More on Alien Brains

In my last piece I indicated some ways of prying consciousness loose from the highly specified human brain in order to make its occurrence more likely among aliens who are, so I assume at least, highly unlikely to have them or any other kind of ‘brain’ (i.e reptilian or avian). It might be objected that this is a large assumption and no doubt it is.  The universe is enormous and there are so many planets there may, by mere happenstance, be dogs or very dog like animals circling another star. If there are dogs there may well be humanoids with spines and nervous systems and brains and all the paraphernalia that support what we know of as consciousness. Indeed, a younger, cleverer person with a foot in the astrobiology game has suggested to me that comets and asteroids may fly through the galaxy seeding organic material on planets and that from this common material there may be some basic properties on which all evolutionary pathways in the cosmos converge. I can say nothing as to the likeliness or unlikeliness of this. Can the sheer quantity of habitable planets overwhelm the power of contingency? Here it seems to me we are staring at a blank page. How many events in the history of the brain’s evolution are contingencies that need not have happened? How many of these contingencies depend on highly specified conditions on our planet that could only be repeated elsewhere in defiance of astronomical odds? The problem is even worse if we think of aliens who have communication technology compatible with ours for the development of HUMAN techne depends not only on natural events but cultural ones involving human agency. For instance one major stimulus for the development of technology is warfare and we have no idea if aliens elsewhere can even conceive of that strange activity. Another more specific one was the colonizing activity of medieval Cistercian monks who chafed at the collective life of Benedictine abbeys. By what mysterious convergence would aliens have the Benedictine rule to chafe at? Of course they may have something analogous to these kinds of cultural stimuli but will merely analogous factors allows technological convergence close enough for significant interface? We can’t decipher Inca communication technology and they are the same species as us!

I put question marks after these statements because I literally have no answers nor do I even know where to begin looking for them. This is why I used the chapter of Butler’s Analogy the way I did, not to prove or disprove any particular theory but to think of a way we might even the odds of certain things being true or false. I used Butler because he was, in my view, a pioneer in this kind of thinking. I must emphasize too that solving the problem of intelligent aliens being unlikely does not address the second, even bigger, problem which is the near impossibility of communicating usefully with them: any message they get from us or we from them may be thousands of years old and the senders long dead! My aim then was to shake the assumption that consciousness is SO closely tied to the brain that brains are the only vehicles that can carry it.

To many people this will seem counter-intuitive for, as has been known since ancient times, the mind is highly sensitive to the state of the body. There have been a number of theories as to why this is so including the theory that the mind is a physical object like any other or, if it is not, abjectly dependent on the body such that it simply dissolves without it. If we are to assess the evidence fairly we would have to say that where its operations are concerned, particularly its acts of visualizing and imagining as well as its acts of discursive reasoning (which involve verbalizing chains of argument) the mind needs a physical apparatus to operate. Of course Butler’s point still stands: the absence of a particular operation does not mean there is no entity with the capacity to operate given the right equipment and the right conditions. Still, imagining and reasoning and judging are operations that can be damaged or inhibited by physical conditions like drunkenness or senility so that the mind seems to need a body in the right condition to perform these operations (and it may be the mind IS the body in this appropriate condition). Of course there is one property that is far more difficult to reduce to material necessity and that is reflexive consciousness itself. Minds scan themselves as minds but brains do not scan themselves as brains else neurology would proceed by introspection. This is why, for instance, Ancient philosophers like Aristotle held that some mental energies can be actualized independent of the body i.e. the higher transcendental ones like self-awareness or the intuition of universals.    

It may be then that these higher functions do not need a human brain specifically and can use other material media at least or (as with several Star Trek races!) use nothing at all. While in the human body the mind may be clogged with images and rendered ineffective by its interaction with our physical organism but other kinds of bodies might be far superior as an instrument for the expression and operation of mind! Another philosopher, Henry More, speculated extensively about this, imagining bodies of air or ether as a vehicle for a higher, more gratifying conscious life. The odd thing is, given how quaint and arcane More’s speculations now seem, air and ether and energy and other fluid ‘fields’ are exactly what appear in sci-fi when writers are tired of the same old humanoids! All of this means that intelligent aliens may be possible and even numerous though if my intuition about this is correct they will, alas, be exponentially more difficult to communicate with. Of course this leaves the vexing question of where ‘pure’ consciousness, if it exists, comes from. There are some interesting and surprising answers to this problem which I may treat some other time though they involve a radical reconceptualization of what we have come to call ‘matter’ (as the external presentation of one mind in the experience of another).