Xenopsychology
Xenopsychology


  


  © 1984 Robert A. Freitas Jr. 
    All Rights Reserved.


  Robert A. Freitas Jr., “Xenopsychology,” Analog Science Fiction/Science 
    Fact, Vol. 104, April 1984, pp 41-53
  URL: http://www.rfreitas.com/Astro/Xenopsychology.htm
  
  
  This paper is the first known published reference to the 
    "Sentience Quotient" invented by Robert 
    A. Freitas Jr., which first defined the computational density of sentient 
    matter along a wide spectrum spanning 120 orders of magnitude, as defined 
    by universal physical constants. The concept was first created ca. 1977-78 
    and was described in Freitas' privately circulated but then unpublished Xenology 
    (1979) manuscript. (The book has since been published 
    online.)
  
  So far we have very little direct knowledge of alien 
    minds -- 
    but we have some fascinating bases for speculation. 

There's a story about a psychologist," science fiction writer 
  Murray Leinster once wrote, "who was studying the intelligence of a chimpanzee. 
  He led the chimp into a room full of toys, went out, closed the door and put 
  his eye to the keyhole to see what the chimp was doing. He found himself gazing 
  into a glittering interested brown eye only inches from his own. The chimp was 
  looking through the keyhole to see what the psychologist was doing." 
What the psychologist was doing was proceeding on a false 
  assumption; that the subject would behave as expected! Obviously even a creature 
  that looks vaguely human may, or may not act human. How vastly more difficult 
  must it be for us to understand extraterrestrial beings who may look I like 
  nothing we've ever seen before? Certainly we shall be at least as surprised 
  by alien behavior as we are by earthly minds. But evolution is even more important 
  than physical appearance, especially where alien psychology–xenopsychology–is 
  concerned. All living creatures, whether of this world or another, survivors 
  in an endless chain of "winners," organisms whose behavior and sentience allowed 
  them to succeed and increase their numbers. 
Intelligence on Earth
On Earth, evolution favored voted the appearance of intelligence 
in two major classes of animal nervous systems, called ganglionic and chordate. 
It has its own peculiar psychology. 
The invertebrates, representing perhaps 69% 
  of all animal species alive today, took the ganglionic intelligence option. 
  The earthworm is typical. Each of its many segments is almost an individual 
  organism unto itself, having its own set of kidneys, muscles, sensors and so 
  forth. Coordination is achieved by a thin latticework of nerve fibers crisscrossing 
  from side to side and lengthwise. The ganglionic system resembles a ladder with 
  bulbous neural tissues at the joints. Invertebrate organisms thus are comprised 
  of a collection of sub-brains, each of which controls a separate part of the 
  animal with fairly complete autonomy and no real centralized control. Sensors 
  and their ganglia tend to cluster nearer the head, making not a true brain as 
  we understand the term but rather a large bundle of distinct fibers. Such a 
  nervous system is highly efficient for responding quickly to stimuli. Each clump 
  of nerve cells becomes expert at some particular function–detecting and 
  passing along sensory information, sweeping a leg or swing in wide uniform arc, 
  opening and closing the jaws in slow munching motions during feeding, and so 
  on. 
Might extraterrestrials develop a high ganglionic intelligence 
  that has, never developed on Earth despite hundreds of millions of years of 
  opportunity? Many an evolutionary biologists believe the system is too complicated 
  to scale up in size – invertebrates are much less intelligent than vertebrates, 
  kilogram for kilogram. Also, ganglionic intelligence may be physically self-limiting. 
  Typical invertebrate nervous systems just have room to accommodate mostly preprogrammed 
  behaviors. Little space is left for growth of surplus neural matter that might 
  eventually evolve into higher intellect. Finally, the endless cross-connections 
  within the body can become so entangled that they actually begin to strangle 
  other body organs. For example, massive head ganglia ringing the spider's gullet 
  squeeze the throat so tightly that the animal must swallow its food in a thin 
  trickle. 
It is hard for us to imagine the mentality of beings with 
  advanced ganglionic intelligence. Dr. H. Chandler Elliot, a neurologist at the 
  University of Nebraska College of Medicine, notes that humans normally disregard 
  their internal organs. We respond to an empty stomach or a feeling of indigestion 
  but normally we ignore its activities. Says Elliot: "The head of an insect apparently 
  regards not only its viscera but also its legs, wings, and so on, with similar 
  detachment. If one deftly clips off the abdomen of a feeding wasp, the head 
  may go on sucking, obviously not distressed. The mind of such a creature, must 
  be alien to us almost beyond comprehension." 
The second option for advanced intelligence on Earth, spinal-cord 
  or chordate intelligence, was tried by just a few tens of thousands of species–mostly 
  the vertebrates such as amphibians, birds. and mammals. Neural centralization 
  is the key idea, with any number of modular sensory, analytical, or other information-processing 
  units plugged into a coordinating "data bus." With this simple invention organisms 
  could evolve to any size, yet continue to increase their intelligence by hooking 
  up more "peripherals." Because of centralization spinal cords could grow far 
  more massive than invertebrate ganglia, yet never entangle other organs of the 
  body. The simple brain was more compact and had plenty of room to grow, perched 
  on the tip of the notochord. 
Dr. Paul MacLean, chief of the Laboratory Evolution and Behavior 
  at the National Institute of Mental Health, believes that the evolution of the 
  human brain involved the slow accretion of three successive neural strata. This 
  "triune" brain, explains MacLean, "amounts to three interconnected biological 
  computers, each with its own special intelligence, its own subjectivity, its 
  own sense of time and space, its own memory, motor, and other functions. Thus 
  we are obligated to look at ourselves and the world through the eyes of three 
  quite different mentalities." These three mentalities include the reptilian 
  brain (evolved during the Age of Reptiles) which dominates in aggressive behavior, 
  territoriality, ritualism and the establishment of social hierarchies; the limbic 
  brain (evolved later) which generates hormonal responses and appears to be the 
  seat of emotion as well as short-term memory, sensitivity to pain and sexual 
  interest; and the neocortex (developed mostly in the last 30 million years), 
  largely responsible for deliberation initiative and caution, anticipation and 
  planning, spatial perception, audio and visual and abstract thinking. 
What if alien chordate intelligences evolve with a slightly 
  different emphasis? One likely prerequisite for rapid neocortical development 
  is stable internal body temperature. On another planet where warm-bloodedness 
  had not yet been invented, the reptilian brain might predominate instead of 
  the neocortex as in humans. Some scientists have proposed just such an intelligence 
  among the dinosaurs, whose evolution was perhaps short-circuited by a meteorite 
  impact 65 million years ago, causing the Great Extinction. ETs with advanced 
  reptilian brains might display dogged aggressiveness and unyielding single-mindedness 
  of purpose, and create societies having massive impenetrable hierarchical bureaucracies 
  with individual actions heavily dictated by ritual gestures, elaborate ceremonies 
  and dances, "turf" rules and highly stereotyped, emotionally cold behaviors. 
A predominantly limbic intellect possibly could arise in 
  an environment favoring the rapid development of the olfactory cortex the oldest 
  and one of the most important components of the limbic brain in mammals. A small, 
  hot, windy, perpetually foggy world located close to a dim red star would have 
  little energy available for vision and any images would be wavering and distorted. 
  Strong winds and faint air would make hearing useless, but molecules travel 
  farther faster in a hot, thin, moving gas, thus favoring the evolution of olfaction 
  over the other senses. A predominantly limbic-brain extraterrestrial 
  intelligence would be heavily emotional, oriented toward pain avoidance and 
  pleasure seeking, conciliation and altruism, and familial and sexual concerns. 
  Their minds might be easily distractible due to a relatively short attention 
  span. 
Of course. each of MacLean's neural strata represents an 
  earthly evolutionary experiment. Fundamentally different ones might be tried. 
  singly or in sequence, elsewhere. An example is a bipolar mentality in which 
  "aggressive" (fight, carnivorous, solitude, competitive, genocidal) and "nurturant" 
  (flight, herbivorous, sociability, cooperative, parental) brains vie for control 
  according to prevailing environmental or social conditions. 
Yet another possibility is alien minds incorporating the 
  advantages of both ganglionic and chordate architectures. For instance, each 
  invertebrate sub-brain might evolve and enlarge to avoid multiplication of internal 
  interconnections. This development is most likely in a radially symmetrical 
  sea creature, wherein each brain has roughly equal access to sensory input and 
  motor controls. Such creatures would have "collegial" mentalities, something 
  akin to the many voting computers aboard the Space Shuttle, with multiple personalities 
  within each organism and the ability to maintain consciousness under extreme 
  physical trauma so long as any one brain remained functional. 
Extraterrestrial 
  Sociobiology
The father of modem sociobiology, Harvard professor Edward O. 
Wilson, caused quite a stir several years ago with his suggestion that human social 
patterns are shaped by evolutionary processes acting through our genes. He did 
not say that out genes drive us to a series of irresistible behavioral compulsions 
like ants or bees, but rather that our more malleable psychology can be influenced 
by our genetic makeup–human behavior can be the subject of natural selection 
and evolve just as our physical makeup does. Some sociobiologists believe 
that all behavior, as well as biology, undergoes natural selection. But where 
genes directly control body shape, their influence on behavior is far more subtle 
and plastic. Each species, say the sociobiologists, is predisposed to exhibit 
certain behaviors such as emotionality, aggressiveness, or sociability because 
these are useful survival tactics in its particular environment. 
The sociobiology of competition provides one simple example. 
  Two common forms of aggressive competition are territoriality and dominance. 
  Territoriality is the defense of a resource-containing area by an individual 
  or group against intruders. Dominance is the establishment of a scarce resource 
  distribution hierarchy within a single social group based on "power" (physical 
  strength, cunning. Wealth, etc.). Under what conditions might each behavior 
  be favored by evolution on other worlds? Sociobiologists have learned that when 
  important resources are distributed uniformly in space and time then is little 
  opportunity for monopolization, and territoriality tends to occur. When important 
  resources are highly clumped, a small proportion of the population can monopolize 
  most of the available reward, giving rise to dominance chains or 'pecking orders.," 
Similarly, it appears that herding, flocking, and schooling 
  are genetically preprogrammed tendencies in certain animals, mostly prey herbivores. 
  The group avoids predation by using marginal individuals as a living shield 
  against danger. Predators seize the first animal they encounter, so there is 
  a great selective advantage for each individual to press toward the center of 
  the group. "The result in evolution." explains Wilson, "would be a herd instinct 
  that centripetally collapses populations into local aggregations." 
Countless other examples of "evolved behaviors" have been 
  examined by sociobiologists. Each behavioral predisposition appears because 
  it allows individuals displaying it to pass more of their genes (containing, 
  of course. the predisposition) to the next generation of offspring. In similar 
  fashion, different alien psychologies might evolve in response to different 
  challenges to survival elsewhere in the universe. 
Wilson believes that human social behavior is best evaluated 
  by comparison with that of other major categories of earthly species. Human 
  beings are proud of their intelligence and many cultural achievements, but seldom 
  pause to consider how much of their psychology can be traced back to their primate 
  (and mammalian) ancestry. "The general traits of human nature." explains Wilson, 
  "appear limited and idiosyncratic when placed against the backdrop of all other 
  living species." To illustrate his point, he first refers to an inventory of 
  the elements of human nature compiled by the American anthropologist George 
  P. Murdock during a study of cultural universals: 
    
Age-grading, athletic sports, bodily adornment, 
  calendar, cleanliness training, community organizations, cooking, cooperative 
  labor, cosmology, courtship, dancing, decorative art. divination, division of 
  labor, dream interpretation, education, eschatology, ethics, ethnobotany, etiquette, 
  faith healing. family feasting, firemaking, folklore, food taboos, funeral rites, 
  games, gestures, gift giving, government, greetings, hairstyles, hospitality, 
  housing, hygiene, incest taboos, inheritance rules, joking, kin groups, kinship 
  nomenclature, language, law, luck superstitions, magic,. marriage, mealtimes, 
  medicine, obstetrics, penal sanctions, personal names, population policy, postnatal 
  care, pregnancy usages, property rights, propitiation of supernatural beings, 
  puberty customs, religious rituals, residence rules, sexual restrictions, soul 
  concepts, status differentiation, surgery, toolmaking, trade, visiting, weaving, 
  and weather control.
Wilson insists that few if any of these elements are inevitable 
outcomes of either high intelligence or advanced social life; rather that "human 
nature is just one hodgepodge out of many conceivable." An entomologist by training, 
he has no trouble imagining an alien insectlike society whose members am even 
more intelligent and complexly organized than people, yet which lacks many of 
the qualities listed in Murdock's inventory. The alien inventory: 
Age-grading, antennal rites, body licking, calendar, 
  cannibalism, caste determinism, caste laws, colony-foundation rules, colony 
  organization, cleanliness training, communal nurseries, cooperative labor, cosmology, 
  courtship, division of labor, drone control, education, eschatology, ethics, 
  etiquette, euthanasia, firemaking, food taboos, gift-giving, government, greetings, 
  grooming rituals, hospitality, hosing, hygiene, incest taboos, language, larval 
  care, law, medicine, metamorphosis rites, mutual regurgitation, nursing castes, 
  nuptial flights, nutrient eggs, population policy, queen obeisance, residence 
  rules, sex determination, solder castes, sisterhoods, status differentiation, 
  sterile workers, surgery, symbiont care, toolmaking, trade, visiting, weather 
  control . . . and still other activities so alien as to make mere description 
  by our language difficult.
So intelligence and civilization are not intrinsically 
  limited to hominoids. Only by an accident of evolution on Earth were our social 
  characteristics linked to the anatomy of bare-skinned, bipedal mammals and the 
  peculiar qualities of human nature. What other strange psychological "accidents" 
  may await us on distant planets we can hardly guess.

Universal Emotions?
Emotions arc extremely important in human psychology activating 
our aggressiveness, sexual activity, learning and perception and a wide variety 
of other behaviors. Will ETs be more or less emotionally motivated than humans? 
Will they have emotions foreign to us, or are there any universal emotions? 
First of all, what exactly do we mean by "emotion"? There 
  is much disagreement on this, but one of the most useful definitions, by psychologist 
  Magda Arnold, draws a careful distinction between states and behaviors. In Arnold's 
  theory emotional experience proceeds in three steps: (1) Perception and appraisal 
  (external stimulus is perceived and judged good, bad, useful. harmful, etc., 
  mostly based on learned associations); (2) Emotion (internal state of arousal 
  or "feeling" arises, involving physiological effects); then (3) Action (specific 
  behavior such as approach, avoidance, attack, or feeding, depending on emotional 
  intensity, learned behavioral patterns, and other motivations simultaneously 
  present). In this view emotion is an internal state, not a behavior or 
  a perception of external reality. 
In the sociobiological view, both emotionality and behavior 
  evolve as strategies to maximize the spread of genes. Thus the mammalian limbic 
  brain system has been programmed to perform as if it knows that its underlying 
  genes will be proliferated maximally only if it orchestrates behavioral responses 
  that bring into play an efficient mixture of personal survival, reproduction 
  and altruism. 
Consider parental love. Sociobiologists believe that love 
  is a behavioral predisposition with selective advantages for organisms which 
  (1) are warm-blooded (love induces close physical contact permitting shared 
  body warmth for small, high-heat-loss young), (2) produce relatively small numbers 
  of offspring (love encourages parents to make a larger investment in time and 
  resources per child ). (3) produce offspring that are helpless at birth (love 
  ensures parental material support essential for infant survival), and (4) have 
  highly plastic intelligence (love drives the parent to teach offspring very 
  complex behaviors). Love is rare in the animal kingdom – only birds and 
  mammals fulfill these requirements on Earth, and only these species experience 
  the emotion. So parent love likely won't be a part of the psychology, of intelligent 
  ETs unless they satisfy at least some of the above criteria. 
Of course, extraterrestrial sentients may possess physiological 
  states corresponding to limbic-like emotions that have no direct analog in human 
  experience. Alien species, having evolved under a different set of environmental 
  constraints than we, also could have a different but equally adaptive emotional 
  repertoire. For example, assume that human observers land on another and discover 
  an intelligent animal with an acute sense of absolute humidity and absolute 
  air pressure. For this creature, there may exist an emotional state responding 
  to an unfavorable change in the weather. Physiologically, the emotion could 
  be mediated by the ET equivalent of the human limbic system; it might arise 
  following the secretion of certain strength-enhancing and libido-arousing hormones 
  into the alien's bloodstream in response to the perceived change in weather. 
  Immediately our creature begins to engage in a variety of learned and socially-approved 
  behaviors, including furious burrowing and building, smearing tree sap over 
  its pelt, several different territorial defense ceremonies, and vigorous polygamous 
  copulations with nearby females, apparently (to humans) for no reason at all. 
  Would our astronauts interpret this as madness? Or love? Lust? Fear? Anger? 
  None of these is correct, of course the alien is feeling badweather. 
While xenopsychologists suspect that even emotional intelligences 
  may not share all our feelings, they are far more certain that there exist no 
  universal emotions among sentients. Survival and intelligence simply do not 
  require it. Very smart aliens, is in other words, may be emotionless. Probably 
  the cleverest nonemotional creature on Earth today is the octopus. This eight-tentacled, 
  highly educable animal is an invertebrate mollusc with a ganglionic nervous 
  system having 5% as many nerve cells as the human brain. The octopus has a few 
  minor endocrine systems which influence the maturation of its sexual organs, 
  the onset of sexual behavior, body fluids, and maternal behavior and which react 
  to the changing length of day with the seasons – but compulsory hormonal 
  responses appear to be absent. The animal is, from the strict mammalian viewpoint, 
  virtually without emotion. 
Octopuses are fiercely independent solitary carnivores with 
  no social inclinations whatsoever; crowded into a small tank they will fight 
  and establish a dominance hierarchy. They have no fear of fire and are insensitive 
  to burns. The animal knows sex, but doesn't get very excited about it. The heartbeat 
  of a male octopus in the midst of copulation is as steady as in a resting animal. 
  The sexual displays of males during courtship appear to serve only for identification, 
  never for stimulation, of the female. Broods are enormous impersonal affairs 
  – up to 250,000 eggs per batch. No maternal love is lavished on offspring 
  after birth so the young must fight for their own lives. Yet females often fast 
  themselves to death guarding their own unhatched eggs. 
The creature may not even know what it means to feel hungry. 
  Mammals long deprived of food become excited and venture out in an agitated 
  search for dinner. The response of the octopus to food deprivation is totally 
  different and utterly alien. When crabs become scarce, octopuses resign themselves 
  to long watchful inactivity until the day the supply improves. They become less 
  likely to emerge from their caves and houses to attack possible prey passing 
  by. Motivation is not as adjustable as in mammals, yet octopus behavior under 
  stress is considerably more cool and calculating. After hundreds of hours of 
  direct observation undersea explorer 
Jacques Cousteau admitted that while the octopus is a timid 
  animal (its first reaction to a diver is to nee or hide), "its timidity is a 
  reasoned reaction, one that is based primarily on prudence and caution. It is 
  not an instinctive and groundless fear (flat persists regardless of circumstances." 
Octopus mentality seems to be more oriented toward calculated 
  prudence, more plastic than reptiles and more aloof than mammals. Is this, perhaps, 
  a clue to the possible psychology of intelligent emotionless extraterrestrials? 
Alien Logic, Time, 
  and Space
Logic is the way we know whether something is true. Denoting 
rationality and reason, logic lies at the very foundation (if all intellectual 
pursuits. Aristotle is largely responsible for the classical development of the 
so-called "laws of thought." 'Perhaps the best-known tenet is the Law of the Excluded 
Middle, which holds that if a statement is true. then its negation cannot also 
be true. For example, if the statement "the sky is blue" is true, then its negation 
"the sky is not blue" must be false. This so" of reasoning seems intuitively 
obvious to most people. Aristotelian logic is just common sense. 
Thus not a few writers have suggested that intelligent extraterrestrials 
  matter how physically strange they may appear, probably will think much like 
  human beings. ETs, in other words, will be good Aristotelians. This is an unfounded 
  and potentially dangerous assumption, even if alien sociobiology proves remarkably 
  similar to our own. Aristotelian logic is just one of many different 
  formal systems of logic, all of which are equally valid in mathematics and philosophy. 
The danger inherent is relying on any single logic system 
  is that it tends to limit the diversity of problems that can be addressed. One 
  good example of this may be found in modem quantum mechanics. Imagine (the following 
  physics experiment: A solid plate with two small parallel slits is placed in 
  front of a beam of electrons. Behind the slits on the other side is a photographic 
  screen to record the arrival of electrons. During the experiment, electrons 
  are sent toward the slits one by one, some bouncing off the blocking plate and 
  others passing through the slits to be recorded as they hit the screen. The 
  Law of the Excluded Middle demands that any recorded electron must pass either 
  "through the left slit" or "not through the left slit " (i.e. through the right 
  slit). These two choices define all logical outcomes, but unfortunately nature 
  does not cooperate. When physicists perform the experiment the "impossible" 
  happens: The pattern recorded on the photographic screen could only have been 
  generated if each electron passed through both slits simultaneously! 
Perhaps the most exciting development for xenologicians in 
  this century is G�del's Incompleteness Theorem. 
  In 1931 an American mathematician named Kurt G�del devised a brilliant proof 
  that any system of logic must necessarily either be internally inconsistent 
  or incomplete. G�del's proof demonstrated for the first time that there exist 
  statements that are unprovable in any logic system (even the Aristotelian system) 
  and that all arithmetic as we know it is at best incomplete, at worst inconsistent. 
  Further, it is logically impossible to construct a single grand "metalogic" 
  capable of subsuming all other modes of logic while remaining consistent itself. 
  So human mathematics–the language of the physical sciences–is incomplete. 
The implications in xenology 
  are far reaching indeed. We now know, for instance, that no single system of 
  thinking can hold, even in principle, all answers to all questions while remaining 
  internally consistent: All logics must harbor unresolvable paradoxes. Therefore 
  each new logic system we discover I most likely will teach us something new, 
  some novel way of looking at the universe and understanding it in a consistent 
  fashion which may be imperceptible–even impossible–from within previous 
  systems of logic. To this extent all human thinking necessarily in must be incomplete. 
  Contact with alien minds will almost certainly open new vistas of knowledge 
  and beauty to us. Extraterrestrial logicians may find many of our most enduring 
  paradoxes to be trivially solvable, just as we may be able to resolve some of 
  theirs equally effortlessly. 
Most living organisms possess natural cycles and rhythms, 
  so sentient aliens should have some finite sense of duration. Dr. Bernard Aaronson, 
  at the Bureau of Research in Neurology and Psychiatry in Princeton, New Jersey, 
  conducted some fascinating experiments in regard to subjective time that may 
  he highly instructive for xenopsychologists. Dr. Aaronson gave posthypnotic 
  suggestions to human subjects to test their reactions to expanded or contracted 
  time frames, such as: "Do you know how we divide time into the three categories 
  of past, present, and future? When I wake you, the future will be gone. There 
  will be no future." Subjects with no future experienced a loss of identity and 
  a profound euphoric mystical sensation–one person reported that he "found 
  himself in a boundless. immanent present." Expanded futures canceled all fear 
  of death, inducing serene calmness and happiness. Elimination of the present 
  was found to be most disturbing (subjects were inordinately depressed and behaved 
  almost schizophrenically), whereas deprivation of the subjective past produced 
  drowsiness, memory loss, speech difficulty, and a vague sense of meaninglessness. 
  These kinds of experiments may someday help us understand apparently incomprehensible 
  alien psyches. 
Alien languages might incorporate concepts wholly unfamiliar 
  to any human culture. For instance, astronomer Carl Sagan has written that if 
  dolphins are clever enough to have language they may not have words which are 
  arbitrary representations of concrete objects, as do humans. Rather, because 
  of their fine sonar sense, their words may consist of sonic pictures of the 
  object in question. Instead of an arbitrary sound for "shark," they may instead 
  transmit a set of clicks corresponding in the audio reflection spectrum the 
  animal would obtain upon irradiating a shark with sound waves. Another interesting 
  proposal by psychologists David and Doris Jonas is that sentient ETs who could 
  see polarized light (as bees can) would create a language whose vocabulary–and 
  thinking–incorporates a running sense of time. To such eyes, objects and 
  colors must appear different at various times of the day because of the changing 
  angle of polarized light due to the motion of the Sun. The aliens might use 
  a dozen words for what appears to us to he a single object. 
Xenopsychologists also recognize the close association between 
  human language and human body form. Extraterrestrials will speak, think, act, 
  and feel differently simply because they have some other body shape and thus 
  experience a markedly different awareness of space, position, and movement. 
  The human body is basically bilaterally symmetric, with the upright posture 
  universally regarded as typical. According to psychologist Donald G. MacRae, 
  our categories for classifying, organizing, and manipulating space, and our 
  emotions about space and the values we attach to direction in space, derive 
  directly from our body form. Explains MacRae: "What is superior is up or high 
  and what is inferior is down or low. Low is often dirty, but high is not necessarily 
  clean. Right is law, morals. the holy and the strong; left is sinister, profane, 
  weak and (often) feminine. Backward and behind are slow, hence stupid. Forward 
  and in front are active, oriented and intelligent.  Beside is confederate 
  or paranoid: It is an ambiguous category of place. What is clear is that these 
  aspects of space derive from our conception of the body and would not hold for 
  an intelligent bilateral but horizontal animal, far less for a radially symmetrical 
  one like a clever starfish, or for spherically symmetrical beings like those 
  of the fable in Plato's Symposium." 
Sentience Quotient (SQ)
"Of all the things that have been tried by the creatures of 
Earth to aid survival," Cornell astronomer Frank Drake once wrote, "be it camouflage, 
many legs, large size as in the dinosaurs, and so forth, only one characteristic 
has continuously been retained and improved throughout the entire succession of 
species–intelligence." Perhaps the most interesting aspect of intelligence 
from the human point of view is that we, possibly alone among all creatures on 
this planet, have an awareness of self. Consciousness may be an emergent property 
of intelligence, a fortuitous feature of a terrestrial animal brain architecture 
originally designed for other jobs. Is it possible that there could exist yet 
higher-order emergents beyond consciousness? 
Science fiction writers are fond of suggesting levels of 
  awareness in the universe which lie totally beyond man's comprehension. In Fred 
  Hoyle's The Black 
  Cloud the human protagonist is killed by data overload during interaction 
  with a vastly superior alien intellect. We may not even recognize the activities 
  of very advanced extraterrestrial civilizations. Carl Sagan once said, "any 
  more than an ant performing his anty labors by the side of a suburban swimming 
  pool has a profound sense of the presence of a superior technical civilization 
  all around him." 
It is possible to devise a sliding scale of cosmic sentience 
  universally applicable to any intelligent entity in the cosmos, based on a "figure 
  of merit" which I call the Sentience Quotient. The essential characteristic 
  of all intelligent systems is that they process information using a processor 
  or "brain" made of matter-energy. Generally the more information a brain can 
  process in a shorter length of time, the more intelligent it can be. (Information 
  rate is measured in bits/second, where one bit is the amount of information 
  needed to choose correctly between two equally likely answers to a simple yes/no 
  question.) Also, the lower the brain's mass the less it will be influenced by 
  fundamental limits such as speed of light restrictions on internal propagation, 
  heat dissipation, and the Square-Cube Law. 
The most efficient brain will have the highest information-processing 
  rate I, and the lowest mass M, hence the highest ratio I/M. Since very large 
  exponents are involved, for the convenience we define the Sentience Quotient 
  or SQ as the logarithm of I/M, that is, its order of magnitude. Of course, SQ delimits 
  maximum potential intellect–a poorly programmed or poorly designed 
  (or very small) high-SQ brain could still be very stupid. But all else remaining 
  equal larger-SQ entities should be higher-quality thinkers. 
The lower end of our cosmic scale is easy to pin down. The 
  very dumbest brain we can imagine would have one neuron with the mass of the 
  universe (1052 kg) and require a time equal to the age of the universe 
  (1018 seconds) to process just one bit, giving a minimum SQ of -70. 
What is the smartest possible brain? Dr. H. Bremermann at 
  the University of California at Berkeley claims there is a fundamental limit 
  to intelligence imposed by the laws of quantum mechanics. The argument is simple 
  but subtle. All information, to he acted upon, must be represented physically 
  and be carried by matter-energy "markers." According to Heisenberg's Uncertainty 
  Principle in quantum mechanics, the lower limit for the accuracy with which 
  energy can be measured–the minimum measurable energy level for a marker 
  carrying one bit–is given by Planck's constant h 
  divided by T, the duration of the measurement. If one energy level 
  is used to represent one bit, then the maximum bit rate of a brain is equal 
  to the total energy available E ( = mc2) for representing information, divided 
  by the minimum measurable energy per bit (h/T) divided by the 
  minimum time required for readout (T). or 
  mc2/h = 1050 
  bits/sec/kg. Hence the smartest possible brain has an SQ of +50. 
Where do people fit in? A human neuron has an average mass 
  of about 10-10 kg and one neuron can process 1000-3000 bits/sec. 
  earning us an SQ rating of +13. What is most interesting here is not the obvious 
  fact that there's a great deal of room for improvement (there is!), but rather 
  that all "neuronal sentience" SQs, from insects to mammals, cluster within several 
  points of the human value. From the cosmic point of view, rotifers, honeybees, 
  and humans all have brainpower with roughly equivalent efficiencies. Note that 
  we are still way ahead of the computers, with an Apple II at SQ +5 and even 
  the mighty Cray I only about +9. 
Another kind of sentience, which we may call "hormonal sentience," 
  is exhibited by plants. Time-lapse photography shows the vicious struggles among 
  vines in the tropical rain forests, and vegetative phototaxis (turning toward 
  light) is a well-known phenomenon. All these behaviors are mediated, it is believed, 
  by biochemical plant hormones transmitted through the vascular system. As in 
  the animal kingdom, most of the geniuses are hunters–the carnivorous plants. 
  The Venus flytrap, during a 1- to 20-second sensitivity interval, counts two 
  stimuli before snapping shut on its insect prey, a processing peak of 1 bit/sec. 
  Mass is 10-100 grams, so flytrap SQ is about +1. Plants generally take hours 
  to respond to stimuli, though, so vegetative SQs tend to cluster around -2. 
How about intelligences greater than human? Astronomer Robert Jastrow and others have speculated that 
  silicon-based computer brains may represent the next and ultimate stage in our 
  evolution. This is valid, but only in a very limited sense. Superconducting 
  Josephson junction electronic gates weigh 10-12 kg and can process 
  1011 bits/sec, so "electronic sentiences" made of these components 
  could have and SQ of +23 – ten orders beyond man. But even such fantastically 
  advanced systems fall short of the maximum of +50. Somewhere in the universe 
  may lurk beings almost incomprehensible to us, who think by manipulating atomic 
  energy levels and are mentally as far beyond our best future computers as those 
  computers will surpass the Venus flytrap. 
Just as consciousness is an emergent of neuronal sentience, 
  perhaps some broader mode of thinking–call it communalness–is an 
  emergent of electronic sentience. If this is true, it might help to explain 
  why (noncommunal) human beings have such great difficulty comprehending the 
  intricate workings of the societies, governments, and economies they create, 
  and require the continual and increasing assistance of computers to juggle the 
  thousands of variables needed for successful management and planning. Perhaps 
  future computers with communalness may develop the same intimate awareness of 
  complex organizations as people have consciousness of their own bodies. And 
  how many additional levels of emergent higher awareness might a creature with 
  SQ +50 display? 
The possible existence of ultrahuman SQ levels may affect 
  our ability, and the desirability, of communicating with extraterrestrial beings. 
  Sometimes it is rhetorically asked what we could possibly have to say to a dog 
  or to an insect, if such could speak, that would be of interest to both parties? 
  From our perspective of Sentience Quotients, we can see that the problem is 
  actually far, far worse than this, more akin to asking people to discuss Shakespeare 
  with trees or rocks. It may be that there is a minimum SQ "communication gap," 
  an intellectual distance beyond which no two entities can meaningfully converse. 
At present, human scientists are attempting to communicate 
  outside our species to primates and cetaceans, and in a limited way to a few 
  other vertebrates. This is inordinately difficult, and yet it represents a gap 
  of at most a few SQ points. The farthest we can reach is our "communication" 
  with vegetation when we plant, water, or fertilize it, but it is evident that 
  messages transmitted across an SQ gap of 10 points or more cannot be very meaningful. 
What, then, could an SQ +50 Superbeing possibly have to say 
  to us? 

FOR FURTHER READING
Poul Anderson, Is There Life on Other Worlds? Crowell-Collier 
Press, New York, 1963. 
Gene Bylinsky, Life in Darwin's Universe, 
  Doubleday & Co., New York, 1981. 
James L. Christian, ed., Extraterrestrial Intelligence: 
  The First Encounter, Prometheus Books, Buffalo, New York, 1976 
Richard Dawkins, The 
  Selfish Gene, Oxford University Press, New York, 1976. 
Robert A. Wallace, The 
  Genesis Factor, William Morrow & Co., Inc., New York, 1979. 
Edward O. Wilson, Sociobiology: The New 
  Synthesis, 1975, and On Human Nature, 
  1978, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts. 

Sentience Quotient 
  References

  Notes re: Dr. Bernard Aaronson studies & Sentience 
    Quotient, probably from Mark Thompson @ The 
    Lycaeum. Please note that the Lycaeum website 
    does not properly attribute the Sentience Quotient to Robert A Freitas Jr. 
    and thus remains in violation of Freitas' copyright despite repeated notifications 
    (by the author Freitas, to the infringer Lycaeum) of this violation. Freitas 
    requests that the infringing material at http://mv.lycaeum.org/M2/hypno-sq.html 
    not be further publicized, and that the infringing URL not be further propagated 
    on the web until such time as the infringement is repaired by Lycaeum. 
  Hypnotic experiments with 'time sense', Dr. Bernard Aaronson, 
    Bureau of Research in Neuropsychology & Psychiatry, described by Freitas 
    in "Timeless 
    Minds," Omni 6(February 1984):38. 
  Sentience Quotient is referenced in the Artificial Intelligence 
    issue of Daedalus, 
    Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts 
    and Sciences, [Probably Volume 117, Winter 1988.] 
  "Sentience Quotient" shows up in Star Trek Voyager episode 
    "Eye of the Needle", broadcast Monday, February 20, 1995, in the review 
    by Tim Wright.
  "Sentience Quotient" appears in the Transhuman 
    Terminology Page by Anders Sandberg, in the Lextropicon 
    collected by Max More, and in the Nanotechnology 
    Glossary by 7th Wave Inc.
   "Sentience Quotient" as defined by Freitas 
    is mentioned in: Linda MacDonald Glenn, "Biotechnology 
    at the Margins of Personhood: An Evolving Legal Paradigm," Journal 
    of Evolution and Technology, Vol. 13 (2002).

Editor Notes: 

  Dr. Hans J. Bremermann is professor emeritus from Department 
    of Mathematics at Berkeley. His specialty was mathematical biology. 
  The reference for Jastrow's claim regarding silicon-based 
    computer brains is: Robert Jastrow; "Toward an Intelligence Beyond 
    Man's," Time 111(20 February 1978):59. 



  Creation date: July 7, 1998 
  Last Modified: July 15, 1998 
  Original HTML Editor: Robert J. 
  Bradbury
Revised and extended by Robert A. Freitas Jr., from 19 November 2002
Last updated by Freitas, 23 September 2024



