Hi folks – working through some deep-level author stuff which I’ll talk about in a few. Right now I want to pass along some cool scifi writing ideas in the form of a question: What is intelligence vs sentience? Redditor zeFrogLeaps answers this for us below. Let’s read their brilliant comment and then discuss what it means for our writing going forward:
Intelligence is the ability to acquire and apply skills. It’s pure raw problem-solving capacity.
Sentience is the awareness that you (and others) exist. The capacity to have feelings and to reason and act based on that knowledge. Sentience is a gradient. Pretty much all organisms have some degree of sentience, that’s why an animal doesn’t eat its own leg for example. It’s made out of food but it has a basic body awareness that causes it to understand that its leg is part of it and thus shouldn’t be eaten or otherwise damaged.
Primates and parrots are a great example. In various experiments we’ve taught intelligent animals like various primates and parrots to communicate with us. By use of gestures, button panels or other methods, they learn how to express simple questions and comments.
And they’ve learned to ask for many things. For example, when provided with a puzzle box that they cannot open but we can, they can ask us to “Open box” or “get fruit”. They can also make simple demands. “Polly wants a cracker” or “Hug me”.
But despite their intelligence and their capacity for understanding how to use these communication methods to make demands or solve challenges, it’s virtually unheard of for these animals to express existential questions that demonstrate self-awareness.
One of the exceptions is a grey parrot who once asked “What colour am I?”. A simple question but the implications are so much bigger than “Polly wants a cracker”. This parrot realised that it is a unique individual with qualities, like it’s colour, that are unique to it. And it wanted to know more about itself. That’s nearly unheard of with these intelligent animals that learn to communicate with us.
A simpler and more to the point example. Primates are extremely capable of learning new skills by intently watching each other. If one of them figures out how to spoon ants out of an anthill using a stick, the skill will spread through the group very fast.
But primates (like other animals) are incapable of teaching. They are incapable of realising that a new skill they have learned is unique to them but will be beneficial to the group if they sit their groupmates down and teach them.
So a primate is very intelligent and far more sentient than an insect. But compared to humans their sentience is very limited.
The aliens in blindsight were extremely intelligent. They had considerably more brainpower than us humans. But they had zero sentience. The individual aliens had no real sense of self-preservation. Sure they’d defend themselves but they also had no problem with dying for the benefit of their group. All of their brainpower was devoted to problem-solving and skill application and none of it was applied to sentience.
Which was also the root cause of the conflict. The greetings we sent into the void were a defacto attack on them. Every transmission took up resources to decode without giving anything meaningful in return. We were forcing them to waste resources so they came to shut down the source of the attack. – Source
So the cool takeaway from this breakdown is that the aliens in the Three Body Problem were similar in intent to the Formics of Ender’s Game – hive-minds with no awareness of self. Another cool takeaway is that when we talk about aliens and what it might be like to meet them, we need to understand the difference of terms in things like Intelligence vs Sentience. Not only does it impact how we write the alien characters, it impacts how the readers will read them. We as authors must clearly understand the problems of the stories we’re telling and solve them before the reader gets there.
I hope you found this helpful in your writing – I’m definitely taking these ideas into my work ahead. Write On!
