INTRODUCTION

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Systems of Non-Human Intelligence

Two kinds of non-human intelligence, or intelligent system, are possible: 1. Natural systems of intelligence; 2. Artificial systems of intelligence. Of the latter, the hybrid, interdiciplinary field of Cognitive Science sets a hard A.I. standard of the Turing Test, of machine models of intelligence that are most anthropoid or humanlike in outcome. These kinds of systems and they problems they imply were dealt with in the previous chapter. This chapter deals with the former type of non-human intelligence. Of natural systems of intelligence, we may have one or two subtypes: 1. Those that are already occurring naturally on earth--possibly the intelligence of primates, or of cetaceans, or possibly, in a limited sense, of any kind of animal on earth. It may well be argued, for instance, that all life, to the extent that they are complex automata controlled by processes of DNA transcription, translation and replication, constitute a kind of intelligent system that is responsive to and adaptive to changing conditions on earth. To understand this, we would have to understand genetic reproduction as a kind of automaton, or model of automata. 2. Those forms of possible intelligence that may occur, or have occurred, but that are not presently available to us on earth. This second type of non-human intelligence would include what we call extra-terrestrial intelligence that would supposedly be associated with some form of alien life-form and possibly alien culture and civilization.

While the principle subject of this chapter is the first type of natural but non-human systems of intelligence, we must begin by a consideration of alternative machine models of automata and intelligence other than those that are the primary concern of the Cognitive Sciences and A.I. and Robotics research.

Informational Cybernesis and Cybernetic Systems

Cognitive science is the term applied to the interdisciplinary involvement in artificial intelligence applications and in the problem of understanding brain function in relation to the life of the mind. In philosophy, we refer to the mind-body dichotomy, and we go back to the problem of the mind as the ghost in the machine, or in this case, the spirit of the brain, which, in a figurative sense at least, it seems to be.

Natural Intelligence and Human Knowledge

Intelligence has many sophisticated definitions and implications in our modern Information age. A natural definition of intelligence is concomitant and inherent to an understanding of what constitutes an information system. In other words, an intelligent system is so because it conveys significant information in its patterning, and an informational system is intelligent if its information is ordered in a meaningful manner but not predictable. Important to the definition of an intelligent information system is that such a system is somehow self-sustaining as a coherent system, and that it is self-adaptive to changing circumstances.

But the definition of intelligence in our reality has a fundamental and inextricable human dimension to its expression and patterning. No informational patterning is significant or intelligent if it is ameaningful to us, who are that's systems, or any systems, ultimate reference points. In other words, intelligence is a direct function of our own human brains and abilities to make sense of the patterning and ordering of natural phenomena. Such natural systems become intelligent because they are perceived by us as being so. We make sense of them, and they become relevant thereby to our own anthropological sense of intelligence.

This caveat of human intelligence imposes a fundamental anthropological relativity to our understanding of informational systems. It makes all our knowledge, indeed, all our reality, ultimately anthropocentric in orientation. The only way out of this conundrum is by assuming hypothetical realities that are independent of our own experience. This, fortunately, is not difficult for us to do, and constitutes a fundamental leap of faith that makes possible both science and religion.

But meta-systems in an objective sense are presumed to exist both before and beyond our own human abilities to intelligently make sense and define the underlying principles of these systems. Indeed, our own intellectual abilities were derived from more basic physical systems and processes that exist before and independent of our ability to conceive of them. They exist as patterns, and the logos that defines their order exists implicit to these patterns. Science needs to make this presupposition if it is to rest theoretically on any universal framework at all. Such is the relativity of our knowledge and existence in reality that unless we do make such a presupposition, we could not even assume the existence of an objective physical reality that extends one inch beyond the circumferences of our own skulls. But because we can and need to make such a presupposition, a whole train of other truths then follows deductively and inferentially as real or hypothetical possibilities.

The anthropocentrism of our own intelligence, and hence of our understanding of metasystems, brings us to the horns of Goedel's dilemma. We cannot objectify that which is a part of ourselves and that we therefore cannot get outside of or beyond. We confront this basic dilemma in any version or vision of science we wish to entertain, and it sets certain fundamental constraints on our ability both to observe and to understand what we are observing. To make a claim like "This statement is false" entails an inherent self-contradiction about what is true and false, and hence violates the principle of the excluded middle upon which a coherent system of truth must be based. Goedel's answer for his own dilemma of course was to propound the existence of a meta-system that allows a resolution of the contradiction by means of external reference to a larger framework. This is indeed how we understand our sciences to work, as they always refer our otherwise tautological truth systems to some larger experiential basis in reality. Hidden in this presumption of a metasystem is the notion that such a system exists before and independently from our own anthropologically relative knowledge of or within such a system.

The challenge of this anthropological relativism of our definitions of intelligence and of information in reality will be met fully upon our encounter with an alien intelligence that has perhaps attained a greater level of civilized development than even ourselves. When we consider the challenges of adequately comprehending cetacean intelligence or the intelligence of Primates, rats, octopuses, dogs or other animals, we face immediately problems of communication and of the hypothetical "black box" of getting inside of other creatures heads, and of even our own black boxes. This kind of challenge will only be magnified if and when we encountered an alien intelligence that possibly evolved along lines completely different than how we now comprehend earthbound biological evolution. But if evidence of alien intelligence that is non-anthropocentric should present itself to us in our explorations and observations of the universe, then we would for the first time be presented with the possibility of stepping entirely beyond the boundaries imposed by own anthropological relativity.

Defining for ourselves metasystems as a form of intelligence that is potentially beyond our own human boundaries creates for us other kinds of challenges as well. It is apparent that we must come forth with a kind of meta-logos that transcends and encapsulates our own logic and knowledge, as knowledge of knowledge, and information about information. A greater part of the opacity and abstruseness of Bateson's essays were in part that he was himself perhaps not entirely clear, and also that he was attempting to approach the problem holistically from the standpoint of maintaining metalogue about reality. This has both intellectual and aesthetic appeal, as it implicitly accentuates the anthropological boundedness and construction of our knowledge.

Furthermore, the challenge of defining metasystems seems to rest upon the problem of reconciling science as a brave new world kind of knowledge system, with the more traditional and ancient philosophy, that appears, in the face of the advance of science, somewhat outdated and useless. Bridging philosophy and science points up both the scientific nature of much philosophical inquiry and the complementary philosophical nature of scientific inquiry. Science and philosophy need one another, perhaps even more than did Einstein believe that Science and Religion needed one another in a way that is entirely parallel and homologous to the way that mathematics and science intersect. Thus we are interested in the marriage of the purely physical, as that range of possibility beyond the boundaries of our own consciousness, and the metaphysical, which, like Kant, we can say defines fully the boundaries of our consciousness, or "Cogito, ergo sum."

We can demonstrate for instance that doing metaphysics is not strictly speaking a-scientific or without scientific method, and that even doing science requires that we conduct some kind of metaphysics at the same time. It is clear for instance, that a great deal of metaphysics went into the formulation of the theory of evolution, as hypothetical constructs without firm empirical foundations, long before the actual empirical or experimental validation of this theory was in hand.

This of course is all an intrinsic part of the nature of the human mind that is both rooted in the same natural systems that it seeks to comprehend. It simultaneously has the power both to comprehend these systems, itself potentially within it, and even new and previously unrealized systems as well. We can only guess at the power of the mind of Heraclitus, who preferred the wealth of wisdom over the promised riches of a King.

In attempting to understand the metaphysical and ontological foundations of metasystems theory, it is important to recognize that metasystems as scientific constructs are concerned with reality first and foremost. Therefore such systems posit an a priori precedence to physical systems. To say that all systems, even noetic systems of the human mind, are reducible to physical factors and processes may sound a bit reductionistic. But we realize that by definitions metasystems comprehend and transcend the analytical description of the physical processes and encompass a holistic description of the state-behavior and systemic patterning involved. This patterning is held to be inherently synergistic at all levels, such that the results are always something greater than the mere enumeration or summation of the parts involved. If synergistic patterning did not arise from complex systems, that permitted new orders of informational patterning in nature, then we would be left with nothing but the physical description of the constituent elements.

The basis for understanding natural information systems and natural forms of intelligence is to realize the synergism of "metaphysical systems" that arise from the complex interactions and state behavior of bounded and contextualized metasystems. A metasystem is therefore something inherently more than the mere sum of its parts. It is rooted in regular and ordered relationships that define in an implicit sense determinist rules.

We understand the relationship of information theory to metasystems theory when we understand the nature of patterning of any informational system. An informational system can neither be wholly random, or wholly determined. Such a system cannot permit a continually meaningless repetition of states, nor can it permit a totally unpredictable repetition of states. We find throughout the natural world, at all levels of analysis, whether it is in terms of human imagination and creativity, or in terms of subatomic dynamics, a surprising sense of sublime order and regularity of principle. We can say therefore that an informational system is one that is implicitly ordered in its relations between its parts, and this ordering is definable within a set of rules that may be inductively inferred from observation of the system and deductive derivable by an understanding of the patterned relationships. This is, needless to say, the basis for all science.

Any system, as a metasystem that is informationally organized, can be said to be bounded or constrained in some manner such that it exhibits a limited number of degrees of freedom along one or more dimensions. Usually, we expect physical systems to be finite in number and size, but if we seek the larger universe as a system, we open up the possibility of infinite systems. Physical systems as we understand these appear to be constrained at least in terms of the four physical dimensions known in an Einsteinian universe. There are also non-physical dimensions of constraint that may operate upon systems, as well as dimensionless constraints or relationships. Systems can be characterized therefore by the kinds of constraints that serve to define the system, and these constitute a paradigm of relational rules are implicit to the patterning of the system.

Language is a perfect model for an information system. Any human language must be made up of a core set of sounds, words and grammatical rules that define the relationship between words, and between words and the meanings they indicate in the real world. Within the constraints of any language, we can find infinite possible permutations of patterning that permit that language to effectively encode and represent reality at multiple levels. Without language, there would be no human symbolic intelligence as we know it, and hence, in a sense, language is the core part of anthropological intelligence as an informational system.

Genetics is another informational system that defines the patterning and evolution of all life-forms on earth--genetic information is constrained within the parameters of DNA chains, which are remarkably uniform and limited in number. Nevertheless, from simple cellular constructs an amazing variety of substances and forms and functions of life have evolved.

Chemistry has the periodic table of the elements, and physics is gaining a surprising well ordered model of the subatomic realm. This model has not yet been completely described and, like genetics in terms of evolutionary theory, we still await a grand synthesis that ties the microscopic with the macroscopic.

We can seek metasystems as well on another level of human behavioral patterning, and in terms of the technological civilization that has created new artificial systems. These are in a sense natural informational systems, as the functional extension of human intelligence, though they are not stochastically self-organizing in the way that we understand naturally occurring systems. They have arisen artificially as the consequence of human intelligence and problem solving, either as serendipitous or intentional systems. But there is also a sense that if human intelligence is a stochastically occurring natural process, the eventual and perhaps inevitable result of biological evolution that leads to intelligent life-forms as adaptational systems, then the artificial products and systems forthcoming from this intelligence are also indirectly stochastic and self-organizing. If this is the case, then we can hypothesize that there is indeed a logical and perhaps inevitable development of these systems as metasystems in some direction. In other words, their continuing development will eventually lead us to solutions that are implicit and possible in the true informational ordering of the universe. Of course, we do not immediately comprehend and cannot foresee what these developments will be.

This leads us to a definition of intelligence as a naturally derivative system. Intelligence is in a sense immanent in natural information systems as stochastic process and possibility of development. It is emergent as a complex metaphysical process that is capable of defining solutions to problems that confront the continuing order, sustenance and growth of systems. We can say that with the emergence of animal life forms, limited forms of intelligence took hold and began evolving into more and more sophisticated systems. We would like to say that such stochastic development has reached its pinnacle in the evolution of humankind that, with its language, its symbolic intelligence, cultural creativity and its hands, has lead to the articulation of entirely new levels of informational patterning. But in the larger scheme of things we must understand this to be a relative assessment, and to define the basis of what can be called anthropological relativity of our understanding of such systems. We exhibit in our selves and in our world just one possible variety of intelligence, as a system that is complex and involves many components. Neither is this intelligence unlimited or so highly evolved that is precludes people behaving typically like other kinds of animals on a regular, indeed normal, basis.

I would confer upon the question of intelligence, as a special case and set of informational systems, as those systems that are capable of self-deterministic change and interaction with its environment in adaptive ways. We can say that evolution itself, as the form of terrestrial biology occurring on earth, forms a system of intelligence that is fundamentally blind and unreflexive. It achieves problem solving and adaptation largely through trial and error in a system that permits remarkable adaptive trait-plasticity in almost every characteristic governed by the system. We can say that the physical structure of reality as this occurs in the known universe at least, is basically non-intelligent. It does not adapt as systems in any sense. Systems occur in physical reality as ordered relationships, but these systems are not intrinsically self-maintaining, adaptive or evolving in the sense that we understand living systems. Stable systems do arise that attain complex and dynamic equilibrium states in physical reality, but these systems are purely a matter of chance process. Cosmogenic evolution is therefore a purely stochastic process that is defined completely within the parameters of its basic constraints. If these systems change, then it is in terms of dimensions or constraints the basis of which are either completely deterministic or completely random, unless this change is ordered upon some lower level of constituent complexity.

The challenge of understanding intelligence in informational patterning in a naturalistic way must necessarily bring us to the question of hypothetical alternative intelligence--or non-human forms of intelligence, and of course to the issue of alien intelligence. It is more than likely that in the universe there are numerous biological systems that have evolved sophisticated forms of intelligent life. It is probable that somewhere in the universe there are creatures that can be considered, from the criteria of metaphysical problem solving, even more intelligent than our selves. These creatures would have probably attained a state of technological development far beyond our own level.

It is likely, perhaps necessary, that these creatures would have a language, and some kinds of hands to do work, and would have elaborated some form of symbolic intelligence and culture. But we should not assume therefore that such creatures would be anything comparable or similar to human or anthropoid forms of intelligent systems as these are found upon earth.

It appears to me that the measure of intelligence of any system would be in terms of the meta-systemic science that that system has attained. It appears to me that in terms of science, some common ground of understanding of principles would be had. This would be true, for instance, in basic mathematical knowledge structures, as mathematics remains the language of science. It would also be true metaphysically in terms of the propositional organization of knowledge and inference structures. In other words, it seems to me that very intelligent creatures must at some level of their evolutionary development exhibit a convergence of intelligence upon scientific metasystems, in the sense that very different creatures must at least become in fundamental aspects "like minded" if nothing else. This universal like-mindedness would be evident in terms of the artificial and alternative patterning that such living systems developed for themselves in their civilization and augmentation of reality. We would know alien intelligence at least in terms of the tools and functions to which it put these tools.

In other words, we must hypothesize that we can only seek to know alien intelligence in an abstract sense that transcends real differences, and in an applied, operational sense that brings these differences to realization.

It would behoove us therefore, if we are to seek to understand alien intelligence, to seek to understand the structure and limits of our scientific knowledge itself.

Being anthropocentrically relative, metasystems theory faces several inherent dilemmas. The liar's dilemma was already broached. We must understand that the metasystem by definition and design entails the possibility of prevarication. No information system could be assumed to be intelligent if prevarication were not possible within such a system.

Another dilemma of such anthropological metasystems is that in the conceptualization of metasystems theory in an abstract sense, or in its operational application in the real world, we confront of a problem of being subjectively caught up within the system that we are seeking to objective describe, as if we were not a part of the system itself. Among other issues, this leads us inevitably to the challenge of solving the problems of our own survival and adaptation on earth, as a metasystem. We are left with the challenge of trying to engineer human systems that are effective in overcoming our own innate shortcomings of intelligence and lack of intelligence. These issues become unavoidable as part of our metasystems development.

A third kind of dilemma is the inherent structural dilemma of all metasystems, and of the concept of the metasystem. Metasystems are in theory all encompassing, and yet any metasystem is by definition bounded and constrained, contextualized and encompassed within some larger system. It is in part a dilemma of context, and in part a dilemma of level of structural relation by which we seek to define and understand any particular metasystem we seek to comprehend. In other words, we must seek to define metasystems generally, or any and every metasystems, in terms of metasystems that are part of these systems. If we cannot step anthropologically beyond the metasystem of our own biology and culture, we cannot step metaphysically beyond the abstract parameters by which we seek to define metasystems in the first place.

This dilemma relates us directly back to the first liar's dilemma. We cannot have information if we had no possibility of being wrong. Information as order encodes its own disorder. In order to escape such a dilemma, we must posit some larger metasystem, and so on ad infinitum. Thus we can see that indirectly, the first dilemma is related structurally to the anthropocentric and anthropomorphic question of being bound within the constraints of our own knowledge system. Somewhat paradoxically, in our conceptions of the physical structure of reality and the total universe, we are also bound within a very similar kind of dilemma--any cosmological model we develop leads us directly to the conundrum of hypothesizing a metastructure to contain that model. It follows that the kinds of solutions we find for one aspect of this "metalemma" will lead to resolutions of its other aspects. On one hand, we can see that the universe in the largest sense must be self-contained entirely, somehow. On the other hand, if we are to agree to such universal laws as thermodynamics, we must see that whatever scale or structure we posit for the universe must leak into a larger background context, if it is composed of energy. It is impossible to imagine, it seems, a universe that is at once infinite and totally self-contained, and these seems like an oxymoronic, self-contradictory statement.

Finally, I must close with the notion that there is an entirely different way of looking at metasystems as these relate especially to ourselves, as human beings, and relate ourselves to reality. All other life forms that we know can be said to be a part of metasystems and yet are not reflective of or upon the metasystems that they constitute or share. As intelligent life forms, we have the capability of thinking about our meta-systemic relationships, about where we came from, and where we might be going in terms of the metasystems we are a part of.

In other words, I think it is important also to construe metasystems as a possible metasystem, as something that is real and applied in the real world, especially that is the product of human civilization and development. We have reached a juncture in our own history of development that we must consider the possibility of the elaboration of a grand metasystem that best serves our interests as a species and a form of life on earth.

The development of a metasystem from this point of view is one that brings to teleological consequence the implicit structures and purposes of knowledge that is inherent to what we have already elaborated. Such a metasystem would comprise a kind of permanent long term solution to the problems and predicaments that confront humankind, particularly upon a global level.

Alternative Intelligence Systems

I propose the development of alternative models of intelligent systems that do not strive to meet the rigorous hard AI standards of the Turing Test, and that serve other functions than the mere anthropomorphization of machine behavior and the projective mimicry of our own behavior in the input-output feedback loop that defines a machine as a form of automaton. If we cast about the natural world for examples of such alternative intelligence, they are not very difficult to discover--we find them in ant-colonies, that can forge a trail in the most efficient manner between food sources and other resources and their underground chambers, even if no single ant by itself, or even a small group of ants, is capable of achieving such a solution by itself. I would recommend that any living system, or species, that has successfully worked out for itself an evolutionary solution in a given ecological niche represents from a form of alternative intelligence in its design and behavioral patterns. I would suggest furthermore that if we look at intelligence primarily as the complex manipulation of information, then even genetic transmission and recombination systems that result in adaptive evolution represent an alternative form of natural intelligence.

Given these considerations, I would proffer a definition of alternative intelligence as any system involving the manipulation, storage, change and updating of information in a semi-autonomous manner that serves to solve particular functional problem sets that are the intention of their designs, including but not limited to the performance of some kind of work, as a machine, or the acquisition and mediation of information for its own sake.

I therefore propose alternative standards and measures of machine or systems based intelligence that might include any subset of the following kinds of criteria:

1. non-anthropomorphic designs in form or function.

2. capacity for consistently solving certain complex problem sets in a reliable manner.

3. performance complex operations in an automatic and routine operational manner with minimal human control inputs, manipulation or mediation.

4. is capable of being integrated into larger systems frameworks that are themselves intelligently integrated upon another level of functioning.

5. is capable of some degree of generalization and modularization of form and function of information.

We should be willing to accept more relative standards of what constitutes an "intelligent system" or machine, and to understand that by this term we do not mean the same thing as a "thinking" machine or a machine that can actually think for itself in an independent manner. Perhaps eventually such a sophisticated device can be somehow engineered, but in the meantime we might content ourselves with more reasonable and realistic sets of standards and definitions regarding machine intelligence.

An intelligent system is, therefore, any complex design of information representation, that is capable of functioning in relatively sophisticated ways in the manipulation and handling of information, given the caveat that what might seem sophisticated from the point of view of an ant or a dog might not seem so from the standpoint of a dolphin or a human. Not being constrained by anthropomorphic or anthropocentric conventions, the stereotype of Robby the bipedal, walking/talking robot is perhaps something best kept in the 1950's. Intelligent systems can take virtually any form and design required of their function, without regard to such standards. Of greater interest are the integration of intelligent systems and subsystems into larger meta-systems framework, with the idea of the distribution of automated control functions and tasking to various components of a larger framework, and the capacity for multi-tasking across a range of problem solving areas.

Metasystems of Non-Human Intelligence

I therefore propose alternative standards and measures of machine or systems based intelligence that might include any subset of the following kinds of criteria:

1. non-anthropomorphic designs in form or function.

2. capacity for consistently solving certain complex problem sets in a reliable manner.

3. performance complex operations in an automatic and routine operational manner with minimal human control inputs, manipulation or mediation.

4. is capable of being integrated into larger systems frameworks that are themselves intelligently integrated upon another level of functioning.

5. is capable of some degree of generalization and modularization of form and function of information.

I believe it was Gregory Bateson who carried the implicit concept of the metasystem to its greatest development as an outgrowth of information theory and cybernetics in his work Steps to an Ecology of Mind and subsequent work Mind & Nature: A Necessary Unity. The theoretical thicket and the noetic mindscape these works encompassed is vast and variegated. There is a veritable minefield of alternative perspectives and overlapping ideas in a wide plethora of theoretical and operational orientations. In hindsight, I can understand clearly the mindset and direction that Bateson was headed in as a theoretical anthropologist. As an anthropologist who has also been interested in information theory and in the problem of mind and meaning, it strikes me as reasonable and inevitable that like-minded people would end up in the same general terrain of ideas undergoing a similar noetic evolution.

In this work, I propose the central concept of the metasystem as a grand unifying metaphor, and also as an operational construct, or a hypothetical model, if you will, for all knowledge on earth that entertains the presumption of being scientific and naturalistic. But I want to stop short of employing this concept as a catchall for every trivial sundry detail under the sun. In invoking one idea to mean everything at once, we render the term useless and meaningless in being interesting about nothing in particular.

As the basis for understanding the empirical and rational foundations for metasystems theory, I hold forth the following presuppositions:

1. All phenomena that occur in nature, indeed all reality as this is experienced or able to be experienced, exhibits a fundamental order or unity of patterning, no matter how chaotic and disordered it may be presentationally speaking.

2. All phenomena cohere therefore in some kind of minimally ordered system of relationships, and all systems are somehow interconnected with one another to create a larger metasystem.

3. Information is possible because it allows us to make meaningful predictions, or to draw meaningful, or hypothetical relationships, that are only indirectly discernible from the experiential presentation of the phenomena itself.

4. All systems are organized into a larger framework that encompasses the total reality, including the total physical universe, and this organization appears to be naturally stratified at various levels of relationship and in different orders of phenomenal patterning.

5. The interrelationship of all systems, at all levels, entails that all systems and all phenomenal patterning, at any level, are primarily determined by a single set of operational principles that govern and constrain the behavior of these systems in the most fundamental of ways.

These principles appear to be dimensionless and yet well ordered in a Pythagorean sense that they may be defined in terms of precise formulas. These principles constitute the basic paradigm of metasystems.

In a sense, most conventional physical systems are thermodynamic, and hence thermodynamics constitutes what can be considered a part of a grand metasystem. I would claim that not all physical phenomena that we observe are fully explanable by an unrevised set of thermodynamic principles.

Gravitation appears to violate thermodynamic principles in several important, fundamental ways. In consideration of these apparent discrepancies, I have offered revised models of gravitational dynamics and what I refer to as universal dynamics that encompasses a hypothetically broader range of physical phenomena than that embraced by conventional mechanical principles.

At the same time, it can be argued metaphysically at least that there exists certain abstract truths or primes of knowledge that are in a sense not susceptible to the laws of thermodynamics in any conceptualization of these principles. Such abstract notions appear to be constant, immutable, and necessary to the understanding of all systems.

Heraclitus, the obscured philosopher who presaged in wisdom the great Greek Thinkers, at the dawn of Greek Civilization and in the age of Homer, left us with a fundamental paradigm of metasystems. He taught us that change was the basis of reality, and all things are in a constant process of change, and nothing stands still completely, even though it may appear to do so. All change is guided by an intelligent law or the logos. Wisdom is based upon understanding the harmony of the logos. Logos leads all things through great cycles of birth and death, darkness and light, through the days and the seasons and includes basic elements of earth, fire and water. I take a metasystems approach to be a fundamentally Heraclitian frame of thought about physical reality, owing its origin to this early time in human history.

But metasystems in an objective sense are presumed to exist both before and beyond our own human abilities to intelligently make sense and define the underlying principles of these systems. Indeed, our own intellectual abilities were derived from more basic physical systems and processes that exist before and independent of our ability to conceive of them. They exist as patterns, and the logos that defines their order exists implicit to these patterns. Science needs to make this presupposition if it is to rest theoretically on any universal framework at all. Such is the relativity of our knowledge and existence in reality that unless we do make such a pressupposition, we could not even assume the existence of an objective physical reality that extends one inch beyond the circumferences of our own skulls. But because we can and need to make such a presupposition, a whole train of other truths then follows deductively and inferentially as real or hypothetical possibilities.

Defining for ourselves metasystems as a form of intelligence that is potentially beyond our own human boundaries creates for us other kinds of challenges as well. It is apparent that we must come forth with a kind of metalogos that transcends and encapsulates our own logic and knowledge, as knowledge of knowledge, and information about information. A greater part of the opacity and abtruseness of Bateson's essays were in part that he was himself perhaps not entirely clear, and also that he was attempting to approach the problem holistically from the standpoint of maintaining metalogue about reality. This has both intellectual and aesthetic appeal, as it implicitly accentuates the anthropological boundedness and construction of our knowledge.

We can demonstrate for instance that doing metaphysics is not strictly speaking ascientific or without scientific method, and that even doing science requires that we conduct some kind of metaphysics at the same time. It is clear for instance, that a great deal of metaphysics went into the formulation of the theory of evolution, as hypothetical constructs without firm empirical foundations, long before the actual empirical or experimental validation of this theory was in hand.

This of course is all an intrinsic part of the nature of the human mind that is both rooted in the same natural systems that it seeks to comprehend. It simultaneously has the power both to comprehend these systems, itself potentially within it, and even new and previously unrealized systems as well. We can only guess at the power of the mind of Heraclitus, who prefered the wealth of wisdom over the promised riches of a King.

This leads us to a definition of intelligence as a naturally derivative system. Intelligence is in a sense immanent in natural information systems as stochastic process and possibility of development. It is emergent as a complex metaphysical process that is capable of definining solutions to problems that confront the continuing order, sustenance and growth of systems. We can say that with the emergence of animal life forms, limited forms of intelligence took hold and began evolving into more and more sophisticated systems. We would like to say that such stochastic development has reached its pinnacle in the evolution of humankind that, with its language, its symbolic intelligence, cultural creativity and its hands, has lead to the articulation of entirely new levels of informational patterning. But in the larger scheme of things we must understand this to be a relative assessment, and to define the basis of what can be called anthropological relativity of our understanding of such systems. We exhibit in our selves and in our world just one possible variety of intelligence, as a system that is complex and involves many components. Neither is this intelligence unlimited or so highly evolved that is precludes people behaving typically like other kinds of animals on a regular, indeed normal, basis.

I would confer upon the question of intelligence, as a special case and set of informational systems, as those systems that are capable of self-deterministic change and interaction with its environment in adaptive ways. We can say that evolution itself, as the form of terrestrial biology occurring on earth, forms a system of intelligence that is fundamentally blind and unreflexive. It achieves problem solving and adaptation largely through trial and error in a system that permits remarkable adaptive trait-plasticity in almost every characteristic governed by the system. We can say that the physical structure of reality as this occurs in the known universe at least, is basically non-intelligent. It does not adapt as systems in any sense. Systems occur in physical reality as ordered relationships, but these systems are not intrinsically self-maintaining, adaptive or evolving in the sense that we understand living systems. Stable systems do arise that attain complex and dynamic equilibrium states in physical reality, but these systems are purely a matter of chance process. Cosmogonic evolution is therefore a purely stochastic process that is defined completely within the parameters of its basic constraints. If these systems change, then it is in terms of dimenions or constraints the basis of which are either completely deterministic or completely random, unless this change is ordered upon some lower level of constituent complexity.

The challenge of understanding intelligence in informational patterning in a naturalistic way must necessarily bring us to the question of hypothetical alternative intelligence--or non-human forms of intelligence, and of course to the issue of alien intelligence. It is more than likely that in the universe there are numerous biological systems that have evolved sophisticated forms of intelligent life. It is probable that somewhere in the universe there are creatures that can be considered, from the criteria of metaphysical problemsolving, even more intelligent than our selves. These creatures would have probably attained a state of technological development far beyond our own level.

It is likely, perhaps necessary, that these creatures would have a language, and some kinds of hands to do work, and would have elaborated some form of symbolic intelligence and culture. But we should not assume therefore that such creatures would be anything comparable or similar to human or anthropoidal forms of intelligent systems as these are found upon earth.

It appears to me that the measure of intelligence of any system would be in terms of the metasystemic science that that system has attained. It appears to me that in terms of science, some common ground of understanding of principles would be had. This would be true, for instance, in basic mathematical knowledge structures, as mathematics remains the language of science. It would also be true metaphysically in terms of the propositional organization of knowledge and inference structures. In other words, it seems to me that very intelligent creatures must at some level of their evolutionary development exhibit a convergence of intelligence upon scientific metasystems, in the sense that very different creatures must at least become in fundamental aspects "like minded" if nothing else. This universal like-mindedness would be evident in terms of the artificial and alternative patterning that such living systems developed for themselves in their civilization and augmentation of reality. We would know alien intelligence at least in terms of the tools and functions to which it put these tools.

It would behoove us therefore, if we are to seek to understand alien intelligence, to seek to understand the structure and limits of our scientific knowledge itself.

Finally, I must close with the notion that there is an entirely different way of looking at metasystems as these relate especially to ourselves, as human beings, and relate ourselves to reality. All other life forms that we know can be said to be a part of metasystems and yet are not reflective of or upon the metasystems that they constitute or share. As intelligent life forms, we have the capability of thinking about our metasystemic relationships, about where we came from, and where we might be going in terms of the metasystems we are a part of.

The development of a metasystem from this point of view is one that brings to teleological consequence the implicit structures and purposes of knoweldge that is inherent to what we have already elaborated. Such a metasystem would comprise a kind of permanent long term solution to the problems and predicaments that confront humankind, particularly upon a global level.

Trans-culturative Civilization as Intelligence Metasystems

Human Civilizations as Transcultural Developmental Process

Civilization as we understand this process anthropologically and archaeologically is the development of advanced cultural-based societies founded upon the adaptation and application of advanced technologies and alternative systems, including systems of communication, information storage, transportation, energy utilization, agriculture, etc.

We have come to the realization upon earth that, regardless of the many human civilizations that have developed, often independently of one another, upon earth, global civilization is emerging upon earth that shares basic technological and structural patterns between many different cultures and peoples which are in turn are becoming structurally more integrated into a common system of exchange and interaction. This does not seem to abnegate or obviate the role, frequency or level of violence occurring between different groups of people upon earth--in fact it is well argued that the prevalence and destructiveness of violence has only increased with the increasing integration and interaction of different peoples upon earth.

It is important to see civilization as we know it to consist of a form of developmental process, a process based upon the transmission, exchange and acquisition of new information, knowledge and "know how."

Extraterrestrial Intelligence and Alien Civilization

Of all the questions that confront us in our sciences and our general systems, the question of the presence or relative absence of extraterrestrial intelligence is perhaps the most daunting. It is a problem that epitomizes the paradox of the unknown outweighing the known, beyond which limited knowledge we have only speculation. It is the kind of question really designed for a natural system framework. If we are to accept life on earth as a natural system, which it clearly seems to be, then how common might life be in the rest of the universe, and upon this question hinges our answers to the challenges of contacting alien forms of extraterrestrial intelligence. Until we discover extraterrestrial forms of life, at least one living system independent of the earth, we cannot compare our own, or do more than conjecture about the prevalence or lack thereof of life in the cosmos. Thus, such an area remains rife with controversy between parties that take different stands, from those that claim that life is relatively rare and unique, to those that claim it is fairly commonplace and even "mediocre" in the galaxy, much less in the entire universe. It also ranges between those who seek UFO's in any blurry photograph and those who see the hand of God in all kinds of Creation, even beyond the earth.

The challenge for a natural systems theory is to provide some kind of constructive framework within which to define and hopefully extend our understanding of the problem beyond the controversial and the merely speculative. Perhaps a middle of the road approach might be the wisest first choice, that life is neither so rare as to be unique on earth, nor that commonplace that it might be found under any stone we turn in our exploration beyond our earth. Between the two extremes, we have a very vast range indeed of possible answers, so vast is the observable universe, and so many are the stars and potential solar systems it probably contains.

If we are to construe and isolate advanced civilizations against the cosmic background, we need to be able to filter out a broad range of noise from a very highlyselective set of non-random signals. The presence of a highly advanced civilization requires a high degree of the organization of information that itself was founded upon self-organization, even if it eventually did not end up being that way. Looked at from the standpoint of the functional distribution of information systems and entropy, a highly advanced civilization would be exceedingly rare against a background that tends to run along the grain towards increasing entropy.

Any advanced civilization would have been built on a long runway of evolutionary development. In evolutionary terms, it would not have happened in a fortnight or even in a millenium. It is not surprising that human intelligence arose in 1/1000 the total time of evolution on earth, in the last 1 thousandths of this time. And in this period of anthropogenesis, the rise of human civilization as we know it was again about 1/1000 th of this total (1/1,000,000) of the total evolutionary time of life on earth, in thelast 1/1000^th of this time frame. And again, if we are to consider the time when humans have first become space-faring, again it has been just about 1/1000 of the last time frame, and it has happened all in an instant. What we are witnessing is a long lag time on the run way of biological evolution, and then a rapid exponential growth curve at the very terminus of this run way.

Any civilization that is out there would presumably be based upon very stable biospheric conditions, and upon a long trajectory of evolutionary development. While the essential genetic mechanisms of evolution are blind fundamentally, evolution as a system of speciation and natural selection towards functional differentiation favors the development of increasingly intelligent systems, and in the long run would favor the development of adaptive cultures and intelligent civilizations. The likelihood is great that such an alien civilization, relatively fresh arisen from a long evolutionary night, has probably not been broadcasting itself for very long, and if it is a very advanced and space-faring civilization, it would have achieved this within just a millennium of its first capacities for transmitting and receiving signals across space. During that time frame it would most like have achieved some measure of space-colonization and biospheric adaptation to space within its solar system, and possibly, within the range of neighboring star system. Still, its time for broadcasting, sending and receiving signals across space would be very short relative to the length of time its basic forms of life had been extant on its home planet.

From an information standpoint, making contact using electromagnetic signals makes supreme sense. In a ways, we have information theory and the heart of systems theory at work. It makes sense that advanced civilizations would have command of tremendous information potentials. If we regard the entire observational sphere of the universe as a macro-state, each star system as a microstate, and we can apply the functions developed by Shannon in communication theory to figure out the entropy of a vast system like our Galaxy. We would be looking for a signal out of an average background noise, that would appear in some manner non-random and deterministic. Hopefully, we would be looking for a set of signals, possibly from more than a single exact source, assuming that the broadcasting source was an advanced civilization that had effected some level of space-colonization. Any such signal or set of signals that were somewhat less than random would have to be taken seriously as signs that intelligent civilizations existed elsewhere in the universe. The odds of it being anything else, like a strange pulsar, would be so remote as to be virtually impossible.

Scholars have been seriously debating and considering these issues, particularly in regard to the challenges of contacting alien civilizations, of ETI, SETI and METI, for almost a half century now. In that time, the radio signals upon which they have relied have traversed a sphere from the earth about 100 light years in radius. Even within this 100 lightyear sphere, not all regions have been covered, and those that have been observed, have not been done so either consistently nor equally. There are fundamental problems that seem often not publically addressed or admitted--what is the necessary receiving or broadcasting power for sources or receivers to effectively transmit signals over 50 lightyears distance--no light on earth, no matter how powerful, can be feasibly seen from 50 lightyears away by any kind of telescopic technology we currently possess. The signals we are receiving, however random or non-random, have at least to be generated by sun-sized systems, and thus we probably would have to encounter, by the Kardeshev scale, at least a Type II civilization, several thousand years ahead of our own, by our own current standards and estimates of technological progress.

For a civilization to make contact with us from further afield, from the furthest corners of our galaxy or even from some other galaxy, then we would have to assume that this civilization had achieved at least a Type III or even possibly a Type IV level of technological development, far beyond our own. If that contact is direct, then at our current level of technological progress, we must conclude that the civilization would be far more powerful and advanced than our own, and the contact would probably have disruptive if not completely destructive consequences for our own civilization, even if that alien visitor was completely benign in intention and non-hostile in purpose.

Presumably, if we wait and watch the night skies long enough, a Type III or Type IV civilization should eventually pop onto our radar screens, if we know what we are really looking for and what we are really observing. Their signals, broadcast over a broad range, would be hard to hide.

The quest for extraterrestrial intelligent life in the universe has almost from its inception confronted an enormous paradox. We know, by our self-knowledge, that such life is certain possible out there, somewhere. We do not know, and cannot now know, how common or rare such intelligence might really be.

From its inception, SETI research and the ETI problem has been dominated by what has become known as the Fermi Paradox, which has become a theoretical reference point for such research. The problem of extraterrestrial life and astrobiology in generral has largely become a hybrid, interdisciplinary field of study that has centered around the Fermi paradox.

The story goes like this. In 1950, while walking to lunch one day at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Enrico Fermi had a casual conversation with several colleagues who were conversing in passing about local UFO reports and a cartoon about Aliens stealing trashcans. The conversation became more serious during lunch, discussing the possibility of detecting faster-than-light objects, and Fermi suddently exclaimed "Where is everyone." He made rapid calculations and concluded that if aliens were out there, Earth should have been visited long before. This has spawned a perennial debate over the essential question, which has been formulated in various ways.

The problem is essentially the contradiction between the argument of scale, probability and lack of evidence. The large scale of the size and age and star-population of the universe suggest that earth may be a rather typical, ordinary planet, then extraterrestrial life should be abundant, and extraterrestrial civilizations common. This assumption is contradicted by the lack of any direct or conclusive evidence for the presence of such civilizations.

The first part of the Fermi Paradox is the argument by scale and probability. Even if life on other planets were exceedingly rare, there are so many stars and star systems that life would still be abundant throughout the universe. This argument assumes the "principle of mediocrity" which states that the earth is rather average and typical as a planet around an average sun.

The second part of the Fermi Paradox is that an advanced civilization would eventually become a space-faring civilization interested in colonizing across planets and stars. Because there has as yet been no conclusive evidence for such colonization, besides out own somewhat feeble efforts, it can be assumed that life, especially intelligent life, is exceedingly rare and exceptional in the universe, almost unique if not completely so. In general, this is known as the Rare Earth Hypothesis, that the rise of especially energy consuming extraterrestrial civilizations would be exceeding rare, if not unique to the earth itself. An alternative rejection of the mediocrity principle is known as the Great Filter--for some reason, one or more factors may bottleneck the rise of civilizations advanced enough to establish interstellar communication. Another variant is the Doomsday Argument, which states that most civilizations that achieve the technological capacity to become space-faring, most often destroy themselves before achieving space-hood. Sagan and Shklovski suggested in 1966 that civilizations will either destroy themselves or master their self-destructive capacity within a century of becoming capable of communicating in space.

And so the argument builds from this dialect. A rejoinder to the second argument against the commonness of living systems is that we have simply not been looking long enough, hard enough or good enough, yet. This basic problem has also been posed as the "Great Silence:" if life is common in the universe, even if interstellar travel is difficult, why do we not detect their radio transmissions?

These basic problems has both spawned renewed efforts to find evidence, to detect signals from space, as well as counterarguments to the effect that life is extremely rare and intelligent life and its civilization even more rare.

Not all extraterrestrial forms of living system are expected to meet standards we would consider as signs of "intelligent" life, even if these standards are relaxed and generally non-anthropocentric in definition. We expect, for instance, to find associated with some kind of advanced alien intelligence a complex of civilization including a record of technological achievement. The question becomes, if we encounter some form of intelligent life form, that is comparable to our own on some scale, just how intelligent or how "advanced" upon whatever scale of progress we consider? Presumably, if we as a human civilization can exist, others are possible as well, and just how unique we may really be, intellectually speaking, in the vastness of our galaxy or the entire universe, remains an unanswered but deeply problematic question.

The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) has been conducted in a systematic manner since the early 1960's, until today. Only was was a non-random, 72 second radio transmission received from space, in 1974, now known as the "Wow" signal. Almost from the inception of SETI research, at the Green Bank meeting, in 1960, Frank Drake proposed what has become now the famous Drake or Green Bank Equation, which was an attempt to estimate the number of extraterrestrial civilizations in our galaxy with which we may possible achieve contact, enabling scientists to quantify the main factors that may help to determine the possible number of extraterrestrial civilizations.

N = R_*f_pn_ef_lf_if_cL

Where N equals the estimated number of civilizations within the Milky Way with whom communication may be established

R_*equals the average rate of star formation per year in the galaxy

f_p equals the fraction of the stars having planetary systems

n_eequals the average number of planets capable of supporting living systems

f_l the fraction of those planets that actually develop living systems

f_i equals the fraction of those planets that go on to develop intelligent life

f_c equals the fraction of those civilizations that develop a technological base involving the release of signals into space that would be detectable

L equals the length of time those civilizations release detectable signals into space.

All of the parameters of Drake's equation are either very rough estimates or guestimates based upon very limited evidence and often conjectural knowledge. It is criticized for being mostly guess work that at best stimulates speculation and limited research on the subject, and at worst, for being unprovable or insoluble as science.

The last four terms of Drake's equation are based upon unknown and at this time unknowable variables. The assumption of the equation is that a sui generis civilization will arise and colonize within its own star system and then die out in relative isolation from other civilization. If civilizations become star-faring, and interstellar in scale, then this sui generis assumption of isolation no longer applies, and instead, the problem becomes one of population dynamics.

The Fermi paradox ("If extraterrestrial civilizations are common, why haven't they been discovered?") suggests that technological civilizations tend to destroy themselves rather rapidly, once they gain the technological capacity to do so, before having the opportunity to make contact with alien civilizations. The Fermi paradox was countered by the Principle of Mediocrity championed by Frank Drake and Carl Sagan, which suggests that our Sun is a relatively average star, and our solar system is a relatively average occurrence, and the earth is a relatively average planet, suggesting that with so many stars in our galaxy, there are probably many earth like planets teaming with multicellular life forms.

The Drake equation was proffered not as a solution to the Fermi Paradox, but, as Drake himself said, as a way of organizing our ignorance about the problem.

Variations of the Drake Equation have been proposed, with modifications for the rates of star formation, a reappearance number for the likelihood of advanced civilizations reappearing on a living planet over a long period of time, and the METI factor, or the fraction of "messaging" civilizations that might actually engage in attempts at interstellar communication.

Altogether, final estimates from some variation of the Drake Equation depend heavily upon our theoretical and received knowledge of our solar system and from beyond. Chance discovery of extraterrestrial life within our Solar system would drastically modify the equation, as have the discovery of numerous exo-planets beyond our Solar System. We do not really know the rate of star formation in our Galaxy, but the number of stars thought to exist within our Galaxy has more than doubled, reaching estimates of 400 billion or more. Attempts to explain the relative absence of signs of life in the Universe all depend upon manipulation of the variables of the Drake equation one way or another, and none of these attempts are mutually exclusive.

In 1964, Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardeshev developed a method for measuring a civilization's level of technological achievement based upon that society's total energy consumption. According to the Kardeshev scale, there are three categories of civilization:

Type I Civilization has achieved mastery of the resources of its home planet. Such a civilization can harness all the power available to its planet. Human civilization currently is calculated at about 72% of a Type I civilization, based upon recent estimates of global primary energy consumption.

Type II Civilization has achieved mastery of the resources of its solar system. Type II Civilization would be capable of harnessing most of the power output by its resident star.

Type III Civilization has achieved mastery of the resources of its home galaxy. A hypothetical type III civilization would harness 10¹¹ times the energy of a type II civilization, and type II civilization would harness 4 x 10⁹ times more than a Type I civilization, which roughly would utilize 25 megatons of power per second.

Because human civilization is currently somewhat below a Type I civilization, it is sometimes referred to as a Type 0 civilizaiton. Carl Sagan argued that intermediate values of the Kardeshev scale could be defined by interpolation and extrapolation from the values given. Sagan calculated contemporary Human civilization to be Type .7, using the formula:

K = (Log_WW- 6)/10

Where K is the Kardeschev rating and W its output power in watts.

A Type IV extragalactic civilization was proposed by Dr. Michio Kaku, and later extrapolation by Zoltan Galantai proposed a Type IV civilization as using the energy resources of the observable Universe, approximately 10⁴⁵watts, while Milan Cirkovic argued that a Type IV civilization should encompass the power output of the local supercluster, being estimated at about 10⁴²watts. Current issues of global warming may be linked to the energy transition from a Type 0 to Type 1 civilization, with global circumscription creating a Malthusian paradox to the growth of human population and its attendant civilization.

Carl Sagan proposed to add another dimension, information capacity, to the rank scale of civilizations, using the letter A to represent 10⁶ unique bits of information, with each successive letter of the alphabet to correspond to a magnitude increase until Z = 10³¹ bits. Earth of 1973 would be a .7 H civilization, with approximate access to 10¹³ bits of information. According to this typology, energy and information dimensions would be independent, such that a level Z information processing civilization would not need to be a Kardeshev type III energy consuming civilization.

We can extend this model a little bit, by first offering a grid of civilization classes by information and energy:

	Type O	Type I	Type II	Type III	Type IV
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
Z

Presumably, from a systems perspective, all civilizations would have to advance in some manner across this grid, moving from the upper left hand corner to the right and down in some trajectory. If we were able to observe and plot different civilizations from a remote distance, we might end up with a configurational patterning something like an S-curve similar perhaps to the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram for star classification.

All such civilizations would occupy initial start states somewhere in the upper left-hand column.

Most civilizations would probably never leave the upper left-hand corner.

Only a few civilizations would end up in the lower right hand corner.

Presumably, at some stage in a civilizations development, it would undertake interstellar colonization (Type II-III development) and it would reach a point in which it would spawn multiple off-shoot civilizations that may or may not be centrally controlled or controllable. At such a stage, interstellar civilization would reach a "take-off" stage that would mean that such a civilization would be very unlikely to go extinct or to destroy itself entirely.

Implicit to the Kardeschev scale of possible civilizations based upon energy is the ideal of the relative size of the civilization in spatial-temporal dimensions, but this is not spelled out in any explicit manner. These equations and formulas may perhaps be extended by adding an explicit dimension of relative size that such a civilization would feasibly occupy in space-time. It would have a certain compass of three dimension distance, or volume, and it would have a certain average length of time. Presumably, the more advanced the civilization, the older, the more long lasting, and the more wide-spread such a civilization would be. An older civilization would of course have more time to branch out and spread itself over greater and greater distances. Young civilizations would not last very long, and their range of authority and influence would be relatively small, even "microcosmic" compared to more advanced civilizations. We might expand the grid above to a third dimension by adding a relative space-time scale.

For instance:

i. Earth-Scale Civilizations--planet sized/millennial civilizations,

ii.Star-Scale Civilizations--Solar-system sized/10 thousand year civilizations,

iii.Cluster-Scale Civilizations--Star Group or Cluster Sized/100 thousand year

civilizations year civilizations,

iv.Galactic Scale Civilizations--Galaxy Sized/million year civilizations;

v. Extra-Galactic Scale Civilizations--InterGalactic Sized/ billion year

civilizations.

Implicit to this scale is the concern of transport and rates of travel. If light-speed is a universal and inviolable absolute in the Universe, then this would set limits to how long it would take civilizations to spread, feasibly in multiple directions simultaneously. Each civilization, by the time it got to the Cluster Scale, would begin expanding spherically in all directions. The volume of space such a civilization would "control" or traverse would expand gradually but exponentially. Presumably, the extent of its domain would be proportional by some scale to the range of its broadcast signaling capabilities by some order of magnitude.

A very large and very old civilization would be extremely rare, but extremely powerful, and extremely capable of surviving in space independently of any isolated ecosphere or star-system.

A very small and very young civilization would be quite common-place, relative to the prevalent biocosmic abundance of living systems in the galaxy and universe, but would be relatively fragile and unlikely of surviving in the long run in space independently of an isolated ecosphere or star-system.

Each civilization, in order to advance to a next higher level in terms of information, energy and spatial-temporal distribution, would have a fundamental set of challenges to overcome at each level. These challenges would be system-type problems, and these in some rudimentary manner would be deducible from a general system perspective. For instance, any civilization, to venture into space off the native planet where it originally evolved, would have to overcome the problem of artificial biospheres, of successfully transporting and sustaining living systems independently of the originating biosphere.

A pattern of artificial selection would be operating upon civilization as systems, such that only the most adaptable would survive and develop to higher levels.

This selection pattern depends primarily upon trans-culturative processes of the transmission of knowledge relating to real alternative systems and their application to the challenges of adaptive survival and reproductive success for the life-forms.

At some point, a civilization would have to achieve a collective realization of a metasystem framework in order to successful adapt and surive in the structure of the long run.

Presumably, from a systems standpoint, any civilization in the universe worthy of our consideration (from the standpoint of establishing contact from earth) would ave already achieved some level of energy consumption as well as a capacity for processing a certain volume as well as complexity of information. Any such civilization would leave a signature, a set or series or even an entire space of signals. If we extend our speculations about the Drake Equation to embrace the Sagan-Kardesheve scale, we can estimate that the likelihood of a civilization becoming a higher order civilization, advancing through whatever changes need to be achieved, decreases with each ascending level of magnitude. In other words, even if all life is rare and basic civilizations like the Greek or Roman civilizations are even more rare, such civilizations in the scale of the large and the long run should be relatively common place compared to civilizations that reach Type III or IV with an X, Y or Z rating on an information scale.

Feasibly then, this three dimensional grid could be represented as a kind of right pyramid, based on the relative frequencies and prevalence of occurrence of each possible type of civilization. Each level of the pyramid would represent the set of challenges that any given civilization at the level would need to meet from a systems standpoint in order to progress to the next higher level.

For every Type 4 civilization that may be out there, we might speculate that there could exist a million or even a billion Type 0 civilizations, and possibly as many as a few hundred thousand Type I civilizations and a few thousand Type II civilizations and a few hundred or even tens of Type III civilizations.

Furthermore, we can speculate, with an average distribution of stars in a galaxy the size of the Milky Way, and a total count, if we can expect an earth type planet in one of a million solar systems, then we can estimate the average distribution of earth-type solar sytems across the expanses of the Milky Way. Furthermore, if only one in a million of these achieved any degree of intelligent civilization, we can go on to estimate the distribution and count of such civilizations in a Milky Way sized galaxy, on average. The complexity and enormity of the problem, combined with our basic lack of information and knowledge about such distributions and ratios, precludes any such meaningful speculation in a non-trivial manner.

The paradoxes seem to multiply when considering such hypothetical exigencies of such alternative kinds of systems of civilization. For instance, we might speculate the following principles apply:

1. As the order of magnitude of a civilization's rating increases, that civilization should become increasingly rare, by an order of magnitude.

2. It would be intrinsically easier to make contact with more advanced civilizations than less advanced civilizations, if they are willing to make contact.

3. An especially rare and advanced civilization would be more disinclined to make contact (The Zoo Hypothesis) if it was aware of the destructive consequences of such contact.

4. If an especially rare and advanced civilization makes direct contact deliberately, then their intentions may well not be benign, and there would be little we could do about the consequences.

5. An advanced civilization may make indirect contact accidentally, as a consequence of interstellar space colonization. Such unintended contact would not be hostile, but would probably have destructive consequences for human civilization anyway.

One of the main conclusions we can draw, is that if our own civilization is premature in its technological development, then early contact, either directly or indirectly, is most likely to be destructive and therefore would be probably undesireable to achieve. This leads to a grand paradox of our knowledge and our own civilization as a system. While our scientific understanding and knowledge of our world (our universal reality) would be expanded enormously by the discovery of extraterrestrial life beyond earth, the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence at our own level of incipient development would probably be disastrous for human civilization.

It would be naïve to assume any alien civilization would be necessarily benign and philanthropic in nature, especially when we find little of these qualities in ourselves. The adaptive function of human culture that gave the human species an evolutionary edge was rooted in a form of social competition and power-motivation that may in thelong run work against the capacity for our civilization to achieve space-faring independence, and may instead lead to the premature demise of our civilization through global circumscription, or the Malthusian dilemma. This might be a grand Darwinian paradox, that the very traits selected for human success in the long run undermines our capacity to sustain ourselves or to escape the conditions that created us in the first place. And if this is so for our own species and civilization, why should it also not possibly apply to any other form of life that develops advanced technological civilization. Presumably, any such intelligent life form would have its own competitive and adaptive requirements, and obviously some drive for power that led to their success in the first place.

Three conclusions are forthcoming:

1. From the systems standpoint, in the structure of the large and the long run, if we do not destroy ourselves first, then such contact is probably inevitable and expectable. Exactly when or how, like a large earthquake, we will probably never be able to predict.

2. For all civilizations, there would be a long latency period of their development during which such civilizations would be most vulnerable either to self-destruction or deculturative contact with alien civilizations. This period would correspond to the time required for that civilization to develop a true space-faring pattern of interplanetary and interstellar colonization independent of the native planet of origin.

3. The likelihood of contact before a civilization reaches this stage of space-faring development is not great, but the likelihood of self-destruction before reaching this stage is great.

4. If a civilization can survive contact with an alien civilization, then that civilization is likely to undergo a revolutionary galvanization of its technological development, and rapidly become a space-faring civilization.

We may speculate further that a highly advanced civilization that extended well beyond its own solar system, would eventually come into contact with not just one or two alien civilizations, but with many other such civilizations. Such contact would either be destructive or constructive in its net consequences, but once such contact occurs we can no longer assume the independent development of a civilization without trans-civilizational influence. Once such contact occurs and eventually becomes relatively frequent, then new patterns of trans-civilizational development will begin to develop, and a new level of artificial systems integration will take place between the co-existing civilizations.

When such contact occurs, we can assume some degree of niche overlap, and some degree of competition between systems. If the civilizations are highly disparate on their levels of technological achievement, then the more advanced civilization will either seek to destroy, incorporate or isolate the less advanced civilization. If the two civilizations are more or less on the same level of technological development, then competition for space resources, by definition few and far between, will eventually lead them to war. Advanced civilizations would have no choice but to become increasingly imperialistic in its colonization of space, or else risk dying out or being killed out by the competition.

If alien life forms develop intelligence, we cannot assume that their brains and intellectual capacities will be even remotely like our own. It will be assumed that alien life systems will develop some form of sophisticated cybernetic response and a capacity for processing patterned information in sophisticated ways. The anatomy and physiology of an intelligent alien life form would be very different from our own, except in as much as there might be convergence of form based upon similar function..

Any Alien Civilization that makes direct contact with us by means of some exotic system of transportation would de facto possess a technological superiority far and above that capable of humans. Whether they were benign or not, human civilization would almost certainly be at their mercy. Whether they were benign or not, the fact of contact with an alien culture would probably entail a major disruption of human systems, and possibly deculturation if the Aliens sought to colonize the earth or to exploit its resources in some way. Undoubtedly, if the exchange were open and friendly, we would experience an almost immediate technological gap and a surge forward in the development of exotic new technological systems.

Contact of alien civilizations may more likely occur indirectly by the reception of their broadcast signals, presumaly by radio waves but possibly by any form of EM radiation that can be modulated sufficiently for communication. Any such civilization that deliberately made contact with us in this way would probably already of "heard" us by monitoring our own EM transmissions. Either way, by communication or by direct transportation, Alien initiated contact would imply their previous awareness of our existence and their desire to say "hello" and pay us a visit.

Alternatively, first contact may be truly accidental in the sense that either or both sides are merely searching the night sky and happen upon a set of signals or other signs that given confirmation of the existence of alien intelligence. Any such contact would entail both civilizations being advanced enough technologically to be capable of both producing and receiving the kinds of signals that would be required for deep space communication. It is not even clear if we yet possess such technology.

A third alternative is that there is a third civilization within the compass of our explorations, one that is far more advanced than the other two, or own or another alien civilization. In this case, the third civilization would be capable of dominating the other two, and possibly transfering the sufficient tchnology to one or both that would eventually enable all three civilizations to get into the contact loop.

There is a fly in the ointment of the last scenario. Civilizations, as systems based phenomena, may be organized on different principles such tht the simple infusion of a certain type or level of technology might not be sufficient to enable that civilization to make the kind of technological leap it would require to catch up. It is equally or possibly more likely that such technological assymetries might in fact lead to a sytems breakdown of the less developed civilization, with ultimately that civilization collapsing in the face of the future.

This brings us to the "Zoo Hypothesis" which goes like this: Any civilization technologically advanced to know of our existence, to be capable of contacting us either directly or indirectly, may be aware of the destructive if unintended consequences of such contact, and may choose to deliberately avoid such contact, possibly with the idea of studying our civilization remotely or secretely.

Alien initiated contact, especially through direct transportation, would profoundly alter our scientific worldview and probably render a much more sophiscated map of the cosmos and understanding of the physical structure of reality--that is once we figured out how to communicate with them, or more likely, they with us. Presumably, if they could make direct contact with us, they may well have been able to make direct contact with many other life-forms in the galaxy, and that being so, would have a much more expanded base of biological knowledge--putting exobiology at the center rather than at the fringe of the living sciences.

We are likely to encounter life beyond our small planet in many different forms--we suspect most commonly something similar to bacteria or prokarya on earth, though we would expect even more something more akin to our archaea or extremophiles. Multicellular organisms may be based upon a cellular organization very different than those of the eukarya on earth. Will sunlight and some kind of photosynthesis be the primary source of energy, or might they be chemosynthesizers and thermophiles. Of all the forms of life we might encounter, by far the most interesting and the most provocative will be those forms that demonstrate advanced intelligence, and, especially signs of alien civilization that are comparable and analogous to human intelligence and civilization. For it is the intelligent creatures of foreign planets that will have developed alternative systems and knowledge that will mostly profoundly impact our own view of the universe and that will most likely result in radical revisions of our view of both the universe and our own place, no longer quite alone or quite dominant, in it.

Non-Human Civilizations and Alien Acculturation

We expect to eventually encounter in the exploration of space what can be safely referred to as alien or non-human civilization. By civilization we refer to that elaboration of the cultural, artificial patterning of life that is the result of adaptive intelligence applied to problem solving and to the challenge which all living forms face, that of adaptive and repoductive survival. Alien life must be evolving in some form, and must overcome the same or similar requirements and challenges that life faces upon earth. Our encounter with non-human civilizations is likely to prove both disturbing and destructive as well as enlightening and constructive. Surely there will be the transfusion and acculturative exchange of radical, powerful new technologies and knowledge. At the same time, there is bound to be radical symbolic dislocation and desymbolization of "home-made" systems of belief, value and understanding that leads to a breakdown and fractioning of coherent worldview.

Several basic postulates hold:

1. Unless our own technologies advance significantly and rapidly, the first alien civilizations we are likely to encounter will most likely come about as the result of their seeking us out, and not vice versa, and thus such alien civilizations are likely to be far more advanced technologically than we would be at the moment of contact. History teaches us that acculturative contact between technologically unequal societies is hardest and most disruptive on the weaker society.

2. First contact is most likely to be communicative exchange of information--hurdles to transportation being so great over so vast a distance that first-hand meeting and exchange with alien cultures remains a very remote possibility. The communication of information will most likely challenge our capacities for translation and understanding of the information being communicated.

3. Even if we do make direct physical contact with remote civilization, this is possible only if they have somehow overcome the challenge of faster-than-light travel, and they would be a civilization so far in advance of ourselves that we would be vastly inferior and primitive by comparison.

4. Even remote civilizations will share at least a basic understanding at least of the same physical context, especially the non-biological facets of such contexts. Shared also should be the command and knowledge of what can be called basic and fundamental technologies and information connected especially to a common physical context.

5. There would like be fundamental biological differences between organisms such that the ecosystems upon which these organisms depend for their survival and propagated into space would be fundamentally incompatible to one another. Intellectually these would be a fundamental point of curiosity as well as a fundamental obstacle to mutual understanding, shared coexistence and cohabitation of populations. Visiting an alien civilization, to make a long story short, would be intrinsically hazardous and fundamentally challenging of our available life-support systems.

6. Language, communication, symbolic and thought systems might be so fundamentally different that mutual understanding would be difficult, if not impossible to achieve. Decoding the message would prove hard enough, but harder still might be the contextualization and comprehension of the full meaning born by the messenger.

7. Whatever communication is achieved is likely to prove to be revolutionary and to have radical consequences that would be unpredictable in the structure of the long run, especially in terms of the behavioral responses of ourselves and our alien visitors.

8. It is to be hoped at least that any alien visitors, our own selves included, will have made a point of leaving any instinctive impulses for agression and destructive violence upon the home planet, and not to carry these kinds of negative patterns abroad into space far from home, but it can never be safely assumed to be so unless signals to the contrary are clearly and unambigously received.

9. It is to be expected that any kind of alien civilization will likely be based upon some kind of symbolic culture based upon the adaptation and application of alternative artificial systems.

10. It is important in first and all subsequent contact to define the metaethical basis and standards to the free and unconstrained and equal exchange of information, and to develop an interplanetary code of conduct that would include the rights and responsibilities of intelligent beings in relation to one another.

These ten precepts form a paradigm of incipient relationships with the contact of any kind of alien civilization in the universe. Unless fundamental limitations of physics can be overcome, it is most likely that the civilizations we first encounter should come from somewhere within our own galaxy, and probably from our own side and region of our Milky Way. Even so, they would still be so far away and remote as to make the opportunity and carrying capacity of contact very constrained and limited.

Wars of conquest, subjugation, competition, while possible, would be unlikely--the civilizations so far apart and so fundamentally different that there would be little gain or perceived basis for such conflict. Possibilities for hostile contact, though comparatively more remote, should not be ignored or completely disregarded. Having a protocol in place for defense and protection from hostile intention of alien visitors, though remote, might be helpful in safeguarding our own long-term interests on earth. On the other hand, it is likely that an alien civilization traveling to us would possess the superior technology needed to easily destroy or subjugate us at a moments notice, and we could not count on being able to mount an effective or adequate defense against such remote possibilities.

If transculturation is the transfer and transmission of culture and human trans-cultural civilization through contact, largely face-to-face between people, or trans-cultural agencies, then trans-civilization can be construed as the transfer of entire civilizational complexes between different civilizations, and in the context of space, potentially between different intelligent life forms, each possessing its own civilization.

Trans-civilization, the process of the transfer of technological knowhow and knowledge, as well as the artifacts and alternative design systems themselves, between different civilizations, would be one expectable outcome as the result of any contact with alien intelligence. Acculturation studies on earth demonstrate the complexity and variety of consequences that come from various forms of acculturative contact, ranging from the very destructive to the very constructive and everything, it seems, in between. It is clear that healthy societies tend to be very selective and careful about the foreign things and patterns they adopt or reject. They are able, it seems, to maintain a degree of control over this process, and not to allow the foreign cultural elements to basically swamp and overwhelm their traditional cultural institutions. Healthy, adaptive societies may undergo a revolutionary change, which we call "modernization" or "Westernization" in which they incorporate or assimilate foreign elements, and in a sense, make them their own. Often, it seems, such societies may undergo an imperialistic and fairly militaristic phase--a kind of adolescent coming off age before they develop more democratic and hopefully more pacifist leanings. If this kind of model applies to different human civilizations upon earth, there is no reason we should not hypothetically apply such lessons to our conjecture about the expectable possibilities and consequences of alien contact and the trans-civilization between alien forms of intelligent life.

Whatever we might expect or want to predict, one conclusion can be certain--the outcomes of such contact are likely to be very complex and become quickly very chaotic and inherently uncertain. Such contact is likely to induce increased entropy, possibly both ways between systems of civilization, whatever efforts of control are sought or established or not.

Contact with alien civilization is one of the least explored and most unknown areas of contemporary scientific discovery. The outcomes of such contact would be virtually, almost completely, unpredictable and we would not even know what to expect from any such contact. Until some substantive, conclusive evidence is found, any discussion or argument one way or another will remain almost entirely speculative. Our imaginations tend to run wild on the fringe, at the edges of our scientific evidence, and there is no clearer example of this than in the debate over extraterrestrial intelligence and the reasons people contrive either for or against.

What is clear, and what cannot be denied, is that the existence of alien civilization is possible, because we ourselves exist, and have the intelligence to know and imagine this. If there is an example of one intelligent civilization, there is the clear possibility of the independent existence of another. The real question is to estimate the likelihood or probability of such occurrence. The lack of evidence suggests low probability, but the scale of the problem, suggests high possibility. The fact that we have only been listening to relatively small areas of the universe for the past half-century, a relatively short span of time and small scale of technological capacity to observe non-random phenomena in an otherwise, Cosmologically entropic universe, suggests that the lack of evidence is only relative to our means, and not absolute to what may be there or not. In other words, relative lack of evidence alone does not disprove an hypothesis of possible presence. It proves nothing scientifically except our own incapacity to discover the evidence or counterevidence.

The Fermi paradox brings to headlong collision the problem of the anthropological relativity of our knowledge and the physical relativity of our universe. The anthropic principle that seems to be at work in how we think about the possibilities of extraterrestrial intelligence seems to work at odds with the Cosmological principle about how we understand the Universe in the large and in the long run. We suspect that in the largest scale inferrable of the physical universe, entropy will prevail. This entropy will be expressed in terms of a universal equiprobability of random events occurring, and this, by and large, is what we see even in our deepest telescopic observations. On the other hand, we counter this with an anthropic compulsion towards finding order and non-random organization in nature, and we seek, out there in the vast, black depths of space, some signs of intelligence that would tell us that we are not only absolutely isolated and alone in space, but we are not unique oddity we seem to think we are. Such a discover of even the slightest signs of alien intelligence would resolve a great deal of uncertainty about our universe, but at the same time it would foster a great amount of insecurity.

It is as it was almost poetically put:

"7. Man's intelligence is one expression of an inescapable tendency for interrelatedness in the biocosmos. There is of course, the counter-thrust of disintegration." (Peter Angeles, in James Christian, 1976: 168

In other words, the discovery of alien intelligence would create both fear and a sense of comfort, as it would both connect us with a larger sense of order in the cosmos, and it would take us for the first time out of our protective shell of isolation.

Last Updated: 08/25/09