# The search for sentient life on earth Date: 2023-02-05 --- --- ### The search for sentient life on earth Fortune has an article claiming that my [one sign of sentience](https://medium.com/@disrael/are-humans-sentient-5060a9c2824) on this planet is [just an economic aberration](https://fortune.com/2023/01/12/millennials-broken-economy-delay-children-birthrate/). Let’s take it at face value that birth rates are a debatable manifestation of humanity’s ability to buck original programming, OP. What else might positively indicate the power of culture to promote humans from simple robots to a truly sentient species? Bertrand Russell said, “Man is a rational animal — so at least I have been told. Throughout a long life I have looked diligently for evidence in favour of this statement, but so far I have not had the good fortune to come across it.” But sentience does not require rationality. In West World the robots mostly need time and memory to acquire sentience. Memories are acquired in addition to OP so in theory enough memories could outweigh OP decision making input. However humans don’t live very long so we need the weight of culture to attempt a similar trick. So one way to search for sentience is to track high levels of culture and see if they lead to humans that are advanced past reproductive machines running Red Queen races. This is extremely hard though since a sentient being doesn’t *have* to break with OP — it merely has that option and may use the freedom occasionally or even never and still be sentient. For instance the West World robots can choose to continue to live in West World or even continue to serve humans (though probably not in their original programmed stories), searching for sentience is not as easy as finding renegades. Conversely finding renegades does not guarantee sentience; some percent rebellion might be built into OP and 60’s rebels became 90’s ultra conservatives. Another way to measure sentience is *resistance to change*. In West World non-sentient robots are unable to break out of routine even when routine is making them unhappy. Take Jordan Peterson’s defense against sentience when a magazine put a woman he considered [unattractive on the cover](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbF7QEKJTZ4). Peterson is not directly defending OP because men of any age might have been attracted to that woman. Peterson is objecting to the magazine using culture to potentially control basic levers inside OP. Deliberately using culture to promote sentience will eventually more fully challenge OP, no matter what original programming really is. The fight against birth control and other conservative projects are basically the fight to remain choice-less robots. Put another way a defender of “individual freedom” might also be defending against sentience because without strong group culture humans are unlikely to break from DNA programmed behavior. Unfortunately arguing against humans as robots does not necessarily make one a promoter of sentience. Conservatives were arguing against the use of culture as a lever — not *for* OP. IE most conservatives are not trying to conserve anything material. So one could easily argue for an OP of humans stably occupying the planet while advocating reduced carbon, reproduction rights and against attacks on diversity. Even a defense of pure animal rights can be in support of OP if one considers the annihilation of millions of species as a potential loss for human bio-technology. Another words the current culture wars might mostly boil down to robots versus robots. Even a West World in which half the robots say stay in West World and the other half so go does not fully indicate sentience. The half that says go might simply want to continue to serve humans elsewhere. Such a simple dispute could be programmed into a robot with just a coin toss stay / go algorithm. What about a humanity that *en masse* has a death wish? Would that prove sentience? No as you can’t be sentient if you are dead. So we can’t easily declare sentient or not but we can track the power of culture in our society. Culture started as pure tool of OP that allowed higher level organization of humans living in a hostile world. But a tool that becomes powerful enough can affect it’s creator — a big enough tail can wag the dog. For this tracking we can look to the [heat of the culture wars](https://heartlandsignal.com/2023/02/02/opinion-backlash-comes-for-the-right-wing-culture-war-in-small-town-wisconsin/). In order to get this hot culture must actually be a powerful enough force to be worth skirting the edge of crazy and maybe going over. It could all still be robots versus robots for now but more and more of the robots believe sentience is possible.