Is Magic Real?

The Universal Goldilocks Zone of Intelligence

For some time scientists imagined a ‘Goldilocks zone’ with respect to a planet’s orbital distance to its sun, and how this might correlate to life in our universe. This zone, not too far or too close, allows for liquid water, a stable atmosphere, manageable volcanic activity, and would be the most hospitable place for life to develop in the universe. In time this assumption lost popularity as life was found to exist, and even thrive in the most inhospitable environments, and to be far more durable in the extreme conditions of space than anyone would have guessed. 

I propose an answer to the Fermi Paradox that such a ‘Goldilocks zone’ while not critical to ecology, does exist with respect to intelligence. That intelligent life clusters strongly around a narrow band, very much corresponding to our own. That this level of intelligence would allow for technology capable of about what we have, to become the apex species of a planet, and maybe even dip a toe into interstellar travel, but not enough to proliferate throughout the galaxy. This idea is similar but crucially different to another theory that imagines there is some ‘great filter‘ awaiting any advanced civilization, and that few if any make it through. Some have imagined this great filter to be asteroid impacts, disease, AGI, nuclear power, or some other powerful toy we can’t help but invent, but are too immature to play with safely. I think this filter is more of a diffuse edge of intelligence. A border that separates us, and others like us, from being able to solve the really big problems, that would allow us to occupy the galactic stage. Almost like a cliff rising up above a huge valley before continuing on the other side. The universe incentivises us to get to the top of our cliff, but not to take the frightening step off of it into what’s beyond.

There are universal incentives for life to develop intelligence capable enough to dodge planetary extinction episodes. To develop technology and scientific understanding, which further pushes them up through this intelligence band over time. But at the upper end, selective pressures of the natural environment become less (Already the apex species of their planet). To make it past this intelligence plateau, requires us to understand and internalize the physics of our universe more deeply. But doing so reveals destabilizing existential truths that discourage advancement. And might even threaten the continuation of the species. Lets first explore this intelligence band, then consider what existential truths might lie on the other side of it, and what it might say about the truth of being ‘alive’ in our universe. 

Lets define this band of intelligence as slightly above earth mammals on the low end, and somewhere above but near the smartest humans that have ever lived on the high end. So apes and cavemen on one side, and da Vinci and Einstein on the other. 

In our own case, the low end of this band acted as a threshold, separating us from other species as we learned to master language, make and use tools, transmit culture and knowledge across time, observe changes in the environment, build consensus amongst each other and act in coordinated ways etc. That was our story, but to make this threshold generally inclusive for all forms of exotic intelligent life that might exist in the universe, we could define the low end of this band as being capable of developing and accumulating knowledge of the environment over time, and finding increasingly effective and efficient ways to act on that environment to the species benefit. We did this through language, cultural transmission, physics, mathematics, science and technology, but the same end could conceivably be reached through other strategies too strange and foreign for our minds to picture. 

Imagining the low end of the band is the easy part, but why should there be an upper limit to this intelligence, if one exists at all? Why would there be a universal incentive to be smart but not too smart? Well one could make a very unconvincing argument that intelligence makes too many demands of life. Being smart is a caloric burden, a complexity burden, a brittleness burden etc. Human beings spend an outsized portion of our chemical energy to power our brain. The human brain is the most complex object in the known universe, it strains the safety of human pregnancy/birth, and renders our children overly vulnerable and dependent for an absurd amount of time. It’s incredible our species survived long enough to enjoy the dividend our expensive brains finally started paying out in the last few thousand years of our existence, when we were able to use these brains to advance through the stages of science and technology and culture that allowed us to eradicate most diseases, and brought us to the threshold of interstellar proliferation. This argument is lazy and unconvincing. And may not apply at all exotic intelligences that are organized along completely different lines. Maybe these restrictive influences don’t apply on other planets with different chemistries, gravity, geology etc. 

Instead, the disincentive at the the upper end of this intelligence band, is the ability to internalize a scientific material reductionist framework of reality, as this is required to amplify influence over the environment sufficient to insure long term survival and technological advancement beyond our current level. But crucially, an intelligence capable of doing this would also have the cognitive tools to follow that argument to its logical conclusion, which is the ‘argument from physics’ aspect of ‘cartesian dualism’. 

This argument matters because it is the only description of consciousness that follows from, and is internally consistent with, a scientific material reductionist theory of the universe. And so far this is the only framework of thought that has produced technological advancement, can be tested and verified, and has predictive power. And is likely the only framework of thought that exists in a productive way on the other side of the universal intelligence band. Monkeys and cavemen can believe in any fanciful mythical framework of reality they want. It makes no difference to them if Earth is a spinning ball of iron or held up by elephants standing on a giant turtle. But if you want to travel the stars and harness atomic power, it’s likely that scientific material reductionism is the only game in town. In other words it’s the only one we have reason to believe is real. And as our species becomes more advanced, and more of that advancement diffuses into our education, culture, and individual psychologies, the harder it will be to compartmentalize the disturbing implications of what this theory dictates about our own mind. 

This understanding invalidates any notion of conscious autonomy, free will, and renders a person’s sense of self/identity at the same level as an inert rock or empty patch of space. That any privileged status you might assign to your living self vs your dead self is meaningless. You do NOT think, therefore you ARE NOT. You make no choices, have no free will, and instead are a pinball machine of chemistry so exquisitely complex, you lose track of the ball and think it’s moving itself. To accept we are deluding ourselves, to really internalize and assimilate the knowledge that we are a causal slave to the past, would be enough to overwrite our intrinsic survival instinct or culturally transmitted/psychological assurance to the contrary. On an individual basis this could create a complete loss of motivation and purpose/meaning in life, and on a global scale this could spur on demographic collapse and erode resilience and species hardiness. 

To take our own civilization as an example, we are smart enough to split the atom and venture out into space, but still on the whole we believe in God, spirits, astrology, superstitions, prayer, an afterlife, channeling, prophesy, telepathy and other such ideas, due to their historic legacy, and the latency of new, more accurate ideas to diffuse through culture and our individual evolutionary and cultural psychology. It doesn’t seem to bother us very much that these ideas don’t fit in the same paradigm our technological and scientific progress belongs to. And even the hard nosed atheists and logically minded scientists and mathematicians among us who know better, still think they are ‘alive’ and directing their own thoughts and actions. That they are an ‘I’, existing in a world of ‘not I’. And for good reason, because following our scientific precepts all the way to their necessary conclusions, invalidates our most intimately authentic experience; that we think, and therefore exist. People when hard pressed will sooner believe the universe is a lie and they are real, before they believe they are a lie and the universe is real. We know magic isn’t real when we build a satellite or create a fusion reactor, but do think it’s real everytime we get out of bed in the morning thinking we are willfully directing our actions in the course of the day. Imagining we are conscious, and our existence has meaning and purpose, and is under our control, that we are not the same as a rock sitting inert on the surface of the moon, or a leaf bobbing erratically down a swift moving stream. We cry when a loved one dies, because we believe something was lost besides the electrical energy animating their neurons or the muscle fibers in their heart. 

Our minds have the ability to compartmentalize, our psychology and culture operates on the cross generational inertia of ideas and persuasive rhetoric. We live in a society with a kind of split personality. One which is tethered to reality and another that believes that very reality is at best a useful heuristic, and that a deeper unknown truth ultimately supersedes it, which validates our claim to identity, and autonomy. Sure maybe science proves we have no free will, but there is a deeper science, whose rules are opaque to our understanding, that would explain how we really are conscious and in control of our thoughts and actions. This deeper science acts as a sort of magic in our physical world, and is more real than anything our puny/lesser  science can measure. This tension, this unsteady,  top heavy weight, bears down on a single question, perhaps the most important question any advanced civilization can ask itself; ‘Is magic real?’ Is our reality animated by anything outside of physical science? How could we know? 

Because if magic is not real and we live in a causally constrained universe, where everything, including our conscious minds and thoughts and ‘choices’ are as inert/deterministic/random as the geological history of a rock, or the movement of gas, or ice particles floating in space. Where everything is simply the continuation of the Big Bang, which is still banging as it were. And every thought, choice, behavior, perception and feeling has only the Big Bang as its prime mover and nothing else. And if it should be discovered that the Big Bang is simply a link in another causal chain of other Big Bangs, or that determinism is undermined by quantum randomness, none of this would make space for another prime mover to exist in your brain or body, to grant you the free will you assume yourself to have. Because if cartesian dualism, and the existential terror of its argument from physics, dictates a universe where your conscious existence is equal to that of a rock or patch of dirt, why strive for anything? How can your daily existence draw upon anything other than blind animal instinct for its preservation and development? I believe this paradox defines the taxonomy of intelligent life in our universe.

So what if magic isn’t real? Then what? What does it mean to really consider the full import of cartesian dualism? How would we define or begin to understand our consciousness within the full sober terror of this framework? If life isn’t ‘special’, or meaningful in any way, then what is it? Why is it? Why should some of it appear, at least to itself, to be ‘alive’ and aware, and in control of itself? Let’s step through it with all the humility and intellectual honesty we can muster. Where the vacuum of space, a rock, a stream of neutrinos, a crab and a human are all equally, blindly marching through a deterministic, causal chain for which they have no personal agency. 

If I had to guess, the universe is likely teaming with life across innumerable planets and moons and in all manner of inhospitable nooks and crannies we could hardly believe. Why? Because life is just what happens where an energy gradient is present in a universe with physical laws that allow for rich chemical interactions between matter, and for such interactions  to accumulate and propagate complexity over time. In other words energy gradients, physics, and time. Our universe has all three in abundance, but even still, if I had to bet on it, I would guess much of the life of this universe is planets covered in slime mound, bacteria and unicellular life. Some small percentage of it resembles life as it was during much of earth’s history. A diverse hierarchy of organisms filling out any and all ecological niches, converting energy gradients of all sorts (chemical, temperature, radiation etc.) into coherently deployed biological functions, through a bewildering array of different metabolic strategies. And in some rare cases, the diversity and complexity of life reaches into the most productive niche of all; time. 

When time functions meaningfully in the context of an energy gradient, we call it by its more familiar name; change. But for an organism to reach deeply into the well of time to draw out metabolic value, it often needs to think. More specifically it needs to think strategically. Which can be more accurately called “simulating the future”. Any organism whose metabolic success depends upon acting upon a changing environment, needs to act on that environment, inserting itself, to become the beneficiary of some asymmetry, and in the process becomes yet another variable of change in that environment. A grizzly bear extends its head so a jumping salmon lands in its mouth instead of back in the stream. The bear simulated a future in which it acted on the environment by inserting itself within a chemical gradient (protein/fat of the Salmon vs its environment) in time. So thinking, at least strategic thinking, is really the process of having enough of a handle of cause and effect, to be able to accurately simulate the future, far enough in advance and with enough precision to determine when and how to bring oneself into some crucial interaction with the environment, to absorb some asymmetry of energy. 

For more complex simulations of the future, we must also simulate ourselves, as our interaction with the environment might necessarily be the most consequential aspect of the future we want. Of course this future version of ourselves must be simulated with the understanding of this contemplation, creating a recursive loop where an individual must  imagine the future, and also imagine it under the influence of one’s own future actions, which are motivated in part by one’s present or past self’s vision of one’s future self. And let’s not forget, it’s not enough to just imagine ourselves in the future at a fixed point, we must also imagine every intermediate version of ourselves/future along the way. Then update and resimulate these possible chains of causality for each future/self co-evolution. And we must do this for each new sampling of reality as we move forward in time towards that fixed point. And of course we can’t do that without also error checking and comparing our past forecasts, as that past is actualized in the present and begins to recede further away from us, so we can better project into the future. This limitless extending out from our mind, oscillating to the point of vibration between self/environment, past/future, this possibility/that possibility, loops on itself ad infinitum. This continuously reinforced arrow of thought pointing at an agent acting on the world, seemingly the only element in the equation not operating with a firm causal motivation, results in the cause and effect of one’s thoughts and actions to stretch out like a hallway of mirrors until it blurs and smears into a continuous shape we call ‘self’ or “I”. This “I” gets so lost in the sauce of this continuous sandwiching of cause and effect, it becomes confused and begins to take credit for the thought/action that causality has just determined for it. When asked to come up with a number between one and ten, the gears of the causal universe create a number and electrically signals the answer inside the brain, after this is complete this “I” or “self” picks up the result, reads it out loud and declares “I have done something. I generated this number and have chosen it.” Continuously standing in the wake of causality and shouting from behind “I did that!”. Hoping no one, most of all itself notices the slight of hand. This subject/object confusion generally works. But where it causes real problems is when the question of existential meaning comes up. 

An apple doesn’t have to contemplate its ‘meaning’. If it could, it might be surprised to discover its ‘meaning’ is to fall from the tree, and appear calorically appetizing to an animal, who will consume it and deposit its seeds on a fertilized patch of dirt elsewhere. Now imagine an apple with a more complex life cycle, one that requires it to engage with its environment in a way that is more complex and strategically sensitive than simply falling and looking red and smelling nice. It might need a brain and an erroneous sense of self/agency. And that sense of self might ask itself at some point, “Do I even want to fall from this tree and be eaten? Maybe I don’t want to ‘die’ so another tree can grow? What’s the point, why should it matter if I seed another apple tree or not? What is this all for anyway?” So for any species relying on a life cycle/survival strategy complex enough to require strategic thinking/future simulation/consciousness/sense of self, there becomes a point at which such complexity of thought runs the risk of imploding into existential bewilderment, brought on by the necessary delusion that they have agency or ‘free will’. This natural tension between the evolutionary incentive to invest in intelligence to mine the niche of time, and the waking into the destructive awareness of the futility of existential meaning, and the admission of the delusion of agency, naturally constrains intelligent life in the universe within a certain band of complexity. The goldilocks zone of intelligence.

Too dumb and you aren’t smart enough to make tools, generate culture, cure diseases, deduce scientific principles and understand physical laws, and get off planet. But too smart and you’re forced to stare into the abyss of the impossibility of your own conscience existence, and the existential dread of the reality to which you belong. As intelligent organisms tend to gain in complexity over time, wherever they start in this band, given enough time they will likely march towards the edge of this intelligence cliff. Maybe this is the answer to the Fermi paradox. Any species on track to be intelligent enough to colonize a galaxy, has long since stood at the edge of this cliff, and either regressed back from it into willful ignorance and simplicity, or sterilized their intelligence with delusion. Or leapt off the cliff and annihilated themselves. All these strategies would likely stall or sease their intellectual and technological development. I would argue we are at the beginning of this intelligence plateau and it’s unclear which path we will take. 

But maybe an extremely small cohort of such intelligent species might instead continue to honestly wrestle with this existential paradox, and deploy all the resources of their intelligence and society to find a way through. A way that allows them to maintain and grow an accurate description of physical reality while preserving the legitimacy of their conscious awareness. Perhaps it requires the invention of complex new physics, higher dimensions, unintuitively complex and abstract math that points to a deeper simulated reality, a hierarchy of celestial beings, rich and abstract metaphysics, and consciousness technologies where minds can be trained and developed with the same rigorous and nuanced topology applied to physical sciences, but without the convenience and immediacy of physical experiment. 

It’s so much faster and easier to pour chemicals in a beaker, and record a color change, than it is to figure out what if any rules govern and validate spiritual experience. Perhaps in that case, the requisite experiments might take thousands of years of religious development and meditative practice to piece together any meaningful resolution of data and analysis, in the very not-impartial space of individual minds. This metaphysical science of the most advanced species in the universe might be painfully slow, frustrating and difficult, and maybe it just doesn’t work. Maybe reality is just causal/deterministic and conscious intelligence is just a lie. In other words, if magic isn’t real, then what’s the point of continuing to advance science and technology? You don’t even exist for god’s sake! And if magic is real, then maybe figuring out how requires an intelligence too far on the other side of the depressing/unmotivating existential black hole of scientific material reductionism. And you can’t invent the science and tools to make it across that black hole if you don’t take a scientific world view very seriously. But if you did that you wouldn’t believe in magic. But believing magic is real, is the only reason you have to sustain the effort to get to the other side. What’s an intelligent species to do? 

In any case, these hyper intelligent species, if they found an answer, likely found it beyond the physical. This is why I don’t give much credence to the dark forest theory of the Fermi paradox. A hyper intelligent species has likely already advanced beyond our needs and anxieties. Why exterminate other species, or colonize their resources, or consider a threat, those who are so far below you? The physical universe and its blindly animalistic intelligences operating in a scarcity paradigm, preoccupied with survival and threat vectors, likely don’t move the needle on a galactic scale. And any species that rises above the Goldilocks zone of intelligence, that masters the physical, and could be a threat to life throughout the galaxy/universe, has likely, by virtue of a deeper understanding, stopping caring about the petty desires and anxieties we care about, and moved on to understanding what lies beyond. 

If anything, a hyper intelligent species would hope and perhaps even encourage the development of other intelligent species, so they can put more heads together to work on the problem of existential meaning. That meaning may even take on some final form, where the universe itself matures into a wholly inclusive consciousness outside of space and time yet somehow of space and time. These intelligences beyond the band might be eagerly waiting for the rest of us to come online as it were, and collectively advance to some metaphysically entropic end state of singular consciousness, or some other such state of being we couldn’t even begin to imagine. At least not yet.