Search for Unconventional Terrestrial Intelligence

Description

Mike Levin:

"SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, is one of those scientific endeavors that not only would have enormous impacts if it were to succeed, but is fascinating in itself, regardless of whether anything is found. Embarking on the search for alien life forces us to ask fundamental questions in science and philosophy. What exactly are we looking for – how do we know if we’ve found it? What is intelligence, defined broadly enough that even truly alien forms would be found? Are we capable of understanding something so different from ourselves? Does our wildest science fiction fail to prepare us for the breadth of possible minds, or conversely, would we be shocked to find that all intelligences have something familiar in common? Would intelligence automatically mean life, or could there be intelligent entities that we would not call alive? Would the latter have to have been engineered by natural beings, and does their origin story matter for their moral status?

While we don’t know when we might confront extra-terrestrial intelligence, these questions are starkly posed by the emerging field of Diverse Intelligence – an interdisciplinary effort to develop frameworks with which to recognize, build, and ethically relate to, intelligences in novel embodiments. This includes swarms, software AIs, embodied autonomous robotics, basal cognition of non-brainy life forms (from cells to organs), synthetic biological life forms, and all manner of chimeras, hybrids, hybrots, and other fusions of evolved and engineered components. We are engaged in SUTI – the Search for Unconventional Terrestrial Intelligence, because, right here on Earth, there are already “aliens” among us that stretch and often break familiar ways of thinking about Self and Other."

(https://thoughtforms.life/suti-the-search-for-unconventional-terrestrial-intelligence/)