The Future of the Mind (49 page)

Our first contact with an alien civilization will probably not begin with a flying saucer landing on the White House lawn. More likely, it will happen when some teenager, running a screen saver from the SETI@home project, announces that his or her PC has decoded signals from the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico. Or perhaps when the SETI project at Hat Creek detects a message that indicates intelligence.

Our first encounter will therefore be a one-way event. We will be able to eavesdrop on intelligent messages, but a return message may take decades or centuries to reach them.

The conversations that we hear on the radio may give us valuable insight into this alien civilization. But most of the message will likely be gossip, entertainment, music, etc., with little scientific content.

Then I asked Dr. Shostak the next key question: Will you keep it a secret once First Contact is made? After all, won’t it cause mass panic, religious hysteria, chaos, and spontaneous evacuations? I was a bit surprised when he said no. They would give all the data to the governments of the world and to the people.

The next questions are: What will they be like? How do they think?

To understand alien consciousness, perhaps it is instructive to analyze another consciousness that is quite alien to us, the consciousness of animals. We live with them, yet we are totally ignorant of what goes on in their minds.

Understanding animal consciousness, in turn, may help us understand alien consciousness.

ANIMAL CONSCIOUSNESS

Do animals think? And if so, what do they think about? This question has perplexed the greatest minds in history for thousands of years.
The Greek writers and historians Plutarch and Pliny both wrote about a famous question that remains unsolved even today. Over the centuries, many solutions have been given by the giants of philosophy.

A dog is traveling down a road, looking for its master, when it encounters a fork that branches in three directions. The dog first takes the left path, sniffs around, and then returns, knowing that his master has not taken that road. Then it takes the right path, sniffs, and realizes that his master has not taken this road either. But this time, the dog triumphantly takes the middle road, without sniffing.

What was going on in the dog’s mind? Some of the greatest philosophers have tackled this question, to no avail. The French philosopher and essayist Michel de Montaigne wrote that the dog obviously concluded that the only possible solution was to take the middle road, a conclusion showing that dogs are capable of abstract thought.

But St. Thomas Aquinas, arguing in the thirteenth century, said the opposite—that the appearance of abstract thought is not the same thing as genuine thinking.
We can be fooled by superficial appearances of intelligence, he claimed.

Centuries later, there was also a famous exchange between John Locke and George Berkeley about animal consciousness. “Beasts abstract not,” proclaimed Locke flatly. To which Bishop Berkeley responded, “
If the fact that brutes abstract not be made the distinguishing property of that sort of animal, I fear a great many of those that pass for man must be reckoned into their number.”

Philosophers down the ages have tried to analyze this question in the same manner: by imposing human consciousness on the dog. This is the
mistake of anthropomorphism, or assuming that animals think and behave like us. But perhaps the real solution might be to look at this question from the dog’s point of view, which could be quite alien.

In
Chapter 2
, I gave a definition of consciousness in which animals were part of a continuum of consciousness. Animals can differ from us in the parameters they use to create a model of the world. Dr. David Eagleman says that psychologists call this “umwelt,” or the reality perceived by other animals. He notes, “
In the blind and deaf world of the tick, the important signals are temperature and the odor of butyric acid. For the black ghost knifefish, it’s electrical fields. For the echo locating bat, air-compressed waves. Each organism inhabits its own umwelt, which it presumably assumes to be the entire objective reality ‘out there.’ ”

Consider the brain of a dog, which is constantly living in a swirl of odors, by which it hunts for food or locates a mate. From these smells, the dog then constructs a mental map of what exists in its surroundings. This map of smells is totally different from the one we get from our eyes and conveys an entirely different set of information. (Recall from
Chapter 1
that Dr. Penfield constructed a map of the cerebral cortex, showing the distorted self-image of the body. Now imagine a Penfield diagram of a dog’s brain. Most of it would be devoted to its nose, not its fingers. Animals would have a totally different Penfield diagram. Aliens in space would likely have an even stranger Penfield diagram.)

Unfortunately, we tend to assign human consciousness to animals, even though animals may have a totally different world outlook. For example, when a dog faithfully follows its master’s orders, we subconsciously assume that the dog is man’s best friend because he likes us and respects us. But since the dog is descended from
Canis lupus
(the gray wolf), which hunts in packs with a rigid pecking order, more than likely the dog sees you as some sort of alpha male, or the leader of the pack. You are, in some sense, the Top Dog. (This is probably one reason why puppies are much easier to train than older dogs; it is likely easier to imprint one’s presence on a puppy’s brain, while more mature dogs realize that humans are not part of their pack.)

Also, when a cat enters a new room and urinates all over the carpet, we assume that the cat is angry or nervous, and we try to find out the reason why the cat is upset. But perhaps the cat is simply marking its territory with the smell of its urine to ward off other cats. So the cat is not upset at all;
it’s simply warning other cats to stay out of the house, because the house belongs to it.

And if the cat purrs and rubs itself against your legs, we assume that it is grateful to you for taking care of it, that this is a sign of warmth and affection. More than likely, the cat is rubbing its hormone onto you to claim ownership of its possession (i.e., you), to ward off other cats. In the cat’s viewpoint, you are a servant of some sort, trained to give it food several times a day, and rubbing its scent on you warns other cats to stay away from this servant.

As the sixteenth-century philosopher Michel de Montaigne once wrote, “When I play with my cat, how do I know that she is not playing with me rather than I with her?”

And if the cat then stalks off to be alone, it is not necessarily a sign of anger or aloofness. The cat is descended from the wildcat, which is a solitary hunter, unlike the dog. There is no alpha male to slobber over, as in the case of the dog. The proliferation of various “animal whisperer” programs on TV is probably a sign of the problems we encounter when we force human consciousness and intentions onto animals.

A bat would also have a much different consciousness, which would be dominated by sounds. Almost blind, the bat requires constant feedback from tiny squeaks it makes, which allow it to locate insects, obstacles, and other bats via sonar. The Penfield map of its brain would be quite alien to us, with a huge portion devoted to its ears. Similarly, dolphins have a different consciousness than humans, which is also based on sonar. Because dolphins have a smaller frontal cortex, it was once thought that they were not so intelligent, but the dolphin compensates for this by having a larger brain mass. If you unfold the neocortex of the dolphin brain, it would cover six magazine pages, while if you unfold the neocortex of a human, it would measure only four magazine pages. Dolphins also have very well-developed parietal and temporal cortices to analyze sonar signals in the water and are one of the few animals that can recognize themselves in a mirror, probably because of this fact.

In addition, the dolphin brain is actually structured differently from humans’ because dolphin and human lineages diverged about ninety-five million years ago. Dolphins have no need for a nose, so their olfactory bulb disappears soon after birth. But thirty million years ago, their auditory cortex exploded in size because dolphins learned to use echolocation, or sonar,
to find food. Like bats’, their world must be one of whirling echoes and vibrations. Compared to humans, dolphins have an extra lobe in their limbic system, called the “paralimbic” region, which probably helps them forge strong social relations.

Meanwhile, dolphins also have a language that is intelligent. I once swam in a pool of dolphins for a TV special for the Science Channel. I put sonar sensors in the pool that could pick up the clicks and whistles used by dolphins to talk to one another. These signals were recorded and then analyzed by computer. There is a simple way to discern if there is an intelligence lurking among this random set of squeals and chirps. In the English language, for example, the letter e is the most commonly used letter of the alphabet. In fact, we can create a list of all the letters of the alphabet and how frequently they occur. No matter what book in English we analyze by computer, it will roughly obey the same list of commonly found letters of the alphabet.

Similarly, this computer program can be used to analyze the dolphins’ language. Sure enough, we find a similar pattern indicating intelligence. However, as we go to other mammals, the pattern begins to break down, and it finally collapses completely as we approach lower animals with small brain sizes. Then the signals become nearly random.

INTELLIGENT BEES?

To get a sense of what alien consciousness might be like, consider the strategies adopted by nature to reproduce life on Earth. There are two basic reproductive strategies nature has taken, with profound implications for evolution and consciousness.

The first, the strategy used by mammals, is to produce a small number of young offspring and then carefully nurse each one to maturity. This is a risky strategy, because only a few progeny are produced in each generation, so it assumes that nurturing will even out the odds. This means that every life is cherished and carefully nurtured for a length of time.

But there is another, much older strategy that is used by much of the plant and animal kingdom, including insects, reptiles, and most other life-forms on Earth. This involves creating a large number of eggs or seeds and then letting them fend for themselves. Without nurturing, most of the offspring never survive, so only a few hardy individuals will make it into the next generation. This means that the energy invested in each generation by
the parents is nil, and reproduction relies on the law of averages to propagate the species.

These two strategies produce startlingly different attitudes toward life and intelligence. The first strategy treasures each and every individual. Love, nurturing, affection, and attachment are at a premium in this group. This reproductive strategy can work only if the parents invest a considerable amount of precious energy to preserve their young. The second strategy, however, does not treasure the individual at all, but rather emphasizes the survival of the species or group as a whole. To them, individuality means nothing.

Furthermore, reproductive strategy has profound implications for the evolution of intelligence. When two ants meet each other, for example, they exchange a limited amount of information using chemical scents and gestures. Although the information shared by two ants is minimal, with this information they are capable of creating elaborate tunnels and chambers necessary to build an anthill. Similarly, although honeybees communicate with one another by performing a dance, they can collectively create complex honeycombs and locate distant flower beds. So their intelligence arises not so much from the individual, but from the holistic interaction of the entire colony and from their genes.

So consider an intelligent extraterrestrial civilization based on the second strategy, such as an intelligent race of honeybees. In this society, the worker bees that fly out each day in search of pollen are expendable. Worker bees do not reproduce at all, but instead live for one purpose, to serve the hive and the queen, for which they willingly sacrifice themselves. The bonds that link mammals together mean nothing to them.

Hypothetically, this might affect the development of their space program. Since we treasure the life of every astronaut, considerable resources are devoted to bringing them back alive. Much of the cost of space travel goes into life support so the astronauts can make the return voyage home and reenter the atmosphere. But for a civilization of intelligent honeybees, each worker’s life may not be worth that much, so their space program would cost considerably less. Their workers would not have to come back. Every voyage might be a one-way trip, and that would represent significant savings.

Now imagine if we were to encounter an alien from space that was actually similar to a honeybee worker. Normally, if we encounter a honeybee in the forest, chances are it will completely ignore us, unless we threaten
it or the hive. It’s as if we did not exist. Similarly, this worker would most likely not have the slightest interest in making contact with us or sharing its knowledge. It would go on with its primary mission and ignore us. Moreover, the values that we cherish would mean little to it.

Back in the 1970s, there were two medallions put aboard the
Pioneer 10
and
11
probes, containing crucial information about our world and society. The medallions exalted the diversity and richness of life on Earth. Scientists back then assumed that alien civilizations in space would be like us, curious and interested in making contact. But if such an alien worker bee were to find our medallion, chances are that it would mean nothing to it.

Furthermore, each worker need not be very intelligent. They need to be only intelligent enough to serve the interest of the hive. So if we were to send a message to a planet of intelligent bees, chances are that they would show little interest in sending a message back.