Extraterrestrial Civilizations - Isaac Asimov [3]
That may conceivably be so, but it doesn’t fall within the purview of science since under those conditions, anything can be said. I can say that the Rocky Mountains are made out of emeralds that have the property of looking like ordinary rock to everyone else but me. You can’t disprove that statement but of what value is it? (Far from being of value, such statements are so annoying to people generally that anyone who insists on making them is liable to be treated as insane.)
Science deals only with phenomena that can be reproduced; observations that, under certain fixed conditions, can be made by anybody of normal intelligence; observations upon which reasonable men† can agree.
It may well be argued, in fact, that science is the only field of human intellectual endeavor on which reasonable men can very often agree, and in which reasonable men can sometimes change their minds as new evidence comes in. In politics, art, literature, music, philosophy, religion, economics, history—carry on the list as long as you wish—otherwise reasonable men can not only disagree, but invariably do, and sometimes with the utmost passion; and never change their minds, either, it would appear.
Of course, the scientific world view has not been handed down intact from time immemorial. It was discovered and worked out little by little. It is not complete now, and it may never be entirely complete. New refinements, modifications, additions may seem fantasy at first (quantum theory and relativity certainly did), but there are well-known ways of testing such things carefully; and if the theories pass, they are accepted. The testing method is not always simple and easy, and in the course of the testing disputations may arise* and verification may be unnecessarily delayed.
Acceptance will come in the end, though, for scientific thought is self-correcting as long as there is reasonable freedom of research and publication. (Without infinite money and infinite space, it is hard to be sure of absolute freedom, of course.)
All this is my justification for having this book deal with the supernormal whenever necessary, but never with the supernatural. In the discussion of nonhuman intelligence that will occupy us in this book, we will consider neither angels nor demons, neither God nor Devil, nor anything that is not accessible to observation and experiment and reason.
ANIMALS
In our search for nonhuman intelligence on Earth, then, having eliminated all the wonderful things the human imagination has constructed out of nothing, we must find what we can in the dull things we can sense and observe.
Of the natural objects on Earth, we can, in our search for intelligence, at once eliminate the inanimate, or nonliving ones.
This is by no means an indisputable decision, for it is not an impossible thought that consciousness and intelligence are inherent in all matter; that individual atoms, even, have a certain microquantity of such things.
That may be so, but since such consciousness or intelligence cannot (as yet, at least, and we have no choice but to go with the “as yet”) be in any way measured, or even observed, it falls outside the Universe as I intend to deal with it, and we can eliminate it.
Besides, if we are looking for nonhuman intelligence, it may be taken for granted that we are seeking for intelligence that, while present in something other than a human being, is nevertheless at least roughly comparable in quality to intelligence in a human being. That means it must be intelligence we can clearly recognize as such, and whatever intelligence there may be in a rock, it is not the kind of intelligence we can recognize.
Ah, but must all kinds of intelligence be the same, or even similar, or even recognizable? Might not a boulder be as intensely intelligent as we are, or more intensely, but be so in a completely unrecognizable way?
If that is so, there is nothing to prevent us from saying that every individual object in the entire Universe is as intelligent as a human being, or more intelligent