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.
I’m suggesting we don’t know the basis for memory, so ‘chemical bonds’ is just a stopgap verbiage, and not really an answer.
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.
Then, I suppose neuroscientists better stop working on the Hard Problem.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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’.
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.
Barlowe’s Guide To Extraterrestrials has entries on Solaris and a few other world organisms.
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.
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?
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).
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.
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
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?
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.
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?