If you’ve read my work, you probably know that I love speculating about different types of consciousness and architectures of sentience. I’m fascinated by the potential for minds that might compare with or surpass our own.
Often, when people think about other forms of consciousness, it’s all lumped into “AI”, however there are a plethora of other types of intelligence that could be “out there”. Sci-Fi philosophises about this, but we also have many likely possibilities on Earth to draw inspiration from.
Therefore, I’d like to show you a few smatterings of what non-human intelligence might look like…
Alien Minds – Pradors from the Polity Universe
Neal Asher’s Polity Universe deals with an alien species called the Prador. They’re a little brutal, and for some/many of the youngsters who are not up to scratch, life isn’t fantastic. Their brains are excavated from their bodies and implanted into drones and ships, in order to control these vessels. Fortunately for the Prador whose brains and bodies remain intact, these “repurposed” Prador minds are actually quite capable of the complex calculations required for various tasks, in lieu of computerised artificial intelligence.
Hive-Type Animals – Ant/Kern from Children of Time universe.
Adrian Tchaikovsky’s inspiration from nature yields various forms of intelligence that are quite different to our own. From the sentient spiders capable of accessing matrix-style memories and abilities through a genetic archive, to the bafflingly inconsistent, instinctual and yet genius “octopi” (octopuses). However, the intelligence I’m focusing on here is that of the once-human Kern, who at first becomes a quasi-computer AI entity, then morphs into an approximation of a hyper-capable simulated Kern running on a circuitry of ants, instead. So she ends up (at least in book 2), as a computer-program type thing whose substrate is the interaction of ants, instead of chips, circuitry and wires. Comprende?
Arboreal Networks – Trees from The Hidden Life of Trees
Veering off the truly Sci-Fi for a moment, to the more speculative (and hazily scientific), we have Wohlleben’s anthropomorphised trees. He considers root networks that are sometimes connected between trees and forests, and ancillary types of fungal network connections amongst them, to be potentially analogous to an internet, or collective mindset. Interesting and definitely worth a read, and it’s kickstarted me into downloading books related to fungal networks for my ever-expanding To Be Read pile.
Hybrids – ‘Mother’ from Raised By Wolves
There are so many types of hybrid entities speculated in fiction that it would be impossible to delve into all of them. However, one interesting case study is from the (unfortunately) cancelled tv show Raised by Wolves. There was a character called Mother, who at first appears as a bog-standard robotic AI, although as her origins are expanded upon, we begin to realise she’s a hell of a lot more. She’s not a hybrid in the sense that she was once human who became part-robotic/AI, she’s a hybrid in the sense that she’s clearly an artificial entity, although she’s also clearly biological too. What’s more, it’s indicated that she was designed by aliens, or ancient humans, or something-else-not-really-explained-since-the-series-was-cancelled (bastards!), but at the least, she wasn’t designed by modern day humans. The show ends before we understand fully what she is, but it’s an interesting take on the hybrid-intellect!
Evolved Humans – Mentats from Dune
Almost a cheat, since they’re essentially smart humans, but mentats from the Dune books are computer stand-ins, who pretty much perform complex calculations in their heads. They come about as a result of a ban on AIs or thinking machines and surpass our current computational abilities. If you haven’t read the Dune books by Frank Herbert, you seriously need to!
Echoes of Time (Book 2 of the Tapache’s Promise Trilogy) by James Murdo is out now. Order your copy here.
