Percy Bysshe Shelley

But if you’ve ever watched young men combing their hair, you’ll see the same principle is at work.

I’ve often wondered if intelligent aliens have humor. I know dolphins like to play prankster. But I guess we don’t even have a good idea what humor is.

The best definition I’ve heard is “an appreciation of the absurdity of existence”.

As for alien raspberries…

something’s wrong

The sun can warm the coldest dawn
And move the movement on the lawn
I watch in every single way
Inside out, yea, outside in, every day

There you are
Makin’ it up but you’re sure that it is a star
When all you’ll see
It’s an illusion shining down in front of me
There you’ll say
Even in time we shall control the day
When all you’ll see
Deep inside the day’s controlling you and me

And one peculiar point I see
As one of many ones of me
As truth is gathered, I rearrange
Inside out, outside in
Inside out, outside in
Perpetual change

There you are
Saying we have the moon, so now the stars
When all you see
Is near disaster gazing down on you and me

There you’re standing
Saying we have the whole world in our hands
When all you’ll see
Deep inside the world’s controlling you and me

You’ll see perpetual change
You’ll see perpetual change

Aaa, aaa

There you are
Saying we have the moon, so now the stars
When all you see
Is near disaster gazing down on you and me
There you’re standing
Saying we have the whole world in our hands
When all you’ll see
Deep inside the world’s controlling you and me

As mist and sun are both the same
We look on as, as pawns of their game
They move to testify the day
Inside out, outside in
Inside out, outside in
All of the way
Yea, yea
Ahh, all the way, yea

Perpetual Change
Jon Anderson and Chris Squire
Yes: The Yes Album
1971

The model of the behavior that I wrote through demonstrated something akin to our sense of humor+joking+laughter. It was a deliberate and obvious telling of a lie concerning the size of something. When the alien jokester had done a good job the listeners would respond by making a buzzing sound by forcing air through lips pressed tightly together (similar to “raspberries”).

It did not get written because (as is usual for me) I could not come up with a plot that I liked enough to hang my ideas around.

It is not the mask. It is what’s behind the mask. It tasks you, it heaps you. It gives you no rest, but it gives you great joy.

Biologists are used to convergent evolution, like the streamlining of dolphins and sharks or echolocation in bats and whales—animals from separate lineages have similar adaptations. But convergent evolution of algorithms? Either all these collectives came up with different behaviors that produce the same outcomes—head-butting bees, neighbor-watching starlings, light-dodging golden shiners—or some basic rules underlie everything and the behaviors are the bridge from the rules to the collective.

Stephen Wolfram would probably say it’s the underlying rules. The British mathematician and inventor of the indispensable software Mathematica published a backbreaking 1,200-page book in 2002, A New Kind of Science, positing that emergent properties embodied by collectives came from simple programs that drove the complexity of snowflakes, shells, the brain, even the universe itself. Wolfram promised that his book would lead the way to uncovering those algorithms, but he never quite got there.

Couzin, on the other hand, is wary of claims that his field has hit upon the secret to life, the universe, and everything. “I’m very cautious about suggesting that there’ll be an underlying theory that’ll explain the stock market and neural systems and fish schools,” he says. “That’s relatively naive. There’s a danger in thinking that one equation fits all.” Physics predicts the interactions of his locusts, but the mechanism manifests through cannibalism. Math didn’t produce the biology; biology generated the math.