Self Awareness Matters

It is impossible to do science without presupposing free will. Someone has to create the experiment and observe the results. This is a paradox. Science assumes the world is deterministic yet the observer cannot be.

We all behave as if we have free will. Some may believe that it is an illusion and if we only knew enough about the brain we could determine someone's thoughts and actions. But I do not think so. Studying the brain will only tell us what free will is not. It will tell us about the tools we have to observe and interact with the world. It cannot tell us what free will is in a deterministic way because science requires free will to exist in a non-deterministic way.

Historically, both determinism and non-determinism have been part of human thought since the beginning. But, historically, determinism has not held the dominant position in thought that it does today. Today, people get so amazed by the wonders of technology that they forget this fundamental paradox.

For me this paradox is a window to spirituality. I was raised Catholic, going to parochial schools and mass on Sundays. I struggled with religion in college and eventually gave it up. I agree with my educated friends that organized religion has a lot of superstition but I do not dismiss it as only being that.

Prior to free will and determinism, there is self awareness. To exercise free will you must be aware of "you". And, by extension, aware of others. A psychopath may have a brain defect that prevents this self awareness but that does not mean this awareness is a deterministic function of the brain. In means the brain is necessary for self awareness but not necessarily sufficient.

Dolphins are self aware in many respects, probably more self aware that any other species besides human. This would appear to be a case of convergent evolution. But convergent evolution occurs in similar environments and humans and dolphins have completely different environments. Science may one day resolve this but for now it would appear to be a fantastic coincidence. There is another possibility. Perhaps the evolution of self awareness is not completely deterministic.

We are alone

We have been listening for radio signals from extraterrestrial intelligent life for over 50 years now and have found nothing. If intelligent life existed in our galactic vicinity and was interested in contacting us, we probably would have pick something up. The data we have is limited but so far it indicates that no intelligent life exists nearby.

Evolution has a core principle that humans are nothing special. We may in fact be maladaptive and drive ourselves extinct through destruction of our environment. According to evolution, roaches are much more successful than humans.

But what if we humans, as intelligent, self aware, space travelers are a million to one chance happening, a billion to one chance, a trillion to one chance. At some point, the story of evolution becomes totally inadequate as a description of who we are, where we came from, and where we are going. It is not that evolution is wrong. It is just that as a human core narrative, it is about as meaningful as gravity.

Just consider the possibility that we humans are alone in the universe. It is scary to contemplate as it puts enormous responsibility on us. On our survival rests the survival of intelligent life – period.

The Highlander

When I was on the sub, a fascination developed among the crew over the movie The Highlander.

The movie is about an immortal born in Scotland in 1536 who can only be killed by decapitation. Through the centuries, he meets other immortals, some of whom he allies with and some he battles. The final showdown is with his arch enemy, a Slavic looking barbarian.

On the sub, men would make costumes and props from the movie and re-enact scenes. Lines from the movie would often find there way into conversations. Though no one in the crew ever mentioned it and I am not sure they were even aware of it, the parallels to the Cold War are obvious. The Highlander was adopted as a myth that personalized the titanic fight we were in. Something we also never really talked about.

In the build up of Operation Desert Shield, I asked the wardroom what they thought about the coming war. They unanimously responded that we were not going to war. As if we were going to deploy half a million men to Saudi Arabia and just sit there. Or worse, remove them and tell Sadam “just kidding”. The men on my ship did not understand even the basics on world politics. It was not that they were dumb, in fact, they were the smartest people I ever worked with. But they were engineers and technicians concerned with keeping the ship running and just did not care about politics.

On a deeper level, they did understand. They were The Highlander, and, when it comes to immortals, there can be only one.

Where are the aliens?

The Fermi paradox is that, if Earth is not unique, there should be many alien civilizations. Given that the galaxy is 13.2 billion years old, has 100 billion stars and is 100,000 light years across, and we should have been contacted. So where are they? One obvious answer is that the Earth is unique and there are no aliens. There are lots of possible explanations for this such as the unexplained evolution of eukaryotic cells.

The other explanation I find plausible is the aliens do not want to contact us.

There are many possible reasons why an alien civilization might not want to contact us. Perhaps they consider it risky. Not so much that we would attack them but that we would give away their location to another civilization that would. Perhaps the universe is a dangerous place and we are being foolish to broadcast that we are here. Another possibility is that the aliens consider us more valuable without contact. Like we are some kind of experiment that will yield useful information.

If we discover aliens, it will be the greatest discovery ever. If we discover aliens do not exist, it will be the greatest discovery ever. Work on this discovery can progress on several fronts. We can build better telescopes, we can send a probe to another star, we can figure out how eukaryotic cells (and thus multi-celled organisms) evolved.