# sentient ocean or ?? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [September 22, 2005, 4:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sentient-ocean-or/322837 "2005-09-22T04:08:53Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Epimetheus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/c4cdca/32.png) [@Epimetheus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Epimetheus)\ **Post date:** [September 22, 2005, 3:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sentient-ocean-or/322837/21 "2005-09-22T15:39:28Z")
You could always consider a meta-intelligence that arose from a conglomerate of other intelligent species. Consider earth and humans. Humans are each thinking entities, and as a “whole” we know more than any individual. Extrapolate that into each human representing a neuron in a non-corporal intelligence. Now, you could go further and imagine something not related to earth. Say a race of intelligent, but non-moblie trees that communicate through chemical signals and completely dominate the planet. Each tree may be nothing spectacular compared to humans, but the meta-intelligence could rival even an exceptional human. You could do an ocean, with things mentioned above, with coral growths, plankton type creatures (a bit tricker since they move a lot) or a race of intelligent dolphins or something that cannot use tools, but master in language and mathmatics. Each dolphin is merely a subunit in the greater “brain” of the meta-intelligence. I vaguely remembering reading a sci-fi book in which a race of intelligent sea algea or something had a meta-intelligence in this fashion. Fredrick Pohl or Steven Baxter or something. ---
**Author:** ![II\_Gyan\_II](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/bbe5ce/32.png) [@II\_Gyan\_II](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/II_Gyan_II)\ **Post date:** [September 22, 2005, 10:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sentient-ocean-or/322837/22 "2005-09-22T22:47:50Z")
> [@Blake](#): > > we both agree that a self-aware entity is intelligent whether it be teleleogical, speleological, teleostic or otherwise. No, we don’t. > [@](#): > > ‘How are they capable’ wasn’t much of a question. It is. It’s the million-dollar question. > [@](#): > > Are you really suggesting that the animal brain would produce memories even if the chemical bonds were all ruptured or were radically reorganised? I’m suggesting we don’t know the basis for memory, so ‘chemical bonds’ is just a stopgap verbiage, and not really an answer. > [@](#): > > Consciousness itself can’t be readily defined or even proven to even exist, as I’m sure you are well aware. Self-consciousness doesn’t need to be proven to exist. It is inherently known. The problem of Other Minds is indeed an epistemological problem, else this OP wouldn’t need to have been posed. > [@](#): > > To suggest that someone present a biochemical explanation of how something that can’t be established to exist operates to produce another effects that is just as dubious in it’s reality is a bit disingenuous isn’t it? Then, I suppose neuroscientists better stop working on the Hard Problem. ---
**Author:** ![AndrewL](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/3d9bf3/32.png) [@AndrewL](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AndrewL)\ **Post date:** [September 22, 2005, 11:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sentient-ocean-or/322837/23 "2005-09-22T23:06:16Z")
It seems to me that such an organism would make most sense as somethign that had been deliberatly created, perhaps through genetic engineering by some preexisting technological species. That bypasses the question of how such a thing could arise, leaving us merely with the question of how it works and what keeps it functioning. It seems to me that rather than trying to make the ocean itself sentient somehow, you’d have to engineer a creature that lives in the ocean to be capable of networking with others of its type somehow. You could imagine a sea full of billions of simple filter-feeding, floating creatures, each capable of communicating with others by bioluminescense, chemical signalling, or something similar. The individual organisms might even be physically connected, with the ocean-mind actually made up of a coral-like carpet covering the floor of the ocean. It woudn’t be a fast thinker. Thoughts would take days or weeks to travel across the brain. Storms or other natural disasters would cause brain damage. The individual creatures might reproduce to fill voids, but it would be hard for the global mind to hold onto memories long-term when parts of its structure keep getting wiped out. ---
**Author:** ![Blake](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/a9a28c/32.png) [@Blake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Blake)\ **Post date:** [September 22, 2005, 11:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sentient-ocean-or/322837/24 "2005-09-22T23:20:47Z")
I think you’ve made your position and tactics infinitelyclear Gyan. Non sequiturs, refusal to answer crucial questions when put to you outright, bi-syllabic questions and answers. Enough said. You have no factual questions you actually want answers to. ---
**Author:** ![jawdirk](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/df705f/32.png) [@jawdirk](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jawdirk)\ **Post date:** [September 22, 2005, 11:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sentient-ocean-or/322837/25 "2005-09-22T23:22:13Z")
This is clearly IMHO (or by the looks of it GD) territory. So I’ll offer this: The fact is that an ocean is plenty capable of having small-scale and large-scale complexity that rivals that of the human brain. It is easily capable of memory – it is free to carve the entire sea bed, and transmit the smallest detail of the sea bed to the wave patterns of the whole. Standing waves are also possible. Could not subtle changes in a large-scale standing wave constitute memory? That said, the consciousness of an ocean will never be anything like a human consciousness. If it could have motivations at all, they would not be comprehensible or effable to us. With no lifespan, offspring, nor cause for improvement in any measure of fitness, there is no reason for the ocean as a whole to evolve beyond its original state. Not so for the wave patterns within it. I think it more likely that the ocean could host an alternative medium for intelligent life in the form of waves. And perhaps the lifeforms that populate the ocean (or even the land) are just robots constructed by the intelligent waveforms that populate the ocean. Perhaps we are completely within their control, programmed to carve ports, mine the surface, and dump rare chemicals into the ocean depths. There is no way to answer this question. The boundary between the water and the life forms swimming in it is equally complex from either side. ---
**Author:** ![II\_Gyan\_II](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/bbe5ce/32.png) [@II\_Gyan\_II](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/II_Gyan_II)\ **Post date:** [September 22, 2005, 11:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sentient-ocean-or/322837/26 "2005-09-22T23:34:56Z")
> [@Blake](#): > > Non sequiturs, refusal to answer crucial questions when put to you outright, bi-syllabic questions and answers. List these crucial questions and I’ll answer them. ---
**Author:** ![RaftPeople](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/6f9a4e/32.png) [@RaftPeople](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RaftPeople)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2005, 5:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sentient-ocean-or/322837/27 "2005-09-23T05:49:57Z")
> [@II Gyan II](#): > > Clarification: By memory, I refer to conscious recall. Another use of memory is as a term given to behaviour characterized by similar response to similar inputs. That’s not what I mean. When your pre-requisite for memory is “conscious recall”, you are either trivializing the word “conscious” or you are expanding “memory” well beyond any standard definition. Here’s a definition from biology: Persistent modification of behavior resulting from an animal’s experience. No requirement for consciousness. ---
**Author:** ![RaftPeople](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/6f9a4e/32.png) [@RaftPeople](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RaftPeople)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2005, 6:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sentient-ocean-or/322837/28 "2005-09-23T06:44:49Z")
> [@Blake](#): > > You’re missing a big chunk, namely organisation. Simply having ‘free flow’ in a complex system will never give you intelligence. After all free flow is just another term for entropy which is just another term for chaos. You’re just describing a system with a high propensity for disorganisation. > > Intelligence as we understand it requires organisation. It requires at the very least an ability to capture, store and later reteive analogues of experience, what we call memories. An ocean can be as chaotic as you like but there’s nothing in complexity that makes storage mechanisms inevitable. > > What makes complexity likely, though not inevitable, is pre-existing complexity. So you need to start small with small units of memeory. That’s what DNA essentially is, it’s a way of storing and sorting molecules that responded in specific ways to the environement. But it’s a pretty inefficient form of memory because inappropriate ‘responses’ are destroyed without the information being passed on to any benefit. Later forms of memory allowed the inapproriate responses to be filed as inapproriate and thus leanring evolved. Ulitmately some systems became capable of learning about themselves and then we had intelligence. > > But an ocean has no small scale complexity unless you conclude that life is the small scale complexity, in which case the ocean already has become intelligent. But in the sense I think you mean intelligence isn’t even probably much less inevitable. The ocean or a magma pool has no means of storing responses. As a result it can’t learn by rejecting poor decisions. It may be complex and chaotic but there is no mechanism to say whether one state is preferable to another: there’s no memory. > > The ocean today might be exactly as it was 10, 000 years ago down to the position of the last molecule, but what would allow anyone to say whether that was desirable or undesirable, and if it was undesirable then how could the ocean make such an event less likely to re-occur? That’s the the basic problem. Without stable complexity/organistation there can be no memory, and with no memory there can be no intelligence because all states will be equally likely to re-occur and any stimulus is likely to produce any state. > > For your idea to have any legs you need some form of organisation, something that is stable yet complex that can act to store the ‘correct’ responses and skew futue actions away form random and towards approriate direction. You need to invent something that makes once specific configuration of waves or chloride ions much more likely than any other appraently identical configuration. Blake, good post. I want to expand on it a little. **Memory Requires Ability to Initiate Action** There must be the capability to initiate action, otherwise there is no memory because there can be no association of action to result (as you said, all states are equally likely to recur otherwise). **Without Goals, There Is No Memory** Memory is a storage of relationships between action (outputs) and stimulus (inputs). The only reason to modify future actions due to stimulus, is if the stimulus moved one closer to a goal, further from a goal or was neutral. If there is no goal, then actions will be random or possibly the same action over and over. **What About Creatures So Unintelligent There Can Be No Goal?** The goal is whatever pre-programmed behavior exists, even if that means there are no brain cells and the actions are purely based on chemical responses to environment. The creatures that would naturally survive for any length of time would be those that took actions that kept them alive, which means their goal is the “survival” goal. **mrrealtime** , I think your challenge is to figure out in what way is the ocean alive, how is it consuming energy, and how can it influence it’s environment, and how does it sense it’s environment. Also, others have made good points about the ocean being 1 creature, no offspring, no population, no competition, etc. which makes it difficult to think memory will arise for no gain, that could be a tough problem to get around. ---
**Author:** ![II\_Gyan\_II](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/bbe5ce/32.png) [@II\_Gyan\_II](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/II_Gyan_II)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2005, 6:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sentient-ocean-or/322837/29 "2005-09-23T06:52:16Z")
> [@RaftPeople](#): > > When your pre-requisite for memory is “conscious recall”, you are either trivializing the word “conscious” or you are expanding “memory” well beyond any standard definition. Without conscious recall, we wouldn’t be aware of memory. How would you know a modification was “persistent”? The point is, memory is instrinsically a concept relating to consciousness. Attributed memory (of the kind whose definition you quoted) is just that: an attribution. BTW, on rereading your reply, I think you might have misunderstood my point. I wasn’t suggesting that a prokaryote has to be conscious in order to exhibit behaviour that shows signs of ‘memory’. ---
**Author:** ![DocCathode](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/doccathode/32/18773_2.png) [@DocCathode](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DocCathode)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2005, 1:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sentient-ocean-or/322837/30 "2005-09-23T13:43:18Z")
The Black Gondolier by Fritz Leiber Minor Spoiler- One of the characters in this story is convinced that earth’s oil deposits are all part of a single inteligent being which is manipulating us to get what it wants. > [@Dalloway](#): > > Surely in a great age-old oil pool with all its complex hydrocarbons- the paraffin series, the asphalt series, and many others- and with its subtle gradients of heat, viscosity, and electric charge, and with all its multiform microscopic vibrations, echoing and re-echoing endlessly from its lightless walls, there can be the chemical and physical equivalent of nerves and brain-cells; and if of brain-cells, then of thought. Barlowe’s Guide To Extraterrestrials has entries on Solaris and a few other world organisms. ---
**Author:** ![RaftPeople](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/6f9a4e/32.png) [@RaftPeople](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RaftPeople)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2005, 7:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sentient-ocean-or/322837/31 "2005-09-23T19:29:19Z")
> [@II Gyan II](#): > > Without conscious recall, we wouldn’t be aware of memory. How would you know a modification was “persistent”? The point is, memory is instrinsically a concept relating to consciousness. Attributed memory (of the kind whose definition you quoted) is just that: an attribution. > > BTW, on rereading your reply, I think you might have misunderstood my point. I wasn’t suggesting that a prokaryote has to be conscious in order to exhibit behaviour that shows signs of ‘memory’. Clearly we are splitting hairs on definition here, but I’ll dive in anyway. Is there an accepted definition in some field of science that matches your definition of memory? When I Google “attributed memory” I get 208 total hits and all of the ones I read were using “attributed” as a verb in a sentence, not in the way you have used it. Regardless of whether that term has ever been defined by someone or not, your position means the definition of memory depends on the definition of conscious, which is a far more difficult concept to define than memory in the first place. ---
**Author:** ![RaftPeople](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/6f9a4e/32.png) [@RaftPeople](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RaftPeople)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2005, 7:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sentient-ocean-or/322837/32 "2005-09-23T19:37:32Z")
> [@II Gyan II](#): > > Without conscious recall, we wouldn’t be aware of memory. How would you know a modification was “persistent”? Just thought of a couple other things. Why do we need to be aware of memory? Why do we need to know a modification was persistent? As a matter of fact, your brain is constantly making memories persistent and you are not aware of this fact. When you practice a golf swing (or whatever) are you aware of all of the detailed muscle control memories that are being stored? I would argue absolutely not. Are you aware of what “scenes” during the day are being stored permanently in your brain? ---
**Author:** ![II\_Gyan\_II](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/bbe5ce/32.png) [@II\_Gyan\_II](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/II_Gyan_II)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2005, 10:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sentient-ocean-or/322837/33 "2005-09-23T22:29:21Z")
> [@RaftPeople](#): > > As a matter of fact, your brain is constantly making memories persistent and you are not aware of this fact. How are you aware of this fact? The term ‘attributed memory’ is indeed my own term. It’s not a fancy one. It simply means thing that act in a way as if they ‘remembered’. ---
**Author:** ![RaftPeople](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/6f9a4e/32.png) [@RaftPeople](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RaftPeople)\ **Post date:** [September 24, 2005, 8:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sentient-ocean-or/322837/34 "2005-09-24T08:16:00Z")
> [@II Gyan II](#): > > How are you aware of this fact? Multiple ways. 1. I know I am unable to sense the strengthening, lessening or creation of connections within my brain, which is they way information is stored within the brain, therefore I can conclude I am unable to determine what I am storing in memory at any given time. (Caveat: through internal feedback and focus, I can determine some small subset fo things being committed to memory). 2. From practical experience, it is not always clear which things I have stored in my brain and which things I have not. For example, when practicing my golf swing, I am unaware of which pieces of the swing are committed to memory. Only by trying to swing the club later can I somewhat determine which aspects of the swing I have committed to memory. This logic can be applied to just about any physical or mental task. ---
**Author:** ![II\_Gyan\_II](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/bbe5ce/32.png) [@II\_Gyan\_II](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/II_Gyan_II)\ **Post date:** [September 24, 2005, 8:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sentient-ocean-or/322837/35 "2005-09-24T08:37:53Z")
> [@RaftPeople](#): > > Multiple ways. > > 1. I know I am unable to sense the strengthening, lessening or creation of connections within my brain You mean you remember the earlier state and do a compare? ---
**Author:** ![Jinx](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/c6cbf5/32.png) [@Jinx](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jinx)\ **Post date:** [September 24, 2005, 1:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sentient-ocean-or/322837/36 "2005-09-24T13:51:34Z")
> [@mrrealtime](#): > > Im considering a topic for a book, but it kind of depends on a certain assumption, that any large complex entity that has some kind of freeflow of its material, where the material is complex in and of itself, may be capable of some form of memory, or self awareness, like the ocean, or perhaps even the mantle under the earths crust…kind of like a giant brain, or a bunch of brains. Is this possible? Is the ocean or any other large liquid body that free flows capable of being self aware or at least some form of thought…or am I missing a big chunk of what else is required for this? I must be dumber than dirt, but what are you asking? The best I can figure is your topic has been done in the 1950’s, IIRC. It was called “The Blob”. - Jinx ---
**Author:** ![DocCathode](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/doccathode/32/18773_2.png) [@DocCathode](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DocCathode)\ **Post date:** [September 24, 2005, 2:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sentient-ocean-or/322837/37 "2005-09-24T14:31:58Z")
**Jinx** I think that the OP is thinking on a much larger scale. The Blob was a kind of giant amoeba. Solaris (which I still haven’t gotten around to reading despite loving Memoirs Found In A Bathtub and Cyberiad) was an ocean big enough to cover an entire planet. I also don’t think that **MrRealtime** had a monster story in mind. From what I know, the whole point of Solaris was how truly alien the being was. It would occasionally extrude structures like cathedrals, which seemed to be physical representations of mathematical equations. In The Black Gondolier, Dalloway can’t just get some guns and dynamite and kill the monster, because he believes all the oil on earth to be part of a single being. Ursula K LeGuinn has worldcreature in one of her works (I can’t give the title since that discovery is one of the big surprises). The human explorers wonder what its life is like -it knows the whole world all the time, it doesn’t need to go anywhere or do anything, it has always been alone knowing of nothing that exists outside itself. Imagine that somehow, the oceans of earth became a single living organism with all the flora and fauna in them serving as cells, enzymes etc of a single body. What would it want? What would it do? Would it nurture us as children or pets? Would it see us as invaders or as an infection and destroy us? Would it see us as of no importance and mock us that it wasin the Marianna trench all day, every day and we had only been there once for twenty minutes? ---
**Author:** ![mrrealtime](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/e8c25b/32.png) [@mrrealtime](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mrrealtime)\ **Post date:** [September 25, 2005, 7:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sentient-ocean-or/322837/38 "2005-09-25T19:03:29Z")
Actually, Im more interested in the fluid magma. I recently read about the “D2? Layer” where the mantle and the core meet, there are supposedly some extremely complex chemical reactions occurring. Agreed that the pace of thought would be extremely slow, however where the density is quite a bit higher in the core/Magma than in the ocean, perhaps information could travel much faster, coupled with the extremely high temperatures involved to increase speed. One could further extrapolate this kind of sentience to perhaps a star … and perhaps all the stars are communicating with each other and their “children” or the cores of large enough planets to maintain similar albeit less extreme temperature and density. Compared to the mantle or earths liquid core, we are but puffs of smoke in terms of density. ---
**Author:** ![ataraxy22](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ataraxy22/32/307_2.png) [@ataraxy22](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ataraxy22)\ **Post date:** [September 25, 2005, 10:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sentient-ocean-or/322837/39 "2005-09-25T22:48:36Z")
This thread seems to be skirting some of the definitions of a [Jupiter Brain](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jupiter_Brain) . ---
**Author:** ![RaftPeople](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/6f9a4e/32.png) [@RaftPeople](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RaftPeople)\ **Post date:** [September 26, 2005, 4:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sentient-ocean-or/322837/40 "2005-09-26T04:39:31Z")
> [@II Gyan II](#): > > You mean you remember the earlier state and do a compare? No. I mean that there is no sensation I am aware of that indicates to me which connections have been altered in my brain. In addition, just knowing which connections have been modified would not allow me to determine what has been memorized because I would then have to run that through a separate process to interpret the results. Now we humans do this to some degree because sometimes we can tell to what degree we are remembering something, but my point is that there is much (possibly most) activity going on in our brain that we are not monitoring. Either way, I believe where you are headed with these questions is back to your statement that consciousness is required to have memory. But that is only if we use your definition of memory, which I don’t. I think a more physical definition is perfectly fine, along the lines of the one I posted earlier. Furthermore, I personally think that consciousness is merely a side-effect of the ability of our brain to include itself in it’s internal model of the environment, nothing more. Which means a dog is conscious also and so is a worm, just to a less advanced degree than ourselves. But back to the OP, I listed some items I think are pre-requisites for memory, what are your thoughts on those? [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sentient-ocean-or/322837.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sentient-ocean-or/322837.md?page=3)