Life
The universe can be considered to be in a continuous process of atomic re-organization or energy re-distribution. The evolution of our planet has been developing through a series of mutations with seemingly infinite diversification. I think it is a pretty safe bet that this is going to continue to happen, and change is guaranteed. Nature's way is to shuffle what it's got, and we are a product of this at this point along the path of this shuffling, and our role is to shuffle it some more.
The development of the Earth in its entirety is part of the story of us. The Earth cannot be separated from the Sun any more than we can be from the Earth. Its geological processes an essential part of the making of us. We are made of Earth, an inevitable consequence of it being. Our very construction has the same trace elements of the primeval ocean we emerged from.
It is all just an inevitable process. The diversification is not guided by anything other than the unstoppable mixing that the laws of nature are obliged to do. It could not be any other way than the way it has gone. This viewpoint could describe it as fate, but that is just a human perspective, and ultimately only a word.
We are the pinnacle of evolution at the moment (on this planet), but we are not the final moment. A reasonable extrapolation would have us being the intermediary in creating the next stage.
The universe can be shown to create and mutate every possible combination there could be, and we extend that process with our technology. Where this ultimately leads is as impossible to imagine as a single celled organism becoming a human being or hydrogen atoms becoming Earth. It almost certainly involves AI, but possibly doesn't include us.
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It is only our naming of things which produce species; it is one infinite, endless variation, mutation upon mutation in what we call evolution. It is us that create the separation of species by our defining; it is all just one thing exploding with variation. It's impossible to keep all the variations; most only exist for a short time on their way on to something else. The idea that we have to prevent extinctions from happening could be seen as a little naive or even an arrogant way of thinking about it, because it is all just part of the inevitable process of life and has been doing this since it started. It can also be seen that it is our obligation to do whatever we can to preserve what is here now, simply because we can. But it isn't as important as we like to think it is. The universe wasn't unimportant before life came along. Change is the nature of the game; it is only humans who like to keep everything the same. We like to pretend that we have control. We even blame ourselves for things happening.
Don't get me wrong, I am a nature conservationist at heart, I am just aware of the bigger picture. It could be seen that it is our responsibility to preserve all species, and a worthy undertaking for those individuals involved, which will be guided and even motivated by our observation that we are involved in the changes in species ecology that are taking place. But we are not to blame; it is all just happening; it is supposed to be like this. This is the universe doing it—see the good, it goes on to be better. Our judgement is just part of a fictional story in which we are guessing a pessimistic end.
Life itself can be seen as a form of intelligence. A single cell amoeba, from its ability to survive and function and maintain its survival, can be conceived of as intelligent. The ability to maintain survival is the prime directive of life by the very fact that that is what happens. Those life forms which have survived the evolution of the planet, and those that are best at maintaining survival, is the evolution of intelligence, and seen from this perspective the process of the universe itself can be awarded the same attribution. If the anthropomorphizing is removed, the process itself could even be seen as an intelligent creator—but understand, there is no forethought or separate being, the intelligence is immanent within the process of the creation.
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The process of life creates senses from the necessity of survival, which in turn create a brain functioning with which to utilize the information and further safeguard survival. This is the mind and is formed from the physical by the sensory information carving channels of patterns from the firing of neural synapses. The inter-relation of these patterns is the functioning of the mind.
The sensors form the mind, and the mind compares. The mind creates our reality, and our reality creates our mind. The word intelligence, comes from inter
and lego
, literally translating as between the gathering
. This is the sensory information producing neural activity which forms the mind by its interconnecting.
Our sensors are just more highly adapted mechanisms of the body as a whole. The whole body is a sensor in some way or another. All sensors are just specialised parts of the body.
I have heard that the surface of our cerebral cortex has its dendrites facing outward (to receive information), which points to the possibility that the brain itself can pick up information directly, independently, and therefore is itself a sensor/receptor. This would allow the phenomenon of thought transference which I have experienced and confirmed, and is quite reasonable considering the sensitivity and complexity of the apparatus involved.
The mind is the sixth sense; the sensor of time. It can sense what is about to happen and what already has. This is what imagination is and is what is happening during our dreams as well as our waking. The juxtapositioning of the information is the conceptualising mechanism with which our ordained nature is tasked with creating the next step in the continuation of the unfolding of the universe.
