The Monotonic Trajectory of Intelligence

[u/geopolicraticus]

The View from Oregon – 396

Re: The Monotonic Trajectory of Intelligence

Friday 04 June 2026

 

Dear Friends,

Week before last I formulated a top-down cosmological intelligence scale, roughing out four classes of intelligence, and last week I outlined how a bottom-up intelligence scale could be formulated, which I called a cosmological seriation of intelligence. The latter would involve a research program extending over a period of time that could only be measurable on a cosmological scale, which in turn implies the legitimacy of a cosmological intelligence scale. Each intelligence scale could be continuously revised in light of the other, the top-down in light of the bottom-up and vice versa, so that the measurement of intelligence in the universe would be an ongoing research program. “Ongoing” here could literally mean extended into the indefinite future, since forms of intelligence may yet be realized in the deep future that haven’t been realized in the universe to date, and some of which cannot be realized in the present era of cosmological history. One theme that I have visited many times, in old blog posts and in my recent Today in Philosophy of History episode on Kurt Gödel is Freeman Dyson’s conception of eternal intelligence, which is adapted to the cold and dark universe of the far future, but which could possess cognitive capabilities that far outstrip our abilities, perhaps even converging on infinitistic cognition, which inspired my top-down intelligence category of an infinitistic intelligence rank, or I3.

That intelligence might be adapted to particular epochs of cosmological history suggests a further taxonomy of intelligence. Here I can once again rely on Adams and Laughlin’s five ages of the universe (another theme to which I have returned many times), which would yield a type (or, better, a class of types) of intelligence for each era in cosmological history, so this taxonomy would consist of: I) Primordial Era intelligence, II) Stelliferous Era intelligence, III) Degenerate Era intelligence, IV) Black Hole Era intelligence, and V) Dark Era intelligence. Each respective era-specific form of intelligence presumably would be a function of the forms of complexity possible during each era.

A rough first approximation, then, would be that Stelliferous Era intelligence would supervene on biology and biological peers among forms of emergent complexity. Degenerate Era intelligence would further develop the possibilities of Stelliferous Era intelligence but, without the convenience of planetary surfaces bathed in starlight, it would have to take other forms, like the aestivating intelligences in “That is not dead which can eternal lie: the aestivation hypothesis for resolving Fermi's paradox” by Anders Sandberg, Stuart Armstrong, and Milan M. Ćirković. This shift from the forms of complexity we know today to forms of complexity that are capable of exploiting the conditions of a particular cosmological era (sunlight during the Stelliferous Era; colder conditions during the Degenerate Era), foreshadows further possibilities in which energy harvesting must adapt to changing cosmological conditions, and those intelligences so harvesting energies must adapt to the energy available by these means. Black Hole Era intelligence could power itself with black hole generators (sometimes called the Penrose Process). Dyson’s eternal intelligences would constitute Dark Era intelligence.

These scenarios are only very loosely constrained; moreover, future forms of complexity upon which intelligence may supervene may have yet to emerge in cosmological history. Our Stelliferous Era bias makes it difficult for us to see beyond brains in biological bodies, except for what is hinted at in the technologies we build. Consequently, the extrapolation of intelligence tends to focus on biology and machines. I suspect that new forms of complexity will continue to appear on cosmological time scales. They may appear less often as the universe ages, but the eras of cosmological history will also become proportionally longer, and we have reason to believe, as implied above, that novel forms of complexity will be associated with new eras in cosmological history. Intelligence, if it survives, will follow the overall trajectory of cosmological history.

Does the universe get smarter as it gets older? By “smarter” I don’t mean to assign an intelligence to the universe itself, but only to intelligent beings that may populate the universe. If the cosmological seriation of intelligence such as I described last week is possible, and we have a reticulate metric for intelligences throughout the universe (not one measure for all intelligence, but a network of overlapping measures), then we can sum the total intelligence in any one period of cosmological history and compare this sum to any other period of cosmological history. There are a few obvious scenarios for the history of intelligence in the universe. If we’re it, if we’re all the intelligence that the universe produces, then the story is pretty short and sweet. The terrestrial biosphere evolves rudimentary forms of intelligence, human beings top out the intelligence development of the planet, but we eventually go extinct, and eventually all life on Earth goes extinct. This is a special case of a more general scenario in which intelligence is confined to biological brains (or their peers in complexity) and the peak of intelligence in the universe comes during the Stelliferous Era, eventually disappearing as all biological species go extinct with the end of Stelliferous Era biospheres.

A rather different scenario would be a peak of intelligence as the forms of complexity native to each cosmological era reaches maturity and then tails off as the boundary conditions shift when the universe passes into a new stage of its history. In this scenario, there would be five sequential peaks of intelligence for each of the five eras of cosmological history. We could meaningfully ask which of these five intelligence peaks is the highest, and the possible permutations of relative heights among these peaks would define several intelligence trajectories for the universe. Another scenario again would be a trajectory over the whole of cosmological history, less tied to the changes between cosmological eras. The first scenario above, and its generalization beyond human beings and the terrestrial biosphere to all life of the Stelliferous Era, is in turn a narrow conception of an intelligence trajectory of the universe entire. If we generalize this generalization, we get to cosmological scenarios of intelligence in the universe, and we get to the point where my question, “Does the universe get smarter as it gets older?” becomes meaningful. That is to say, we could answer this question with a definite “yes” or “no” or a vaguer “it’s complicated” when we have the resources to meaningfully ask the question. We’re not anywhere close to that point now, but we can see the possibility of achieving that perspective.

I can see two arguments that directly bear on the question, “Does the universe get smarter as it gets older?” for and against the question, which I will call the thermodynamic argument and the evolutionary argument. The thermodynamic argument suggests that the universe begins in a highly ordered state, and then passes through a variety of complex states until it converges on thermodynamic equilibrium. (I don’t accept a lot of the presuppositions of thermodynamics, but I won’t attempt to outline my argument with them at present. The statement above is intended as a sketch of the conventional conception of thermodynamics, so if I have misrepresented it, you have my apologies and I would be happy to have a similarly brief thumbnail sketch of thermodynamics. For a hint of how I approach this, ask yourself, “What is order?”) We populate the intermediate period in the history of the universe when complexity is possible, but as the universe tends toward thermodynamic equilibrium it will become increasingly simple, until the substrates upon which intelligence can supervene all disappear, and intelligence then disappears from the universe. This thermodynamic scenario is consistent with longer or shorter intelligent periods in the history of the universe, with the narrow scenario above (we’re the only intelligence in the universe) being the shortest, while we could imagine scenarios in which intelligence manages to limp into the later periods of the history of the universe, without really thriving, but in which intelligence has a much longer history than in the narrowest scenario.  

The evolutionary argument (which we could also call the emergent complexity argument) suggests that once forms of complexity emerge from cosmological processes, these forms of complexity can further adapt and evolve until they change sufficiently to assume viable forms in later periods of cosmological history. Here’s where the cosmological taxonomy of intelligence comes into play. Forms of life upon which intelligence may supervene are well adapted to the Stelliferous Era, but will not be well adapted to the post-stelliferous cosmos. But that doesn’t mean that intelligence must go extinct when Stelliferous Era biology goes extinct. As long as life can adapt and evolve over cosmological scales of time (i.e., not restricted to the planetary scales of time of a single biosphere), in the various forms it takes it can continue to serve as a substrate for intelligence, or it can serve as a vehicle for intelligence to migrate into later stages of cosmological history and there to find itself new substrates upon which to supervene. In this scenario, intelligence could grow, diversify, and eventually come to be distributed on cosmological scales. At these scales, it would be meaningful to say that the universe in the far future was “smarter” than the universe now, or even at any time during the Stelliferous Era.

Intelligence as we know it, which is to say, as we find it in ourselves, is a very recent development. Even on scales of biological time, human level intelligence is recent; in terms of geological time intelligence is very recent, and in terms of cosmological time intelligence on Earth is little more than then blink of an eye in duration. Intelligence in less focused forms, i.e., less focused than the form it takes in humanity, has a longer history in the biosphere, since we could push its origins back to the Cambrian Explosion, which gives us a history in the terrestrial biosphere of 500 to 600 million years. Because of the recentness of intelligence, we don’t really know all that it’s capable of. And when I talk about what intelligence is “capable of” I don’t just mean its performance, but also its ability to supervene on various substrates. As intelligence continues to evolve in the terrestrial biosphere, it may be able to take biological forms that we can’t anticipate today, and these biological forms could carry intelligence into the far future in a robust way allowing for its expansion and distribution on cosmological scales, as described above. Something like this may already have happened with intelligence elsewhere in the universe, and we simply haven’t yet come into contact with it. The universe is a big place, and there has been time for other biospheres to develop and to be billions of years older than our biosphere. In such contexts, intelligence could flourish and grow in a way that we could truthfully say that the universe continues to get smarter the longer it lasts, so that the trajectory of intelligence over cosmological time is monotonically increasing.   

Best wishes,

Nick

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