I that predatory pressures are not the only possible pressures that could facilitate intelligence. Natural disasters, or changing climate could conceivably have the same function. Species that can adapt, will survive. One way to adapt could be to predict and prepare. But of course, intelligence is only a possible answer to such pressures, not the only ones.
True. I suppose without some "pressure", intelligence is unlikely to come about; but as you say, that pressure could be from the environment itself, for instance.
Sure, intelligence isn't the only possible answer. But that would apply equally to these "predatory pressures" of ours as well.
Yep, agreed, a world populated by plants might, through having to adapt to changes to their climate, end up evolving to intelligence. And yet, lacking the dog-eat-dog food chain of earth, it might remain completely non-violent, non-aggressive, and non-expansionist.
(Although I don't know about the last, when I think of it. Are plants non-expansionist? Given the opportunity, wouldn't they proliferate wherever they could? Unless their intelligence led them to stem that instinct, but then that last applies to us as well, our more violent nature notwithstanding. In that last trait, the expansion thing, plants may not really differ from us.)
Another thing to consider is that where we on Earth have different species competing with another, under other conditions it is possible that there is only a single species, or even a single individual, like the mycelium of a huge fungus. We ourselves consist of different cells working together to form an individual, and some regard ant hills as being an individual with moving cells, i.e. ants forming that individual.
Possible, I suppose. Sure, that might explain the astonishingly close, and apparently selfless, coordination we see in creatures like bees and ants. But still, wouldn't that sort of "hypothesis" be more sci-fi type speculation than actual fact (even though, like I said, I suppose it isn't totally impossible, much like many other things aren't totally impossible but we don't seriously think of them as likely)?
Conditions can simply be wildly different from what we know on Earth.
I fear that if we encounter alien life, we will not recognise it as life, and we might not recognise if it is intelligent.
Entirely possible, agreed. Heh, lots of sci-fi along those lines. One I can think of right now, can't remember the title or the author, was where it turns out in the end that the actual alpha intelligence isn't the intelligent and murderous horses, or "hippae", that stomp about that planet, but the grass that the planet is carpeted with. [eta]Just went down and looked it up, the book, it's called Grass, by Sheri Tepper.[/eta]
Again, sci fi territory, rather than reality. But then that applies to the very existence of extra-terrestial life itself, at this point; so I suppose when speaking of life outside of earth, such "hypotheses" are far more likely and believable (than when speaking of ants and bees here on earth, I mean).
