30 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
stimulating speculation about the underlying nature of the cosmos, May 11, 2007
This review is from: The Intelligent Universe: AI, ET, and the Emerging Mind of the Cosmos (Hardcover)
Having read Gardner's earlier work
Biocosm: The New Scientific Theory of Evolution: Intelligent Life Is the Architect of the Universe, I was prepared for "The Intelligent Universe" to be the work of a visionary thinker who is not afraid to speculate about the cosmological principles underlying our universe. I cherish the work of authors who are not afraid to think big. Gardner does not disappoint in the grandeur of his vision. If you think there is nothing new under the sun, I encourage you to read "The Intelligent Universe". One can't help but find enlightening material in the book. Oliver Wendell Holmes said "Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions." This sentiment certainly applies to my reading of Gardner's book.
Gardner's book is, however, not without flaws. One criticism I won't make of the book is that the ideas are hopelessly speculative. The book employs the kind of theoretical flights of fancy that John Horgan dismisses as "ironic science" in his book
The End of Science (Helix Books), a book which says that science is asymptotically approaching a point at which there won't be any major new scientific theories, not because of science's failures but because science has been so successful. I mention Horgan because the scope of Gardner's vision encourages me to believe that we haven't even begun to exhaust our potential to develop breathtaking scientific theories of the cosmos. I came away from The Intelligent Universe with an excitement about the power of large-scale thinking about the universe.
Having said that, while Gardner presents an original "story", weaving together the work of numerous cosmologists and other scientists, perhaps paradoxically, the book often reads as a rehashing of the ideas of numerous big-picture thinkers. Maybe both perspectives can be accurate: Gardner summarizes the work of many while putting together the pieces in a unique way. There is nothing wrong with synthesizing the views of one's peers. However, the book too often lapses into a series of synopses of the big ideas of other scientific thinkers, brilliant though these thinkers may be.
To give you an idea of Gardner's method I reproduce the train of thought found in a few early chapters. Gardner uses extended paragraph-long quotations to run through the following thinkers (not all of which Gardner ultimately endorses):
Fred Hoyle on the fine-tunedness of physical constants, Francis Crick on directed pansperma (the idea that extraterrestrials seeded the biosphere with the first life forms on Earth), Stephen Wolfram and Ed Fredkin on cellular automata principles underlying physics, Seth Lloyd on the cosmos as quantum computer, Erwin Schrodinger on quantum physics underlying life, John Wheeler's on the "participatory anthropic principle" (the idea that only with conscious life does the universe summon itself into being), John Koza on genetic programming, Roger Penrose on the quantum physical underpinnings of consciousness, (leading to a gloss on the implications of combining quantum computing and genetic programming). Then Gardner begins the next chapter with Mark Bedau on artificial life, with an interlude about the perils of nanotechnology run amok, alluding to Michael Crichton's techno-thriller
Prey. After that, we move on to topic of the technological singularity, where Ray Kurzweil plays a prominent role, both for his vision of smarter-than-human artificial intelligence and his optimism about the prospects for immortality. In the same chapter Gardner describes how Vernor Vinge forsees the arrival of super-human intelligence as more likely to result from intelligence amplification (at least at first) than from artificial intelligence.
Many of the later chapters work in a similar fashion, cycling through the big ideas of major thinkers. If a book is going to run through thinkers as this one does I guess what I would wish for is a book with the kind of comprehensiveness of
The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (Oxford Paperbacks). Instead, too often there is only a superficial treatment of one thinker before we move on to another superficial treatment of the big idea of the next thinker. Such a technique is particularly unsatisfying for someone who is already familiar with many of the thinkers presented. I would relish a deeper engagement with the work of many of the thinkers treated. So one problem that I have with the book is simply that it is not in-depth enough. The body of the text takes up 196 pages, with an additional 46 pages comprising reprints of three articles from the International Journal of Astrobiology and Complexity magazine (2 articles).
I don't mean to dismiss Gardner's writing style. The value of his approach was demonstrated to me by his discussion of Beatriz Gato-Rivera's proposed solution to the Fermi Paradox. I had never heard of Gato-Rivera but Gardner's treatment of her position in The Intelligent Universe provided a nice jumping off point to her work. It is easy to see how the book could function as a window into a lot of other scientific topics. I was wondering how Gardner would reconcile the Fermi Paradox with Gardner's view that the universe is "hard-wired" to produce intelligent life, and Gato-Rivera's work figures prominently in his proposed resolution to the conundrum, although, characteristically, there is no attempt made to contradict this hypothesis or to pronounce on the merits of any alternative explanations.
"The Intelligent Universe" ultimately attempts to answer what Brian Greene has called the biggest of the big questions: Why is the universe life-friendly? Gardner, bold and original thinker that he is, thinks he knows the answer. His solution is the Selfish-Biocosm Hypothesis. The central claim of his Selfish-Biocosm Hypothesis is "that the ongoing process of biological and technological emergence, governed by still largely unknown laws of complexity, could function as a von Neumann controller, and that a cosmologically extended biosphere could serve as a von Neumann duplicating machine in a conjectured process of cosmological replication." In other words, the universe comes to life and then reproduces itself through the creation of other universes. This comes right out of Gardner's first book Biocosm. In this picture, human beings (or other intelligent life forms) might be thought of as the mitochondria of the cells that make up the universe as organism. The Intelligent Universe can be seen as the exploration of this basic storyline, and this includes dealing with the religious implications of the radically new perspective afforded by the Selfish-Biocosm Hypothesis. All in all, the story is well worth reading.
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55 of 62 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
A rehash of his, and others, ideas -- and not well done, February 27, 2007
This review is from: The Intelligent Universe: AI, ET, and the Emerging Mind of the Cosmos (Hardcover)
I was very disappointed with this book. As the previous review states, an incredible number of his passages start with "In my first book, Biocosm..." He says that so many times it gets absurd. If I wanted to know what Biocosm said, I would read Biocosm. Similarly, he quotes EXTENSIVELY from other authors (and not just phrases here and there -- entire paragraphs), which in some cases I would say is great because he is proving his case in a scholarly manner, but in this book it just comes across as him not having anything new to say so he fills up space with quotes from others. I would almost say that this book should be treated as a digest of his and other's thoughts on related topics, with very little that is new or interesting. As such, if you have done previous reading on the topics of Turing computation, AI, and singularity-related topics, this is a very boring read. If you haven't, I wouldn't recommend starting here. Get some of Kurzweil's or Drexler's stuff instead. Or maybe read Biocosm ;)
I have one other bone to pick with this book, and this may be a more serious criticism than it simply being boring restatements of previous work: Scientifically, he doesn't make his case in the least. Gardner's main belief seems to be that our universe has been purposefully engineered with bio-friendly physical constants and that it, therefore, is just full of life. However, he gives no satisfactory explanation for how he reached these conclusions. On the topic of the universe having physcial constants that are too "convenient," he rejects the weak anthropic principle without a satisfactory explanation. And, on the topic of his belief that the universe is teeming with life, he fails to reconcile that belief with the complete failure of our SETI programs, or the lack of Dysonian evidence (which he seems to consider a more promising way to search for life than via radio signals). In short, he presents a controversial hypothesis, and then utterly fails to logically support it, which makes the book doubly a waste of time.
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7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent Exploration of the Possible, February 28, 2007
This review is from: The Intelligent Universe: AI, ET, and the Emerging Mind of the Cosmos (Hardcover)
I enjoyed this book thoroughly. While many of the theories that underpin his conclusion are extremely complex, he does an excellent job of illuminating them in a manner everyone can understand. Want get a primer on many of recent theories concerning our universe and its creation, read this book. More to the point, Mr. Gardner weaves a convincing case that the universe is teaming with life and was created for that purpose in order to self replicate. While perhaps in my lifetime we might never prove whether the universe contains other forms of life, his theory of a Selfish Biocosm is thought provoking. It also interests me in exploring more about the subject. For me, that is the biggest compliment I can pay an author.
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