I understand the sentiment, but there must be some number of common attributes all advanced intelligent species across the universe have. Tool use, for example, would require that the organism have some kind of appendage that can manipulate things.
I mean, they do have an appendage to manipulate things, but a species that breaks our expectation is ants. In the plural, that is. We typically assume intelligence to be an individual trait. That you need to use tools, because you are an individual. Meanwhile, ants exceed our ability to collaborate in many ways. As such, they even build bridges, not with tools, but rather with more ants.
Okay, how then would you generalize this trait? We would expect an intelligent species to be social to some degree? It’s hard to imagine how a species could evolve the capacity to achieve technological advances without cooperation between individuals.
Personally, I think a definition of life can be boiled down to whether something can record and then selectively rebroadcast information patterns in a different medium. Intelligence is a function of how long a delay there can be between recording and rebroadcast in addition to how much information is transcribed.
Transcribing DNA/RNA into peptide chains obviously meets the criteria.
Wildfires are ruled out since, although wildfires can propagate themselves, information in fuel is almost immediately lost during combustion; if wildfires are alive, it is only in combination with other life forms that can selectively preserve and sacrifice parts of themselves through fire, such as pine cones requiring fire to clear away undergrowth for new sprouts.
A computer meets the criteria, but the selectivity of information storage has historically been tightly controlled by humans. It’s more accurate to say humans and computers form an augmented hybrid lifeform.
Not just any tool use either, New Caledonian crows can make and use hooks. That might not seem special, but the amount of planning it takes to make and understand how to use a hook to retrieve something hidden in a nook is much more sophisticated than figuring out that you can poke something in front of you with a sharp stick.
I understand the sentiment, but there must be some number of common attributes all advanced intelligent species across the universe have. Tool use, for example, would require that the organism have some kind of appendage that can manipulate things.
I mean, they do have an appendage to manipulate things, but a species that breaks our expectation is ants. In the plural, that is. We typically assume intelligence to be an individual trait. That you need to use tools, because you are an individual. Meanwhile, ants exceed our ability to collaborate in many ways. As such, they even build bridges, not with tools, but rather with more ants.
Okay, how then would you generalize this trait? We would expect an intelligent species to be social to some degree? It’s hard to imagine how a species could evolve the capacity to achieve technological advances without cooperation between individuals.
Personally, I think a definition of life can be boiled down to whether something can record and then selectively rebroadcast information patterns in a different medium. Intelligence is a function of how long a delay there can be between recording and rebroadcast in addition to how much information is transcribed.
Transcribing DNA/RNA into peptide chains obviously meets the criteria.
Wildfires are ruled out since, although wildfires can propagate themselves, information in fuel is almost immediately lost during combustion; if wildfires are alive, it is only in combination with other life forms that can selectively preserve and sacrifice parts of themselves through fire, such as pine cones requiring fire to clear away undergrowth for new sprouts.
A computer meets the criteria, but the selectivity of information storage has historically been tightly controlled by humans. It’s more accurate to say humans and computers form an augmented hybrid lifeform.
Birds can use tools.
Not just any tool use either, New Caledonian crows can make and use hooks. That might not seem special, but the amount of planning it takes to make and understand how to use a hook to retrieve something hidden in a nook is much more sophisticated than figuring out that you can poke something in front of you with a sharp stick.
A beak falls under “some kind of appendage”
Or telekinesis.
Yeah… no, I don’t think that can evolve naturally
I would call something intelligent if it can smelt and cast metal, maybe