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Sapience without sentience?
Topic Started: Mar 20 2018, 10:44 PM (365 Views)
Scrublord
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Father Pellegrini
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So, I recently read Peter Watt's novel Blindsight, which absolutely blew me away in terms of being one of the most convincing portrayals of an actually alien intelligence in all of fiction.
To elaborate, the human protagonists (well, four humans and a vampire, which in this world are a species of predatory hominid closely related to humans) are on a space mission to investigate an alien artifact at the edge of the Solar System. They attempt to communicate with it, and the aliens reply. But it turns out that even though the aliens are giving the "logical" responses to everything that they get asked, they actually aren't even self-aware. Everything they do is pure instinct, even the creation of advanced technology.
Could something like that happen in reality? It reminds me somewhat of how eusocial insects exhibit complex behaviors, but lack any sort of individual intelligence. The rationale the characters give for this is that self-awareness is an evolutionarily costly and often useless adaptation, and the things it offers--sapience, tool use, technology-- can just as easily be accomplished without it.
Thoughts?
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TAXESbutNano
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I don't think instinct can directly produce extremely complex behaviours, myself. You'd basically have to store the majority of a human brain on your DNA alone- an organ is complex, but recording the interactions between every neuron is stretching it. And it could go wrong with even a small amount of mutations- unlike normal cell systems, where you can install various buffers against things going wrong, a specific information-storing cell system could go full butterfly effect with one small change. It's like needing the spacial coordinates for every cell you grow.

Learned behaviour, meanwhile, is a self-buffering, self-correcting system- it vastly reduces both the required information on the DNA and the risk of it going haywire. I'm not sure if self-awareness is intrinsically linked to it, per say, but I can't see a technological organism without memetics- it's just too good.
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Tartarus
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Seems very doubtful to me. Insects instinctively piling and sticking together material into structures is one thing, building advanced technologies is another. Advanced technologies tend to require certain knowledge of chemistry and physics to be in place before anyone can figure out how to build them. For example, if building anything electronic knowledge of electricity needs to be in place to understand what sort of physical forces will be harnessed and how to harness them. To get the right materials, knowledge of various properties of said materials (e.g. melting point, electrical conductivity, malleability) need to be in place as you can't just slap together any random materials and hope to get a working piece of technology from it. All of this knowledge cannot just be instinctively known, but has to be learned.
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Strychnos
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TAXESbutNano
Mar 21 2018, 05:14 AM
I don't think instinct can directly produce extremely complex behaviours, myself. You'd basically have to store the majority of a human brain on your DNA alone- an organ is complex, but recording the interactions between every neuron is stretching it. And it could go wrong with even a small amount of mutations- unlike normal cell systems, where you can install various buffers against things going wrong, a specific information-storing cell system could go full butterfly effect with one small change. It's like needing the spacial coordinates for every cell you grow.

Learned behaviour, meanwhile, is a self-buffering, self-correcting system- it vastly reduces both the required information on the DNA and the risk of it going haywire. I'm not sure if self-awareness is intrinsically linked to it, per say, but I can't see a technological organism without memetics- it's just too good.

I don't think the aliens in this book stored their coding for behavior entirely on DNA-anologues, nor did it come across when I read the book that the aliens were incapable of developing memes. What I got from it was that the aliens were true examples of philosophical zombie-ism. It also seemed like they couldn't pass the mirror test. Many animals we know to be capable of complex problem solving can't pass the mirror test but can transmit memes, so self awareness would appear to not be completely tied to what we would consider as true sentience.

Also, since we can't really even know if other humans are philosophical zombies or not (or if that even matters) it's hard to say that sentience and intelligence are linked (or, again, if it functionally matters if they are).

Tartarus
 
Seems very doubtful to me. Insects instinctively piling and sticking together material into structures is one thing, building advanced technologies is another. Advanced technologies tend to require certain knowledge of chemistry and physics to be in place before anyone can figure out how to build them. For example, if building anything electronic knowledge of electricity needs to be in place to understand what sort of physical forces will be harnessed and how to harness them. To get the right materials, knowledge of various properties of said materials (e.g. melting point, electrical conductivity, malleability) need to be in place as you can't just slap together any random materials and hope to get a working piece of technology from it. All of this knowledge cannot just be instinctively known, but has to be learned.


The aliens in this book weren't really doing everything by instinct. They were capable of learning and passing down information, but were not aware of it. In a sense, every thought that these aliens had was a subconscious one (and hey, humans brains can perform complex subconscious tasks too!) The book seemed to me to be an exploration of the idea that even the lives of intelligent animals could be absent of any true qualia.

One problem I do have with the book is that the author seemed to present sentience as a binary state, either an organism is aware of itself and the environment or it is not. This could be true, but in between states might also exist. The New Caledonian Crow, for example, is an incredibly adept tool user that can transmit memes. It can use a mirror to solve problems, but is not aware that the bird in the mirror is itself. By the logic of this book, the crow would have no sentient experience. But couldn't it be possible that the bird still perceives it's experiences, has the ability to perceive that it is thinking, but just not be able to perceive a sense of self?

Food for thought.
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