OK, so here’s a deep dive (best to read slowly).
The universe is in process of evenly distributing the matter unleashed at the Big Bang. When everything is in place, all the energy will have been used up and the so-called “heat death” will occur. Don’t wait up: the duration of the universe has so many zeroes that I can’t even fit the number in a blog posting of 3-4 pages.
Physics is about what happens until then. Biology is about a small subset of that activity called “life.” Psychology, philosophy, and epistemology are about how we and other “intelligent” life forms think about all this. By this accounting, psychology will, therefore, go extinct first, followed by biology, leaving it to physics to (so to speak) turn out the lights.
Entropy is the process by which everything (starting with the basic physical structure of matter, but also including ordinary stuff like desks and apples) is falling apart. It’s not just a matter of things rusting and wearing out, gravity is doing most of the work here (at least the part that we can actually see); other atomic forces will do the rest. Life is not only built on those structures, but embodies a way in which that matter evolves in response to external forces.
In many ways, there’s not much difference between things that are “alive” and those that are not. Planets accrete matter via gravity, animals accrete matter via eating. Falling off a cliff will smash a stone as well as a skull. Those globs of matter that are “alive” adapt to and alter their environment. There’s no particular “intent” here, those that do something useful and effective will live longer and reproduce more (Darwin). Those globs of matter that are “conscious” (a term to which I will return shortly), actively and “intentionally” try to adapt to and alter their environment.
You can’t say it’s the “job” of consciousness to fight entropy (since that implies an intent which has to come from some outside source (aka God)), but it is an important effect. Since we are aware of entropy and the heat death of the universe, we can see that everything we do has an anti-entropic effect (even stupid and destructive actions). This is the battle of life; one which, on our current understanding, we are destined to lose (these are the basic physical laws of thermodynamics). The ultimate futility (and its more immediate ramification in our own individual death) is the “human condition” and the source of most psychological stress we know.
However, getting beyond our individual lifespans and looking at our species (and, indeed, the genus of all “intelligent” species in the universe), it’s pretty clear that we’re nowhere near understanding what this “heat death” business is all about (much less if it’s actually going to happen). Millennia of metaphysics and religion have postulated frameworks, but none seems satisfactory as yet. If you date the beginning of “science” to Egyptians and Mesopotamians from 5000 years ago, or the Greeks of 2600 years ago or even Isaac Newton from 350 years ago, we have come far in a short time. Certainly, if we have another few millennia, we will look back on the modernity of the 20/21C as being as primitive in our understanding as we think of the Babylonians. So, there is hope (immediate crises notwithstanding) that we will figure out a lot more well before the Sun runs out of hydrogen in five billion years, much less the Universe checks out (apparently) permanently.
Of course, other than our (highly localized) experience, there’s no reason to think that soft, fleshy carbon-based physical containers are the exclusive mode of life. We are in the process, via computers, robots, and AI, of creating an alternate morphology. The universe is a big place and no one should be surprised if something (that seems to us) bizarre shows up.
Ditto for “consciousness” (a social construct if I ever saw one). Whether AIs achieve this exalted level will depend more on the definitional debate than their capabilities. We seem to be reluctant to contemplate the possibility, which is more about humans trying to preserve the last vestiges of their (our!) claims of uniqueness, power, and meaning than it is about whether some electronic/quantum device can pass a Turing test or whether some chimps or dolphins can learn some smattering of language. There would be no small irony if, after such a long time wondering if “there’s anyone out there,” it turned out that those “others “were first found here, on the planet, likely in some lab in Cambridge or Mountain View.
Consciousness is premised on the creation of an “I” that is distinct from everything else in the world. It may be an illusion, but it’s one that has got us to where we are today. As with Newtonian physics, it may not be entirely accurate (thanks to relativity and quantum uncertainty), but it certainly works well enough for all of us who rarely travel at a rate near the speed of light. So, too, with consciousness; our habit of envisioning the world as a thing apart may be a fact, as may the uniqueness of our independent creativity (the apparent mark of humanness). But, if not, we can still carry on: loving, writing, painting, enjoying ice cream. Actually, I kind of suspect that Descartes (or, to be more precise, his popular interpreters) got it wrong. Descartes likely meant that self-recognition of the act of thinking presupposed existence. Rather than cogito ergo sum (a phrase that Descartes never wrote), it may be better to say with Kierkegaard (the 19C Danish philosopher): I exist, therefore I think,” in other words, the ability to recognize self-existence is the first act of thinking.
The AIs of 2024 already seem to be at this point. So, we humans are perhaps not so special (in this regard, check out my 093022 posting “Centric”).
There’s an amusing SciFi series called the “Boboverse” in which friendly, moral AIs in spaceships roam the galaxy indefinitely, long after humans are extinct. Perhaps they will figure out this “heat death” thing. But, like I said: “Don’t wait up.”
(btw, thanks to Douglas Adams (whose Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is 45 years old) for the title)
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