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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 8830232" data-attributes="member: 4937">The problem with being the only sentient thing we have experience with is that we tend to treat sentience as a quality and not a quantity.  We also tend to think that with sentience automatically comes a whole host of other qualities that we only observe in that one thing (ourselves) and so assume that there is a tight correlation between say sentience and being self-willed or independent or between sentience and desiring the sort of things that humans think make a fulfilling life - acquiring stuff, acquiring mates, and dominating imposing our will on others. And naturally, being sentient apes, we make big shows of pounding the ground with our fists and hooting if we think someone is saying something that might threaten us or our station in the tribe, and likewise expect any sentient thing is going to do the same and have the same basic array of not only emotions but emotional displays and behaviors.And I don't think that any of that is true.  To put it bluntly, both our notion of sentience equals personhood and that personhood equals humanity are flawed.  And this bothers me because we're getting close to making semi-sentient beings and at that point all that theoretical ignorance becomes potentially dangerous or immoral - like the well-meaning Hermoine Granger condescendingly trying to trick a being that she thinks (correctly as it turns out) is a person into receiving clothes for their own good because she thinks she knows better than they do what is good for them.   Because she's a wizard or something.Rawlings treatment of interactions between widely divergent sentient beings is one of the best in fiction.  She's actually comfortable with the concept of alien.  I can't think of another author that has done it better, though Gordon R. Dickson's "The Alien Way" and Amy Thompson's "The Color of Distance" are both good, in some ways they reflect more human bias and make apes less uncomfortable than what Rawlings does.The Star Wars droids are debatably sentient, but that's because they demonstrate a range of sentience, from being about as sentient as say your pets to being as sentient as you are.   But even more so, they show a range of emotional frameworks and independence of thought.  So you have a sentient like IG-11 that is almost incapable of independent thought, because someone probably quite rightly thought it was a bad idea to give a sentient killing machine a great degree of independence of thought.  I mean, why would you make that machine?  And humanities first instinct to that is to get offended and to also assume that almost the first thing that is going to happen and the most likely thing that is going to happen is that the machine is going to want to alter its programming so it can be more human.  Because, well, a human would in the same situation, so naturally a machine would as well.  But that is as fundamentally ridiculous as a machine being romantically and sexually attracted to a female human because well, isn't that how every sentient thing thinks?   Those assumptions are really just ape biases and ape insecurities being manifested.  As I mentioned before, Data is clearly different in purpose and intent from most Star Wars droids.   It's a crime to not treat him as a person.  But it would be equally a crime to insist that Data act more human than he wants to.  Data as a conceit of the show wants to be more human, because well we narcissistic ape types just assume everyone would want to be more like us.  And that's fine, but if Data didn't want to be more human because he is a person it would be immoral to treat his wishes otherwise.  Just like it would be immoral to have a Gonk droid liberation front because we assume that they want to be independent and acquire possessions and mates.  One wonders what value people think R2-D2 or B2EMO could possibly derive in not be servile chattel?  Do anyone think think R2-D2 wants to acquire power and possessions?  Does anyone think the maker that made him created an emotional framework that was satisfied and thrilled to dominate over others?  That really wants to do anything other than be allowed to fix things that don't belong to him?  What pay could you possibly give R2-D2?  Do you think R2-D2 gets bored?  Why would you be so cruel as to design a droid to get bored and need to watch vicarious thrilling episodes of apes fighting and mating with one another to remain marginally emotionally stable?   R2-D2 is alien by design and by necessity.</blockquote>

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