Intelligent but non-sapient

Summary:

What is the T's take on this?

Intelligent but non-sapient

Pilgrim 23 May 2008 19:56

Since there aren't really any T's, I thought I'd ask Colin and the hivemind here - what would the Transcendentals take on intellignet but non-self aware life be? Part of me thinks they wouldn't even care (its a big universe after all), but another part of me says they'd fire up the strangelet launcher, especially if it was a human variant.

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Reason I'm asking is instead of pounding my head against writer's block the size of a 2001 monolith with regards to OA, I'm playing a bit. Maybe the Rix from the Killing of Worlds, but something like a cross between zimboes and the eusocial human variants of Hellstrom's Hive is currently tainting my brain meat, maybe even touches of Fourth Millennium's Donegal Phyle.

What I'm thinking here is a biological caste system, divided by gender, with a variety of specialized roles. Further, unlike the entities from Hellstrom's Hive, most of the members of this civ aren't sentient. Yes, they can pass a Turing test, but to borrow from a friend on rpg.net, the lights are on, but no one is home in there. The ruling caste is sentient, but constrained and can't reproduce.

Anyway, thoughts? Comments?

Re: Intelligent but non-sapient

Pneumonica 23 May 2008 21:23

It depends on what they do. If they sit there and act as a data conduit for to you provide suggestions to help a friend you've never met get through his writer's block, then they probably wouldn't care. If they actually provide those suggestions under thier own power, I imagine the Transies would have a serious issue with them.

Re: Intelligent but non-sapient

Colin_Fredericks 24 May 2008 03:24

In my opinion, self-awareness comes as a package deal with intelligence. You can't really be intelligent without it, though the degree varies. The reverse is not necessarily true; I think my cat is self-aware, but certainly not very bright. I have a trouble imagining intelligent life without self-awareness, mostly because intelligent self-aware life is the only kind I've seen so far.

Can you give better definitions of "self-aware" and "intelligent?" Perhaps tell what someone who had one but not the other would do in certain exemplifying situations?

Re: Intelligent but non-sapient

narfanator 25 May 2008 03:19

My current working definitions for intelligence versus sapeince/sentience is as follows:
Intelligence is sophisticated pattern & symbol matching; Matlab has some vaguely "intelligent" programs, but, essentially, the day we have something that can do some of the more complex differential equations via symbol manipulation is the day we have an intelligent system. Understanding of the symbols not required.

Sentience is the ability to look at two symbols, for which you have no rules relating them (or set of rules), and come up with an accurate rule to relate them.

Essentially, intelligence deals with thoughts expressed in a "language", while sentience can deal with the thought directly, without quantification.

Re: Intelligent but non-sapient

Colin_Fredericks 29 May 2008 17:19

Where is self-awareness in that?

Re: Intelligent but non-sapient

TauCeti 30 May 2008 17:44

My original conception of the Aia was built on the idea of a fully intelligent, sentient society that /wasn't/ self-aware, at least not in the classic sense.

Wikipedia's take on self-awareness.

The idea was to have entities for whom the concept of “I” is blatantly inaccurate. The closest approximation to “self” for the Aia is “gestalt”, “zeitgeist”, or “collective”, and even then it fails to describe the sheer degree of blending between “individuals”.

My intent was to demonstrate (admittedly in fiction) that such entities could conceivably exist and could function rationally; and that their world view would be necessarily alien.

WARNING: ramblings ahead:
It was also to shed light on the human concept of “self” which I find horribly inaccurate. Personally, I am a collection of millions of cells, each a separate living organism, although crippled by evolution into the hive that is me such that they cannot survive on their own. I am also a tiny fragment of the gestalt of my society and of humanity as a whole. I am a small piece of the decision making of the company I work for, which itself is an individual (although certainly not a human one). I exist not only within my body but also in the minds of those around me, and the many records of me in schools, hospitals, and on the Internet all represent parts of the thing that is me. If I were to die today, my influence on reality (and thus “I”) would slowly fade, but that process would take many years (10 years for the medical records, for example). This is what I mean by “I”. By the classical definition, where “I” is only a single individual, I don't have self-awareness. And by my definition, most people (who don't have my bizarre sense of scale) don't have it.

Re: Intelligent but non-sapient

Rhebeqah 29 Mar 2020 13:07

I suggest reading "Blindsight" by Peter Watts which is about first contact with a non-sapient technological civilisation. Very creepy and disturbing, especially the author's speculations that such intelligences are the most common type in the universe. It seems to me that the Logicians were heading in such a direction. However, contact with emotional yet more technologically advanced civilisations has given them pause.

Last edited on 29 Mar 2020 13:55 by Rhebeqah Show more

Re: Intelligent but non-sapient

Colin_Fredericks 31 Mar 2020 22:45

Thanks for the recommendation.