SEMREM: The Search for Extraterrestrial, Morphically-REsonating Mathematicians

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An interesting idea came up in an email thread with my dad Ted Goertzel, his friend Bill McNeely, and my son Zar Goertzel…

Suppose that morphic resonance works – so that when a pattern arises somewhere in the universe, it then becomes more likely to appear other places in the universe.   Suppose that, like quantum entanglement, it operates outside the scope of special relativity – so that when a pattern occurs on this side of the universe, its probability of occurrence is immediately increased way on the other side of the universe. 

(As with quantum entanglement, the language of causation is not really the best one to use here – rather than saying “pattern X occurring here increases the odds of pattern Y occurring there”, it’s better to say “in our universe, the odds of the same pattern occurring in two distant locations, sometimes with a time lag, is higher than one would expect based on straightforward independence assumptions” – this has the same empirical consequences and less needless metaphysical baggage.   I’ve pointed this out here )

Suppose also that the physical universe contains multiple intelligent species and civilizations, flung all over the place – scattered across our galaxy and/or multiple galaxies.

It would follow that when one intelligent civilization creates a certain pattern, other civilizations halfway across the galaxy or universe would have a higher probability of happening upon that same pattern.   And perhaps there would be an increasing-returns type dynamic here: once half the intelligent civilizations in the universe have manifested a certain pattern, the odds of the rest coming to manifest it would be much higher.

But what kinds of patterns would be most likely to get propagated in this way?   A pattern highly specific to Earthly life would not be likely to get picked up by gas-cloud aliens in some other galaxy – because morphic resonance, if it works, would only mildly increase the odds of a pattern being found in one location or context, based on it already having been found in another.    Most likely its mechanism of action would involve slightly nudging the internal stochastic dynamics of existing processes – and there is a limit to how much change can be enacted via such nudging.   If the odds of a certain Earthly pattern being formed in the world of the gas-cloud aliens is very low, morphic resonance probably isn’t going to help.

Probably the most amenable patterns for morphic resonance based cross-intelligent-civilization transmission would be the most abstract ones, the ones that are of interest to as many different intelligent civilizations as possible, regardless of their particular cultural or physical  or psychological makeup.    Mathematics would seem the best candidate.

So, if this hypothesis is right, then mathematical theorems and structures that have already been discovered by alien civilizations elsewhere, would be especially easy for us to find – we would find ourselves somehow mysteriously/luckily guided to finding them.

It’s not hard to imagine how we might test this hypothesis.   What if we built a giant AGI mathematical theorem prover, and set it about searching for new mathematical theorems, proofs and structures in a variety of different regions of math-space.   Based on all this activity, it would be able to develop a reasonably decent estimator of how difficult it should be, on average, to discover new theorems and proofs in a certain area of mathematics.  

Suppose this AGI mathematician then finds that certain areas of mathematics are unreasonably easy for it – that in these areas, it often seems to “just get lucky” in finding the right mathematical patterns, without having to try as hard as its general experience would lead it to suspect.   These areas of mathematics would be the prime suspects for the role of “focus area of the intergalactic, cross-species community of morphically resonating mathematicians.”

Suppose the AGI mathematician is trying to solve some problem, and has to choose between two potential strategies, A and B.   If A lies in a region of math-space that seems to have lots of morphic resonance going on, then on the whole it’s going to be a better place to look than B.    But of course, every alien species is going to be reasoning the same way.   So without any explicit communication, the community of mathematically-reasoning species (which will probably  mostly be AGIs of some form or another, since it’s unlikely evolved organisms are going to be nearly as good at math as AGIs) will tend to help each other and collectively explore math-space.

This is an utterly different form of Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence – I’ll label it the “Search for Extraterrestrial Morphically-REsonating Mathematicians”, or SEMREM.  

As soon as we have some highly functional AGI theorem-provers at our disposal, work on SEMREM can begin!

P.S. -- After reading the above, Damien Broderick pointed out that species doing lots of math but badly could pollute the morphic math-space, misdirecting all the other species around the cosmos.   Perhaps this will be the cause of some future intergalactic warfare --- AI destroyer-bots will be sent out to nuke the species polluting the morphic math metaverse with wrong equations or inept, roundabout proofs ... or, more optimistically, to properly educate them in the ways of post-Singularity mathemagic...