Contingency and Convergence by Powell Russell;

Author:Powell, Russell;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: contingency; convergence; constraint; causation; macroevolution; cognition; consciousness; mind; Umwelt; image-formation; iteration; body plan; chance; natural experiment; parallelism; astrobiology; SETI; Fermi paradox; universal biology; laws of nature; animal cognition; culture; human evolution; comparative neuroscience; goal-directedness; Stephen Jay Gould; origins of life; observer selection effects; Copernican principle; uniformity of nature; contingency; SETI
Publisher: MIT Press

The writers of Arrival deserve credit for declining to provide yet another vector for the cosmic humanoid epidemic, picking out a genuinely alien mind among us as a model for the evolution of extraterrestrial intelligence. For all its improvements, however, Arrival makes the same bundling error that gives rise to countless iterations of the humanoid. It lumps accidental traits with evolutionarily robust ones, and it treats the cluster as a single, law-like package, prompting a new bundle: the “cephalopoid.”

The cephalopoid bundle is just as fallacious as the humanoid bundle and for exactly the same reasons. The error in each case is to entangle what are plausibly robust, interconnected outcomes of the evolutionary process, such as complex brains, cognition, and eyes (part II argues for law-like linkages among of these features), with accidental features of animal body plans, such as hominin-style bipedalism or coleoid-style jet propulsion. The portrayal of intelligent “insectoids,” which have also cropped up from time to time in science fiction, emanates from the same bundling fallacy. In essence, what the standing humanoid epidemic and the incipient cephalopoid outbreak in science fiction depict is not the plausible result of extraterrestrial histories of life, but alternative histories of the shape of life as we know it on Earth—a worthwhile, but very different, philosophical pursuit.

There is an interesting parallel between the fallacy of bundling and the cross-cultural proclivity to postulate supernatural beings—or what cognitive scientists of religion call “minimally counterintuitive agents” (MCAs). MCAs are postulated beings whose ontology is on the whole familiar, but which also exhibit some properties that breach intuitive expectations for how entities in that familiar ontological domain will look or behave (such as a tree that talks).7 In his impassioned defense of reason in The Demon-Haunted World, Carl Sagan remarks on the nonaccidental parallels between supernaturalism and folk depictions of alien visitations.8 Despite more than a century-and-a-half of evolution and cognition research, the portrayal of extraterrestrials has achieved little more than a naturalized version of supernaturalism: there but for the point of an ear or a supernumerary tentacle (and a spaceship) goes intelligent life as we know it.

If any features of life have cosmic projectibility, then some of these features will be present on Earth. But which aspects, if any, among the complex outcomes of earthly evolution are the cosmically projectible ones? Calling out the bundling problem is only the first step, for it leaves us with the even more daunting problem of disentanglement.

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