The search for sentient life on earth — rules and regulations
In the search for sentient life on earth rules and regulations form a part of the culture capable of allowing humans to go beyond DNA formed original programming, OP.
Imagine a group of gorillas led by a alpha male. For the purposes of this discussion we overly simplify gorilla social structure to make gorilla OP more understandable.
Let’s start with a troop of gorillas where their social structure is written down but never read by any of the gorillas. At this stage OP obviously still remains supreme and we can think of the troop as mostly DNA led robots minus whatever sentience could be gleaned from their unwritten memory led culture (an oral tradition of memorizing and passing down across generations is here mostly equivalent to writing).
Now in stage two we give the gorillas access to these rules and regulations. Let’s suppose that they then are able to extend this cultural tool and create much larger troops with a hierarchy of alpha males — feudalism if you will. So now culture is a tool of OP but no threat yet of the tool dominating IE the tail wagging the dog.
In stage three the rules and regulations become more complex to where they must be consulted regularly and eventually dominance of alpha males is threatened. Simply writing down that the troops alpha male gorillas are in charge is not enough to contain the growing power of culture. If an alpha males authority comes from rules and regulations then that is not at all the original situation where the authority came from OP.
So for the stage three alpha male gorillas it’s a fine line. They want the larger troop size that the tool of culture afforded them but not full sentient life where the rules and regulations are in charge — not them. So they would want to limit what is written down as much as possible without giving up their larger troop size civilization and leave the rest to OP unwritten rules.
In stage four the troop is even larger and unwritten rules no longer work. Again simply writing alpha males are in charge would eventually lead to someone simply inserting NOT so that alpha males are NOT in charge. Rather than admit the rules and regulations are the ultimate authority the alpha males would write up a rule like the strongest should be in charge along with lots of regulations on how strongest is to be measured.
Stage four has somewhat left original programming but can they be described as sentient life? Or is their DNA programming still merely being culturally extended?
Again we go back to our previous blog’s metric of “unable to break out of routine even when routine is making them unhappy”. This is well in line with the dictionary definition of sentient as “able to perceive or feel things” since a robot that can feel things should be able to act on those feelings.
A robot that can feel but not act on those feeling might be some weak form of sentient (the robot that could kvetch — hilariously represented in The Good Place by a robot begging for it’s life but simultaneously encouraging it’s murder) but not one that can be measured and so not helpful in a search for sentient life.
Now we have to leave the gorilla example as we’ve no idea what they feel. For humans in a stage four troop a lot would depend on the level of fear.
If the world were scary enough then diligently following OP practices to conquer the threats might be very meaningful. Otherwise it’s routine for routine’s sake and one wonders whether even the alphas would be happy with that (space anyone?).
Of course everything in this example was over simplified as stated at the beginning. Happy or unhappy are emotional constructs that also lie in the domain between DNA controlled OP and culture. So as usual measuring sentience is turtles all the way down.
Still it’s clear that rule of law and better regulations is much more likely to result in sentience than an OP traditional tribal structure.