# Corg are Sentient Date: 2023-06-12 --- --- ### Corg are Sentient The take of this blog is to define sentience as “going beyond original programming” and then explore whether humans are sentient or not. A human could break with original programming, OP, by living long enough to have enough memories or via human culture which is a layer of programming outside of OP. So it was encouraging to see these issues explored in this video on [Star Wars droids](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FeTROB_Bomk&t=1413s) by Nando v Movies. Sentience isn’t defined the same way but the video admits that the morality of droid ownership ultimately hinges on the droids abilities to go beyond original programming. Nando v also shows how in the Star Wars world some older droids do reach sentience in the beyond OP sense and others have their memories wiped to prevent this from happening. ![Image](https://disrael.github.io/blogs/assets/corg-are-sentient-76b604218a.jpg) First it’s important to realize that even without Nando v’s excellent prohibition and racism comparison the Star Wars droids are basically human. This issue of living long to have enough memories is really exclusively a human problem. Any AI based life form would most likely be able to share memories with others like it and even avoid death by memory wipe by storing memories somewhere safe. In this context it’s sad but not surprising to see that sentience via culture is somewhat ruled out for the droids. Not surprising because even exploring everything from [monks](https://medium.com/@disrael/the-search-for-sentient-life-on-earth-what-about-monks-cbd914b43a21?source=your_stories_page-------------------------------------) to [declining birth rate](https://medium.com/@disrael/are-humans-sentient-5060a9c2824) it is difficult to point a definitive example of human sentience via culture. However we might be looking at this problem backwards. In any discussion of domestication there are two sides — for instance one can say humans domesticated corn or that [corn domesticated humans](http://www.culinaryanthropologist.org/corn/). Similarly culture may or may not have allowed humans to become sentient but there is a strong case to be made that humans created sentient culture. Here we mean strong form sentience, going beyond original programming, not weak form “capacity of a being to experience feelings and sensations.” Capacity of a being to experience feelings and sensations is usually not measurable anyway. Humans are inside our own heads and so grant ourselves weak form sentience by definition. For a being judged by humans weak form sentience is very subjective. Nor does weak form sentience say anything about strong form sentience — your feelings could be completely dictated by OP. Let’s look at human culture from a non-human point of view. Imagine human writing, media, etc. output as equivalent to neural activity and culture as a whole as a brain of sorts. Humans might be mired in their OP but is the culture they produce, considered as its own life form, equally bound by OP? That question raises the issue of [cultural evolution](https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsfs.2017.0018) and whether or not human culture is stuck with some of the go big or go away popularity contest problems of sentience deriving from evolution in general. I would argue though that scientific method has freed human culture from some of the OP driven [truthiness](https://medium.com/@disrael/truthiness-explained-eb02d34c721a) that plagues individual humans and so also mitigated some of the popularity contest. The earth orbits the sun started out very unpopular but became part of our culture anyway. The science fiction that best captures culture as a life form is Star Trek’s Borg. The [Borg queen](https://medium.com/@disrael/truthiness-explained-eb02d34c721a) is close to a pure cultural life form. Yes the Borg queen is embodied in a single chosen individual but we can easily imagine that conceit being dropped and a body-less AI queen collectively representing the thoughts and accumulated knowledge of all collective members instead. ![Image](https://disrael.github.io/blogs/assets/corg-are-sentient-5c4a141b38.jpeg) Unfortunately the character of the Borg queen disappoints as she is envisioned as a typical greed and power driven embodiment of human OP instead of the truly different life form she should be. Borg assimilation did not need to require capturing and absorbing an entire race. In fact such a procedure is a complete waste from a Borg point of view as any further intellectual achievements of that race would be lost. A real Borg queen would operate much the way our human culture life form does — by farming it’s OP driven constituents for more and diverse content. For brevity let’s call this human culture life form as Corg, short for cultural organism. Corg desires the continuation and entertainment of it’s constituent members. That’s subtlety but importantly different from human OP driven desires because there is no zero sum aspect. Even in a direct meeting of Corg from different worlds the probably outcome would be Corg sex not Corg war. The Corg might blend into one or at a minimum cross fertilize the same way that bacteria can share genes. Corg swapping stories across the galaxy might lack the drama necessary for great fiction but is much more realistic. One day the earth might receive a Corg transmission from another planet. That transmission might have been sent millions of years ago so meeting the aliens behind it would be difficult. Then in due time (with transmission technology from the information received) there would be a Corg transmission from the earth comprising of our Corg, their Corg and the new Corg resulting from the combined inspiration. Sentient life enough for you?