The Intelligent Universe

James Gardner is part of a new breed of complexity theorists: an armchair philosopher that goes beyond the epistemological, who posits broad, celebratory theories about the nature of the future of the universe. His first book, Biocosm, proposed the "Selfish Biocosm" hypothesis, which suggests that intelligence doesn't emerge in a series of Darwinian accidents, but is hard-wired into the cycle of cosmic creation; it's a really beautiful idea, putting us right at the center of a living, breathing, intelligent universe, which, incidentally, is the title of his newest book.

Dude also rolled with J.P. Sartre in 1967, edited the Yale Law Journal, counts Ray Kurzweil among his colleagues, and was a six-year Oregon State Senator. I also went to elementary school with his son.

Thanks to the good people over at the Willamette Week, I had the opportunity to pursue some really metaphysical, extended e-mail conversations with Jim Gardner, the most interesting of which is featured below. Get deep with me: it's worth it.

Universe: I'm interested in the process of explaining complex scientific ideas to a lay audience. There are moments of great elegance in your book, in terms of how compactly you manage to lay out huge ideas. Is this something you find difficult -- or, as a self-avowed "scientific generalist," does this sort of synthesis come naturally?

Gardner: The composition of both Biocosm and The Intelligent Universe was excruciatingly difficult for me. The two books presented the most daunting set of intellectual challenges I have ever confronted, both in terms of coming to grips with the implications of some very unusual ideas and then communicating those ideas and implications to a lay audience. That being said, there were extraordinary âAha!â moments I experienced throughout the process of writing both books that were truly exhilaratingâmoments that more than compensated for all the pain.

Universe: You often cite Ray Kurzweil's ideas of our transhuman or post-biological future. As a writer, what do you think the role of writing -- or more generally, of culture -- will be in a post-biological society? Does the singularity necessarily imply an end to creativity and the arts as we know them, or simply a huge shift?

Gardner: I believe that culture and art will continue to flourish in a post-biological future. That future will build on what has gone before. Indeed, it will represent a fusion of the human and the transhuman. (As you saw in the last part of my book, I disagree with the pessimistic views of Arthur C. Clarke in Childhoodâs End.) Because it will vastly expand the realm of intellectual possibilities and the sheer size of available cultural space, the onset of the Singularity should facilitate an immense burst of creativity and give birth to new artistic genres that we can only dimly foresee. Some people believe, for instance, that we are on the verge of a Golden Age of truly artistic video games and that the Shakespeare of this genre may already have been born. I would add that that video-game Shakespeare need not necessarily be a traditional, unaugmented human being.

Universe: Will the Internet survive the technological singularity?

Gardner: Oh yes. Indeed, I believe we are just at the beginning of the transformation of the Internet into a true global nervous system. The increasing pervasiveness of Internet-enabled applicationsâwhich will leash humans ever more tightly to machines (think of the Blackberry epidemic) and link machines to machines with humans essentially out of the loopâwill propel the whole shebang, at an ever accelerating pace, toward the future that Teilhard de Chardin foresaw.

Universe: I'm sure you've been asked this before, but what (if any) role did spirituality play in the formulation of your Selfish Biocosm Hypothesis? It's a profoundly hopeful way of approaching the Universe.

Gardner: None really. I am not a religious person. I began my quest almost accidentally by attempting to answer what seemed to me to be a very straightforward question: what process could conceivably supply the missing von Neumann elementsâelements that von Neumann demonstrated were logically essential for any self-replicating objectâin the context of Lee Smolinâs hypothesis of cosmological natural selection. (This is covered in detail in the Complexity essay that is included as an appendix in The Intelligent Universe and is entitled âThe Selfish Biocosm: Complexity as Cosmology.â) It was only after I framed the Selfish Biocosm hypothesis that its extraordinary implications slowly began to dawn on me. I certainly did not anticipate them at the beginning of the process of discovery. The whole experience reminds me of graphically displaying a fractal or graphically displaying the results of running cellular automata through millions of iteration. From so simple a beginningâDarwinâs wonderful phraseâendless and totally unsuspected diversity and richness of detail emerges, almost miraculously.

Universe: Your hypothesis is that biological evolution is part and parcel of a cosmic reproductive cycle -- a "coming alive" of the Universe. Does this mean that the human race will evolve to the point of being able to seed our own new "baby universes," as ours was sown before us? If this is the case, then are we created in the image of whatever intelligence seeded us? Does this mean that all extraterrestrial life (if it exists) would resemble us on some profound level?

Gardner: Yes, it is a central tenet of my hypothesis that our distant successors will be capable of seeding new baby universes and endowing them with âcosmic DNAâ (i.e., a set of tightly constrained physical constants) that renders the Big Babies bio-friendly, so that the process of cosmic replication can continue indefinitely. An implication of the hypothesis is that our universe was created in the image (metaphorically speaking) of a predecessor universe that possessed that same or very similar âcosmic DNA.â And yes, all extraterrestrial life (if it exists) will have evolved on a common substrate (that cosmic DNA again) and thus will resemble us on some profound level.

Portlanders: James Gardner is reading from The Intelligent Universe at Powell's Technical Books, 33 NW Park Ave, at 7 pm on Monday, April 9. Hit it. It's free.

On an unrelated note: If you're interested in "Free Culture," I just wrote a short piece about Wikipedia founder Jimbo Wales' recent talk at Reed College over on Urban Honking's nerd.blog.