The Earth is far more alive than previously thought, according to “deep life” studies that reveal a rich ecosystem beneath our feet that is almost twice the size of all the world’s oceans.

Despite extreme heat, no light, minuscule nutrition and intense pressure, scientists estimate this subterranean biosphere is teeming with between 15bn and 23bn tonnes of micro-organisms, hundreds of times the combined weight of every human on the planet.

Researchers at the Deep Carbon Observatory say the diversity of underworld species bears comparison to the Amazon or the Galápagos Islands, but unlike those places the environment is still largely pristine because people have yet to probe most of the subsurface.

But perhaps the problem is not that insects lack an inner life, but that they don’t have a way to communicate it in terms we can understand. It is hard for us to prise open a window into their minds. So maybe we misdiagnose animal brains as having machine-like properties simply because we understand how machines work – whereas, to date, we have only a fragmentary and imperfect insight into how even the simplest brains process, store and retrieve information.

However, there are now many signs that consciousness-like phenomena might exist not just among humans or even great apes – but that insects might have them, too. Not all of these lines of evidence are from experiments specifically designed to explore consciousness; in fact, some have lain buried in the literature for decades, even centuries, without anyone recognising their hidden significance.

Based on such evidence, several biologists (notably Eva Jablonka in Tel Aviv and Andrew Barron in Sydney), and philosophers (Peter Godfrey-Smith in Sydney and Colin Klein in Canberra) now suggest that consciousness-like phenomena might not have evolved late in our history, as we previously thought. Rather, they could be evolutionarily ancient and have arisen in the Cambrian era, around 500 million years ago.

At its evolutionary roots, we think that consciousness is an adaptation that helped to solve the problem of how moving organisms can extract meaningful information from their sense organs. In an ever-changing and only semi-predictable environment, consciousness can solve this problem more efficiently than unconscious mechanisms possibly could. It involves manifold features, but some include: a grasp of time and space; the capacity for self-recognition; foresight; emotions; and top-down processing. As the American zoologist Donald Griffin wrote in Animal Minds (1992): ‘Environmental conditions vary so much that for an animal’s brain to have programmed specifications for optimal behaviour in all situations would require an impossibly lengthy instruction book.’

Scientists have begun to speak of functional extinction (as opposed to the more familiar kind, numerical extinction). Functionally extinct animals and plants are still present but no longer prevalent enough to affect how an ecosystem works. Some phrase this as the extinction not of a species but of all its former interactions with its environment — an extinction of seed dispersal and predation and pollination and all the other ecological functions an animal once had, which can be devastating even if some individuals still persist. The more interactions are lost, the more disordered the ecosystem becomes. A 2013 paper in Nature, which modeled both natural and computer-generated food webs, suggested that a loss of even 30 percent of a species’ abundance can be so destabilizing that other species start going fully, numerically extinct — in fact, 80 percent of the time it was a secondarily affected creature that was the first to disappear. A famous real-world example of this type of cascade concerns sea otters. When they were nearly wiped out in the northern Pacific, their prey, sea urchins, ballooned in number and decimated kelp forests, turning a rich environment into a barren one and also possibly contributing to numerical extinctions, notably of the Stellar’s sea cow.

Conservationists tend to focus on rare and endangered species, but it is common ones, because of their abundance, that power the living systems of our planet. Most species are not common, but within many animal groups most individuals — some 80 percent of them — belong to common species. Like the slow approach of twilight, their declines can be hard to see. White-rumped vultures were nearly gone from India before there was widespread awareness of their disappearance. Describing this phenomenon in the journal BioScience, Kevin Gaston, a professor of biodiversity and conservation at the University of Exeter, wrote: “Humans seem innately better able to detect the complete loss of an environmental feature than its progressive change.”

In addition to extinction (the complete loss of a species) and extirpation (a localized extinction), scientists now speak of defaunation: the loss of individuals, the loss of abundance, the loss of a place’s absolute animalness. In a 2014 article in Science, researchers argued that the word should become as familiar, and influential, as the concept of deforestation. In 2017 another paper reported that major population and range losses extended even to species considered to be at low risk for extinction. They predicted “negative cascading consequences on ecosystem functioning and services vital to sustaining civilization” and the authors offered another term for the widespread loss of the world’s wild fauna: “biological annihilation.”

It is estimated that, since 1970, Earth’s various populations of wild land animals have lost, on average, 60 percent of their members. Zeroing in on the category we most relate to, mammals, scientists believe that for every six wild creatures that once ate and burrowed and raised young, only one remains. What we have instead is ourselves. A study published this year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that if you look at the world’s mammals by weight, 96 percent of that biomass is humans and livestock; just 4 percent is wild animals.

We’ve begun to talk about living in the Anthropocene, a world shaped by humans. But E.O. Wilson, the naturalist and prophet of environmental degradation, has suggested another name: the Eremocine, the age of loneliness.

Our political opinions and attitudes are an important part of who we are and how we construct our identities. Hence, if I ask your opinion on health care, you will not only share it with me, but you will likely resist any of my attempts to persuade you of another point of view. Likewise, it would be odd for me to ask if you are sure that what you said actually was your opinion. If anything seems certain to us, it is our own attitudes. But what if this weren’t necessarily the case?

In a recent experiment, we showed it is possible to trick people into changing their political views. In fact, we could get some people to adopt opinions that were directly opposite of their original ones. Our findings imply that we should rethink some of the ways we think about our own attitudes, and how they relate to the currently polarized political climate. When it comes to the actual political attitudes we hold, we are considerably more flexible than we think.

A powerful shaping factor about our social and political worlds is how they are structured by group belonging and identities. For instance, researchers have found that moral and emotion messages on contentious political topics, such as gun-control and climate change, spread more rapidly within rather than between ideologically like-minded networks. This echo-chamber problem seems to be made worse by the algorithms of social media companies who send us increasingly extreme content to fit our political preferences.

We are also far more motivated to reason and argue to protect our own or our group’s views. Indeed, some researchers argue that our reasoning capabilities evolved to serve that very function.  A recent study illustrates this very well: participants who were assigned to follow Twitter accounts that retweeted information containing opposing political views to their own with the hope of exposing them to new political views. But the exposure backfired—increased polarization in the participants. Simply tuning Republicans into MSNBC, or Democrats into Fox News, might only amplify conflict. What can we do to make people open their minds?

The trick, as strange as it may sound, is to make people believe the opposite opinion was their own to begin with.

Scientific and technological progress might change people’s capabilities or incentives in ways that would destabilize civilization. For example, advances in DIY biohacking tools might make it easy for anybody with basic training in biology to kill millions; novel military technologies could trigger arms races in which whoever strikes first has a decisive advantage; or some economically advantageous process may be invented that produces disastrous negative global externalities that are hard to regulate. This paper introduces the concept of a vulnerable world: roughly, one in which there is some level of technological development at which civilization almost certainly gets devastated by default, i.e. unless it has exited the “semi-anarchic default condition”. Several counterfactual historical and speculative future vulnerabilities are analyzed and arranged into a typology. A general ability to stabilize a vulnerable world would require greatly amplified capacities for preventive policing and global governance. The vulnerable world hypothesis thus offers a new perspective from which to evaluate the risk-benefit balance of developments towards ubiquitous surveillance or a unipolar world order.

Just like a quantum computer, physical processes involve the exchange and processing of information. Lloyd explains that when two electrons interact, their velocities and spins interact just like the patterns of firing neurons do in the brains of two businessmen talking on the phone. The amount of information lost during a process is related to how complex the encoding of information is. Lloyd compares this to long division: the results of the intermediate steps in long division are useless, or “junk” information (Lloyd, 2007). Physicists want to know the relevant information as well as this discarded information.

Think about your laptop; what is the limit to the amount of information it can process? There are two limitations; the first being that most of the energy is locked up in the mass of the computer itself, and the second being that a computer uses many electrical signals to just register one bit. Perhaps the information of the universe is limited in the same way. Just like any natural process, how fast a computer can process information must be limited by its energy and the number of degrees of freedom it possesses.

Ed Fredkin first proposed that the universe could be a computer in the 1960’s, as well as Konrad Zuse who came up with the idea independently. In their view, the universe could be a type of computer called a cellular automaton, which describes a dynamic system that is broken apart into black and white grids, in which cells gather information from the surrounding cells on whether or not to change color (Lloyd, 2007). This is similar to the way a line or moving colony of ants might share information between each other about their surroundings, signaling to each other whether or not to follow a food trail.

...If not much that happens in nature is, in fact, as orderly and regular as we have been led to believe by physics, then we must expect even less order when we enter the world of the human sciences. Hence, if the economist attempts to lay down laws, he or she is well-advised to equip them with ceteris paribus conditions – that is, if he proposes that “taxes increase prices” he will protect his hide by informing us that they will only do so if other things are equal. But other things rarely are equal. All kinds of countervailing trends may be at work, as well as quite unexpected events – a run on the dollar, an oil bonanza, a devaluation of the currency – so that it is possible that a tax increase, far from raising prices, may be followed by a fall in prices.

Does this mean that the ‘law’ in this case is wrong? Not at all. In explaining why the law failed to apply on this particular occasion the economist will have recourse to counterfactuals: that is, he will explain that the tax increase would have caused a rise in prices if x or y or z had not occurred. In which case, one may think, it is not much of a law, if it cannot guarantee that the cause will give rise to the effect. However, Cartwright argues that this situation is scarcely peculiar to laws of economics; it applies equally to the laws of physics.

Normally the laws of physics do not come to us armed with ceteris paribus clauses: physicists are rather more confident of the robustness of their laws than are economists. For Cartwright, however, this confidence comes from the fact that, unlike economists, physicists are able, in the closed world of the laboratory, to ensure that the outcomes they predict are in fact attained. They create, that is, the severely restricted conditions in which their predictions will come true. Here Cartwright quotes the econometrician Tyrgve Haavelmo who praises the cleverness of physicists who “confine their predictions to the outcomes of their experiments.” When it comes to predicting things in the real world – the world of avalanches, floods, and earthquakes – the task is somewhat trickier...

Cartwright, unusually for a philosopher of science, displays a concern not only for science as knowledge but for its potentiality to change the world. If we are practically concerned with science our main interest is less with conceptual purity than with getting things to work. She cites the example of building a superconducting device which would allow us to detect the victims of strokes. Superconductivity occurs when a metal’s electrical resistance vanishes below a certain critical temperature, and is understood in terms of quantum mechanics. In the practical business of designing such a device, Cartwright finds that the supposed primacy of quantum physics disappears. It is the case, rather, that quantum and classical mechanics are applied on an ad hoc basis, as and when they are seen to work. In general she argues that quantum mechanics, rather than offering (as is often alleged) a more basic, ‘truer’ account of the world than classical physics provides, is instead severely limited in its scope of operation. It is not a case of the one being true and the other false. Rather, she argues that quantum physics works only in very specific situations, and not at all when classical physics works best. The latter in no way supervenes on the former. In order to make sense of the world we need both. The world, it seems, does not acknowledge the requirements of scientific faith that it be rational and well-ordered.