Thinking Meat

Courtesy of /u/deadantelopes, wanted to share.

It seems more likely to me that the issue is simply that society building organisms are rare, perhaps extremely. We see this on our planet, there are thousands and thousands and thousands of species, trillions of organisms, that we share this planet with and none, but us, carry a lasting multi-generational record of knowledge of any obvious consequence.

Human beings have gone beyond being biological organisms and become the cells of an informational organism. A human being left in the woods from birth to death, kept separate and alive would be nothing more than an ape, but when that same animal meets the memetic, infectious organism that is language… that is history, that is society, that’s when a human being is born. We envision hive minds in our science fiction as something very alien to us, but isn’t it that very nature that makes us alien to other living things? This whole interaction, this very thing you’re experiencing right now where a completely seperate member of your species who you have no physical contact with and no knowledge of is creating abstract ideas in your own mind through the clicking of fingers to make symbols, phonemes and words, is immensely weird on the scale of a context that doesn’t simply declare anything human normal by default. We can do this because we are connected, not by blood or skin, but by the shared infection of a common language, the grand web of information that is the most immortal part of each of us.

That’s not something that has to happen to life, that’s not somehow the endpoint of evolution in any meaningful way, and humanity was nearly wiped off the face of the earth several times over before we got to that point. I wouldn’t be surprised if billions of planets have developed life that is exactly like the life on earth, sans humanity, creatures that live and die without language and leave no records, no benefit of experience, no trace.