# Search for Sentience on Earth — Identity
Date: 2023-06-05

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### Search for Sentience on Earth — Identity

![Graph of ranking of human identity versus choice of human identity](https://disrael.github.io/blogs/assets/search-for-sentience-on-earth-identity-9acf96e58d.png)
*Graph of ranking of human identity versus choice of human identity*

Here as always with this blog sentience is defined as the ability to go beyond original programming. So we further define that “full sentience” would be complete control over your programming IE complete choice of identity.

Full sentience would overwhelm any attempt at ranking humans as any identity that did not rank highly could be changed. Similarly an assigned identity scheme like a caste system destroys full sentience.

Equal pay for all jobs reduces the ability to rank but does nothing towards allowing one to change one’s identity.

Education is a form of limited sentience and so increases choice of identity. Designer babies would presumably allow a one time full choice of identity but high ranking would require choosing the right design.

So roughly speaking the recent increase in sexual fluidity is a step towards sentience and the ever increasing income inequality is a step towards a caste system and away from sentience.

Towards this blog’s thesis of using culture to encourage sentience one path that jumps out from this diagram is removing ranking. Do humans need ranking to satisfy their original programming, OP?

Offhand no because for instance [medieval life](https://www.getty.edu/news/what-was-life-like-for-women-in-the-middle-ages/) was much closer to equal pay for all jobs than we are now. **Progress has so far increased both the choice of identity and the ranking of the resulting identity.**

So potentially the hard line in OP is that diversity increases feelings of inferiority / superiority and othering. Higher levels of education, workforce participation in more abstract jobs and overall wealth may come with an inevitable ranking hangover.

Or put another way increased sentient choice of identity is always met with increased ranking of those choices:

![Image](https://disrael.github.io/blogs/assets/search-for-sentience-on-earth-identity-be804fe920.png)

So progress can become a [Red Queen’s race](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen%27s_race) where greater choice of identity is always met with greater competition between identities resulting in a sort of [golden mean](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_mean_%28philosophy%29).

Diversity of choice of intellectual identity is met with the crude ranking of humans into “smart” and not smart. Increased freedom of travel and availability of culture is met with unequal distribution of these goods and ranking of humans by level of access.

*Can humans appreciate diversity for diversity or do we mostly only appreciate ranked diversity?*

In a world stripped of ranking all of our career aspirations and hobby passions are in danger of not sufficiently satisfying OP. Even the sustenance level feudal life was highly ranked if you consider the quick as ranking above the dead.

Imagine when designing your designer baby one of the choices is “seeker of beauty but not status.” Is an entity given such an original programming still human?

Definitely yes the seeker of beauty but not status is human. Our educational systems arguably once tolerated such a person but now [that’s seen as archaic](https://hbr.org/2021/05/the-u-s-education-system-isnt-giving-students-what-employers-need).

However a ranking agnostic person would be less likely to contribute to culture than one aware of status. A person who does not procreate is genetically silenced. Culture does not have such a strict rule but it’s also a group resource owned by billions and someone motivated purely by beauty might have a quieter voice.

Both our genetic and cultural identities are biased towards ranking and so even our limited sentience remains tarnished by OP status.