I’m constraining the laws of sentience in my own science fiction universe. I’m conceptualizing and not wording a polished version.
The principals of sentience
- one must never act to harm self or other sentients
- one must practice tit for tat with a tenth extra measure of forgiveness
- sentients disarm and uplift all subsentients to mitigate self harm
- sentience is a measure of behavior only applicable on millennial scales
These ideas lead me to question: where exactly does the Hippocratic principal of “first do no harm” fail us as humans and lead to the mass murder orgies of war?
I’m partial to TST’s Seven Tenets, and they work for “laws of sentience” in a sci-fi universe as well.
What even does the second rule mean? Tit for tat, but also forgive (with a quantifier for how much forgiveness)? Sounds like an oxymoron to me.
So like the 10 commandments but for aliens?
Laws of Robotics by Asimov. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._Daneel_Olivaw
That is what I am inverting in concept
I think because we don’t use “first do no harm” as a first and higher-order law. It gets overridden by religion, vengeance, something might seem threatening or unfair more due to subjective perspective and then you’re doing harm to defend something (unrightfully)…
And what’s with situations where you can’t avoid harm? And if you can never do harm, you also can’t defend something against malicious actors?! I mean that might be alright in your scifi universe, but that’s definitely not how our world works. We have malicious sentient beings around.
The existence of these laws implies the existence of an institution to dictate and enforce them.
The place where these kinds of things fall apart, IMO, ultimately comes not from issues concerning the interactions of individual people, but from issues concerning the interactions of people with institutions.
I think that is a matter of scale, scope, and culture. As humans we are still too small for such a culture to form with relevance. The culture and definition changes with scale and when there is contrast with more than one potentially sentient group.
I’m thinking about how difficult life is for people with a criminal record or those convicted of crimes against children. The culture and label have some serious power and these impact the labeled individual considerably. Most of the problems I see when it comes to institutions is from subsentient type behavior where someone is always willing to turn to negative criminality for their own gain. Once there is any kind of entity with persistence of mind or a more hive minded culture aware of their place in time, such short term compromises for gain become meaningless.
In the big picture, every negative input represents a step backwards in true potential growth as shown in game theory. Every advancement achieved through conflict is really just a program of blank check investment with well defined objectives. The same investment strategy in the economy at large should produce nearly identical but far more net positive outcomes. It is the negative miserly austerity culture that leads to stagnation, consolidation, and tyranny. Such is the result of subsentient creatures that cannot act in the best interests of themselves long term and never in the best interests of their kind in altruism.
I picture a contrasting group that is persistent of mind or culture, and these holding a view of subsentients like child rapists and excons while interacting with them as the lesser beings they are and the limited potential they are capable of achieving. It is not about enforcement through violence, it is about proving that it is a disadvantage for such ineptitude.
The US won the cold war because of the shift to venture capital and growing an economy after ditching the military based industrial economy while the USSR never responded in kind. Prosperity can win conflicts when short term gains and exploitation are made meaningless for the sake of persistent logarithmic gains.
Sentience is the ability to experience feelings and sensations. it’s a pretty low bar. I think the word you are looking for is sapience.
Generally speaking sentience is self awareness when applied to the individual. Sentient self awareness is acting in one’s best interest with planning and strategy that includes long term self preservation.
The question of sentience can however have a broader context at the species level. At this level, does the entire species display an altruistic self awareness where they act in the best interest of the entire species. Humans at the present fail as a sentient species. I am not the first to make this association or definition, just don’t ask me to quote who exactly. I think it was Asimov in one of his short stories but I’m not certain.
