t believe in an omnipotent God or believe in the concept of any such thing, but if this universe was a programming of some sort, then the survival instinct (whether in living organisms or machines) is one of the loops that seems to be inhibiting in the whole coding of universe to repeat itself like a virus and seems to hold the power to change the hardware and software therein all in all. And because I am a part of this iterative code, I enjoy seeing the universe change because a single microbial portion of it happened to be programmed to survive. This universe is a chaos, but more beautiful than anything existing therein. And I don’t know why, but my fascination has always been in the things behaving according to the Chaos Theory and fractals. This is why I took some time to write this post. We are a part of a game of chaos and we should feel proud of it. Thanks for your time you gave to read my post.
~ Jonathan John
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