Intelligence in Nature: both life and inanimate

Intelligence in Nature: Both life and Inanimate

KRS Murthy

The nature we live in, are part of and participate in has intelligence, resilience and adaptation, built in at different of its dimensions, parts and between the parts. At elementary particle levels of matter, subatomic, nano, micro, macro, mega, giga, zeta and universal levels these properties vary, but are actually built from the smallest through intermediary scales to universal scale. Continuous evolution is the ultimate purpose at all levels. Continuous creation is the game.

The life forms as currently known and understood exhibit innately present survival properties, evolution properties and self duplication properties, all requiring certain internal and external conditions. Parts and aspects of these sets of activities and behaviors include sensing the external conditions, interacting with the external conditions, benignly and aggressively.  This is similarly true even in the inanimate world as well.

I will discuss the above seemingly abstract statements with examples in the following paragraphs and sections of this document / blog.

Starting from amoeba stage of life, through intermediary phases of the evolution of life to the humans, the properties and behaviors mentioned earlier are exhibited. The amoeba developed the property and capability to self replicate. This is actually made up of and built out of the property of matter that make up the amoeba, built from the constituent parts of matter, which by themselves do not have the property of the whole; the uniqueness of the configuration of the constituent parts making up the organism, and most importantly the ability to harvest matter and energy from its external environment, plus the internal configuration duplicating engine makes it a biological organism.  The organism with all these properties is known to us as life. One aspect of adaptation is to be able to mutate as needed, or even randomly experimenting in the act of mutation, to ultimately create an adapted configuration. After many of the adaptation driven mutations, the series of mutations gives rise to a different species of life.

These qualities of resilience, interaction with external environment and also the adaptation are the embedded suite of properties of all matter and energy, even down to the fundamental elements of matter and similarly energy, all in the inanimate world. All charged particles announce their presence with a charge field around them. They also interact with the field around them that may be from other charged particles. All charged particles discriminate action and interaction with other particles based on the type of charge, positive or negative. Negative charge repels other negative charges with “hatred”, whereas displays intense love towards positive charges. Similar action and reaction is displayed by positive charges repelling other positive charges and attracting negative charges. Particles without any charge simply “ignore” other particles with either positive or negative charges.

The electron in an atom absorbs the energy of any photo that comes in its vicinity, only to spit it out later. Atoms bond with each other by sharing an electron between them. With such bonds many atoms may come together to form a “family”, that we call as molecule. The family of molecules acts as one entity with the bonds between them vibrating, not just in one mode, but many modes. Atoms and molecules interplay with energy of all types, wavelengths and frequencies. They “swallow” heat, that we call absorption, and exchange heat energy between each other. The atoms and molecules change their behavior based on the amount of heat absorbed. They may come close to each other as solids, separate from each other after acquiring heat, flowing and gliding past each other, which we call as melting from solid state to liquid state. Atoms and molecules may further acquire heat to fly off from each other in seemingly random directions. Their behavior is not random at all, but to follow the rules very “religiously”, that we call laws of physics. All matter and energy “religiously” follow the different laws of physics. They adhere to the “religious commandments” of the laws of physics, without fail, that they have been from almost the beginning of time, and will follow till the end of time, if at all there is a beginning and an end for their “life” in time.

The atoms came together to form molecules, further to form a chain of molecules, some of the molecular chains accidentally forming configurations that we call as DNAs and RNAs, that further have a combined behavior, that we call as life. It is nothing but the combined behavior or property of life, even though such a property exists by coordinated activity of many molecules and atoms as the “dance performance” on the “stage of this earth”. This dance performance has been happening for billions of years on the earth.

Yes, both life in many forms, simple to very complex, and the inanimate objects in all forms and phases of matter, along with energy of different types, rhythmic dances in a variety of frequencies coexist, one form transforming to the other. We are ourselves parts and participants in the dance and drama on the earth. The earth is just a miniscule in the whole universal stage. Intelligence is a property of the both life and inanimate world.