In this episode of the “Through the Wormhole” series put together by Discovery Channel, Morgan Freeman asks, “Is the Universe Alive?” He builds on the ideas of a motley crew of scientists in order to learn to see life at multiple scales, including the computer scientists Juergen Schmidhuber (machines are alive) and Seth Lloyd (atoms think), the theoretical physicists Stephon Alexander (the universe has a heart beat) and Lee Smolin (black holes allow for cosmological natural selection), the particle physicist at the Sante Fe Institute Geoffrey West (cities are alive), and the physician Robert Lanza (the universe is imaginary).
An interesting set of ideas. I only had trouble with Lanza’s strangely titled (“biocentrism”?) idealistic solipsism.
