The Speculist

Enlightening the Universe

Ray Kurzweil, in an interview in What is Enlightenment? magazine, spins a scenario by which intelligence may re-shape the universe itself:

In my mind, we will ultimately saturate all of the matter and energy in our area of the universe with our intelligence, and I suppose you could say that's an end in itself. All of this dumb matter and energy around us will wake up and become sublimely intelligent. Then it will spread out to the whole universe at the fastest speed information can flow. And one could make an argument that it's not going to take an infinitely long time because there may be other ways to get to other parts of the universe through shortcuts like wormholes, which physics has postulated. Eventually the whole universe will, essentially, wake up.

But isn't it interesting that you never see cosmologists give any role to intelligence in the future destiny of the universe? Rather, they talk a lot about whether or not the universe will contract back to a big crunch or expand indefinitely, as if these sorts of mindless forces of physics are just going to endlessly grind on like a big dumb machine.

Nowhere do they consider, "Now, wait a second, intelligence could spread through the universe and actually make an intelligent decision about what the destiny of the universe is, and even though the gravitational force and other forces might cause the universe to spin apart, the intelligent civilization infusing the whole universe will decide, 'No, we're not going to do that. We're going to do something different.'"

Such an evolutionary development will represent a confirmation or even vindication of sorts for pantheists. Those who have always believed that the physical universe is host to a divine intelligence will, in a sense, be proved right.

The intelligence will be there — in every pebble on the beach, in the birds, in the trees, in the clouds, in every star in a moonless sky — but it won't exactly be divine. It will be us.