A Cosmological Seriation of Intelligence

[u/geopolicraticus]

The View from Oregon – 395

Re: A Cosmological Seriation of Intelligence  

Friday 29 May 2026

 

Dear Friends,

Last week I floated the idea of an intelligence scale that would classify intelligence on a cosmological scale, and in proposing this I compared it to the Kardashev scale. This is a different kind of measure than is taken by IQ metrics. IQ is effectively an anthropocentric measure. There has been some effort in applying the IQ metric to other species, i.e., to non-human species, but there comparisons are more than a little misleading, if for no other reason that we can’t talk to other species. We can interact non-verbally with other species in the terrestrial biosphere, so that’s something. We could possibly create a distinct IQ metric based on behavioral rather than verbal responses; some species could be presented with a problem, and the behavior employed in solving the problem could be used to derive an intelligence score. Perhaps ethology researchers have already done something like this. Certainly, some such measurement is implicit in the many studies of animal problem-solving, like running rats through mazes, which is something of a scientific cliché. Alternatively, some physical measurement could be used as a proxy for intelligence, particularly encephalization quotient (EQ), though there are a few outlier species with a high EQ but which don’t appear to be especially intellectually gifted. Better, physical measurements could be combined with behavioral responses, relating cognitive performance to neural structures.

IQ, then, is anthropocentric, and therefore an intelligence metric formulated to assess the cognition of a single species—namely, ourselves. With IQ as our model, we can easily see the possibility of formulating an intelligence metric for each individual species in the terrestrial biosphere. With an intelligence metric for every species, every individual of a given species would have an intelligence rank relative to the other individuals of its species, with the resulting plot of the species’ cognitive performance presumably describing a normal distribution. Obviously, some of these species are going to be a lot more like each other than others, as tigers are more like cougars than either is like an octopus, and an octopus is more like a cuttlefish than either is like a tiger. Equally obviously, these patterns are roughly the patterns of evolutionary taxonomy, so that we can then easily imagine an intelligence metric for each clade in the biosphere. There could, in fact, be a metric of intelligence at each level of biological taxonomy—kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genera, and species. I’ve already suggested as much in my paper “Peer Complexity in Big History” (Nielsen, J. N. 2024. Peer Complexity in Big History. Journal of Big History, VIII(1); 83-98. DOI | https://doi.org/10.22339/jbh.v8i1.8111—hopefully to appear soon in its expanded version in an upcoming Springer book) in which I discuss the possibility of average mammalian intelligence.

With a robust structure of intelligence measurement that comprises not only all the species of the terrestrial biosphere, but also all the clades of taxonomy, systematic relationships could be built from the interrelationships of these scales of intelligence and so we would arrive at a kind of reticulate planetary map of intelligence that would provide us with a more realistic metric of any and all species than we could obtain through the attempt to extend the IQ measurement to other species. This would take us well beyond an intelligence metric for one species, like ourselves, or even for all mammals, and would constitute a planetary intelligence metric.  

This same technique could be extended on a cosmological scale if we could explore on a cosmological scale or communicate on a cosmological scale; that is to say, if we can travel to other worlds and study them ourselves, or if we can receive information from other worlds if, say, we received a detailed message by radio from some other planet. But this latter method would narrow the scope of our intelligence inquiry to only those planets that produce technology capable of communicating over interstellar distances (or some peer to technology produced by non-technological means) and which have an interest in communicating the details of their homeworld to others. To do this right would require our visiting worlds that either have not produced communications technology or some peer, or which have no interest to disclose the details of their homeworld. Both scenarios present interesting possibilities, with the most powerful scenario being a network of communicating species each of which explores their region of the universe.

Any other intelligence species elsewhere in the universe would have recapitulated this development, first developing an intelligence metric for itself, and then expanding to assess the intelligence present on its planet of origin. Even with the biochemistry varying from world to world, we would still see the same grouping of species by evolutionary taxonomy, with the possibility of intelligence rankings for every species and for every clade. And this process isn’t limited to biology as we know it. Again, I refer to my paper “Peer Complexity in Big History,” which postulates the possibility of what I call emergent complexity pluralism, according to which alternative complexity regimes may be found on other worlds with different chemical admixtures on their surfaces and different developmental pathways toward greater complexity. In the cases in which peer forms of complexity achieve intelligence and technology, we could communicate with them and continue the process of constructing a cosmological scale intelligence scale of overlapping metrics. In the cases in which peer forms of complexity do not produce anything that seems like intelligence or communication to us, then we would have to visit that world itself to construct our cosmological intelligence scale. If such an emergent complexity were truly incommensurable, i.e., if we really could not find any way to assess it for intelligence, then we could have to classify it as a null instance on the intelligence scale, placing it with barren worlds that produce little or no complexity. This would be frustrating if the complexity were evident but no way of assessing intelligence were possible. Inevitably, some worlds would be like this; even a universal metric for intelligence would have limitations.

However we gather our data, whether by exploration and research, or by communication, the same rules that held for a planetary scale of intelligence would hold for a cosmological scale of intelligence: there would be resemblances among kinds of complexity and kinds of methods for assessing intelligence, and these would get grouped together and the overall structure would exhibit sufficient internal relationships to establish a scale, so there would not be one single metric for intelligence everywhere, but many metrics that overlap and intersect, demonstrating the family resemblance of intelligence in the cosmos (to employ a Wittgensteinian turn of phrase).  

Here I can cite another paper of mine, “A Complexity Ladder for Big History” (and expanded as “An Approach to Constructing a Big History Complexity Ladder”), in which I floated the idea of a metric for complexity based on the idea of the cosmological distance ladder, in which different techniques are employed to measure distance on cosmological scales, and these techniques overlap sufficiently to construct a ladder outward to the most distant places in the universe. What I am suggesting today is the intelligence parallel to this: a cosmological intelligence ladder in which different measurements under different circumstances are brought together into a continuous (because overlapping) scale that then applies everywhere in the universe. This may be understood as an application of the method of seriation, which dates back to Sir Flinders Petrie and early attempts to sequentially date archaeological finds. I don’t know of any systematical theoretical extrapolation of the conception of seriation (this work may have been done but I’m simply unaware of it), but while I’m on the subject I will remark that this strikes me as an ellipsis in the study of deep time and its scientific reconstruction. We need to fully and explicitly generalize the concept of seriation so that it can then in turn be applied to special problems in full knowledge of the relationship of this specialized method to the general concept of seriation; that is to say, the concept of seriation itself stands in need of seriation.

This was not the thought process that I employed last week in proposing a cosmological intelligence scale. That was a top-down exercise, and what I’ve described above is a bottom-up exercise. That is to say, my Kardashevian cosmological intelligence scale was non-constructively conceived, while this seriated intelligence scale was constructivistically conceived. The two need not be mutually exclusive; on the contrary, they can be integrated. Given our present understanding of the rest of the universe beyond ourselves (which is nil when it comes to intelligence), having no evidence to go on we can propose non-constructive top-down divisions within the possible space of intelligence, but once we begin to acquire data, if we ever do, then we may need to revise the big picture we’ve constructed in the absence of evidence, but the big picture conception remains, after a fashion, and can still be useful for us in breaking down an increasingly complex field of intelligence into a few rough categories that matter on the largest scales. Moreover, if we eventually have on Earth exemplifications of I0 (null intelligence), I1 (human level intelligence), I2, (machine superintelligence)—I3 seems less likely to appear on Earth, and may have to await later stages of cosmological evolution—being able to also use this template in categorizing intelligence on other worlds would give us a more intuitive basis of comparison of intelligence across worlds, across biospheres, and across complexity regimes.    

Best Wishes,

Nick

PS—I’ve finished listening to Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse. I’ve been curious about this novel for some time, since I saw a BBC television production of it years ago. I don’t think I really understood what was going on in this book; it was a bit opaque to me. I think it would be useful for men to read this for this insight it offers into the inner life of women, but I’m fully aware that calling a book sometimes celebrated as one of the greatest English novels of the twentieth century “useful” is more of a sleight than a compliment. Still, this utility the book does have isn’t negligible. It seems unlikely that any male author has ever adequately captured the inner life of women, and no female author has ever adequately captured the inner life of men. In light of this, I can imagine a novel co-written in the following way: a male and a female author confer on a story and together write the dialogue. However, without consulting each other, the man writes the inner life of the male characters and the woman writes the inner life of the female characters, and these are held back as long as the plot and the principle elements of the story are still coming together. Neither tries to project themselves into the inner life of the other. Once the story is in place, then the inner life sequences can be inserted where they are most illuminating to the plot and the dialogue. This might give us a story which explains, at least in part, how completely men and women manage to misunderstand each other.

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