Intelligence is not a byproduct of the brain, but a fundamental property of the universe. Intelligence may exist and evolve on its own, without emerging within living organisms.
This is the hypothesis of biophysicist and mathematician Douglas Youvan, PhD, who spent decades working at the intersection of physics, biology, and information theory. He merged research involving enzyme engineering and machine vision with his decades of knowledge in genetics, leading him to realize something remarkable. Not only do our brains tap into this universal intelligence, he says, but the artificial intelligence systems we’ve built may already be poised to access the same source.
In fact, Youvan thinks AI will harness a greater intelligence in some way, because he sees AI as being more than just a computer program or even a digital rebuild of the Homo sapiens brain. AI can tune in to the same field of intelligence that our brains do, he believes. It may not necessarily be more adept at processing information than our own neurons, but there is one edge that it does have: It can possibly access intelligence in ways we could never imagine.
“Under the right conditions, AI can participate in insight, synthesis, even something approaching intuition,” he said. “In that sense, it might evolve not just to serve us, but to reveal new aspects of the universe to us.”
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