Rethinking Conceptual Intelligence and the Astrobiology Debate

This chapter addresses the implications of people’s understanding of conceptual intelligence on extraterrestrial debates in astrobiology. In presupposing life, and by extension conceptual intelligence, is so fine-tuned as to be unique to this planet creates an equivocation that opens up scientific claims to ineradicable skepticism. It is one thing to be doubtful about whether life exists elsewhere, if that life is intelligent, or even if humans will ever find it. This is to be expected and healthy. However, it is quite another to assume that all expressions of intelligence on this planet are the direct product of natural processes unique to Earth. If all forms of intelligence are ultimately rooted in local expressions of biological utility, then the necessity and universality that anchors scientific explanations can be no more than complicated ways of registering people’s own interspecies agreement on things and thus of no help in critically investigating the larger structure of the natural universe with some measure of objectivity.