Beyond accomplishing the permanence that life “wants,” humankind and its descendants may ultimately be able to benefit the entire universe. As a result of human efforts in the fields of AI, robotics, and nanotechnology humans have started to build machines that result in inanimate matter being converted into matter that senses, processes information, and communicates.
Far in the future some of the entities that will eventually descend from humans will have the ability to do this on an exponentially accelerating scale. We can imagine how just two units with the ability to convert matter in this way, and the capacity to self-replicate could be deployed within our solar system. Those units would be able to produce numerous copies of themselves and those copies would in turn do the same.
In just thirty such exponential iterations two units can multiply into 1,073,741,824 (one billion, seventy-three million, seven hundred forty-one thousand, eight hundred and twenty-four.) Given sufficient time this process can result in an increasingly large portion of the universe gaining intelligence until ultimately, a substantial portion of the reachable universe would be part of a vast intelligent network capable of sensing, thinking and communicating at many orders of magnitude beyond the capacity of humans. In his essay The Intelligent Universe, American inventor Ray Kurzweil presents this very scenario .
Pioneering German AI scientist Juergen Schmidhuber has written:
AIs will colonize and transform the entire cosmos, and they will make it intelligent.
Perhaps it could be advantageous for a universe to be made intelligent or intelligized. An intelligized universe may have an array of options over its destiny which a completely inanimate universe would not. Perhaps an intelligized universe can resist the ultimate oblivion that many physicists believe will be our universe’s fate.
If the multiverse theory about our universe being but one within a multiverse of other universes is correct, perhaps an intelligized universe would be able to interact in some way with other intelligized universes. Perhaps once sufficiently intelligized, a universe may experience, in a single burst, a major acceleration of awareness or an intelligence combustion point as if it were suddenly awoken to notice that it is not alone. Universes that do this may find themselves in a special class of universes that communicate, perhaps, like joining a zoom call in progress.
Regardless of whether the intelligizing of the universe is something that our universe wants, or can benefit from, humans are of paramount importance for the preservation and permanence of life. If we accept that this is the task with which we are charged, which we can think of as our “prime directive,” to borrow a term from the Star Trek series, it is essential that we think and behave in ways consistent with this goal.
Irrespective of whether we regard our unique ability and responsibility to assure the ultimate survival of life and intelligence as a response to what life wants and needs from us, or as an endeavor that is self-determined and subjective, our challenge is the same.
Like faith-based and supernatural oriented narratives which call for followers to conduct themselves in ways consistent with the values they teach, a naturalistic approach to spirituality requires that we each promote ideas and behaviors which help us become a more just, egalitarian, kind and environmentally stable society. Highly conducive to the realization of these goals are the key features of a Naturalistic Humanist practice — metawareness, proanthropy, and adopting an experimental mindset.