What more than sentience do you need from a species for its intelligence to be recognizable by humans?

Question

It's becoming obvious from how could humans recognize another species as sentient / intelligent that recognizing another species' intelligence is very complicated. There are no universal tests, no common definition of intelligence...

Let's go with one assumption: wherever we go in space, we'll be looking for extra-terrestrial life, and if we do find it (and recognize it as alive), we'll always try to learn if it is sentient.

Now what traits does a species need, to be recognized as intelligent by humans, beyond the fact that it is sentient and recognizable as alive by humans?

Differently put, this question could also be: what type of sentient species will we miss out because of our inability to recognize their sentience?

Answer 1

While bees communicating the location of a food source through movement to others can be seen has intelligence, I don't believe humans as a whole would consider it significant enough. The minimum requirement could quite possibly be the ability to record history. It would not need to be as advanced as written text but the simple pictures in a cave showing migration to a food source for future generations.

Answer 2

To be successfully recognised as intelligent you first have to be recognised as life. Being recognised as life requires that metabolic rate and scale are tangible. If an organism meets every other criteria for intelligence but does it on a geological scale then everything that a human can observe in human terms will be ascribed to geological process.

Similarly, no matter how complicated our own activities, that organism would regard us as an unintelligent parasite.

So, to be recognised as intelligent by, and to some extent for that intelligence to be in any way relevant to, humans you have to act with a tempo within the grasp of humans.

Also, having a face helps.

Answer 3

Intelligence is inherently linked to work. Work is an organized form of changing our environment. Bees and ants do work and change the environment, but they do so in a pattern organized by their genomes. Intelligent work is characterized by its capability to be taught to others of the same species. A human being is not born knowing how to build houses like ants do. It is taught how to do so by someone who already knows. This kind of accumulated knowledge that is first transmitted by alive members of the species, later evolves, with writing, as a multigeneration accumulation of knowledge and culture.

So, to verify if some species is intelligent you might ask:

1. Does this species change the environment?
2. Does this species change the environment via organized work?
3. Does this species create new kinds of work and tools out of necessity?
4. If this species does create new kinds of work and tools, does it do so by genetic change or learned behaviour?
5. Does this species pass their knowledge from one generation to the next via teaching?
6. Does this species write down their knowledge so it can be furthered by the next generations?

Up to the fourth question you are still in the realm of primate intelligence on Earth, because each one of those things can be done by various primate species. The questions five and six are humankind development.

Answer 4

Now what traits does a species need, to be recognized as intelligent by humans, beyond the fact that it is sentient and recognizable as alive by humans?

Differently put, this question could also be: what type of sentient species will >we miss out because of our inability to recognize their sentience?

The beings must:

1) Have the ability to accomplish complex tasks with results that are detectable (by humans), that are beyond the complexity achieved by non-sentient animals (as defined by the culture that encounters them), or

2) Have the (apparent) ability to communicate non-immediate or complex abstract concepts with one another (or with us), and

3) Operate on something close to the same timescale.

Or, to answer the reverse: Humans are not likely to recognize as sentient any race of beings that neither performs tasks more complex than nest-building or poking anthills with sticks, nor has any apparent means of communication more complex than required to signal dangers, the presence of food, the desire to mate, etc. Nor are we likely to recognize a sentience that requires day to say hello.

Answer 5

Motion will almost certainly be the most obvious thing that will make humans sit up and take notice. The ability to move, and to sense motion, is the subject of too many studies to mention. Conversely, if a species is sessile (and the spell checker sure doesn't like that word!), it will likely be overlooked for years, if it's ever spotted at all. Note that this isn't a requirement for sentience, just a focal point for human investigation.

Communication is probably the next biggest thing. Vocal communication attracts our attention as a species, and we tend to make big assumptions about species that don't operate this way. Electromagnetic phenomena will also almost certainly be noticed immediately. Body language is something that a trained observer would probably notice, especially if the species is highly gregarious, but this is the point at which arguments will develop about whether or not this form of communication constitutes sentient intelligence. Species that use chemical, "psychic" (for a certain value of psychic), and other more exotic forms of communication will almost certainly be overlooked for a long time.

Gregarity will also be a valuble clue. If a species, especially a spacefaring species, has such a sparse population as to rarely encounter other members of the same species, it might be hard to recognize an extraterrestrial species for what it is, never mind identify it as intelligent.

Technology is, of course, a dead giveaway, or it ought to be. Certainly anyone that thinks the great apes are sentient would see even the most primitive tech as a sign of intelligence. The famous termite fishing sticks come to mind.

Nervous Biology (Let the jokes begin!) For a species that isn't noted as sentient by any other method, biological examination might be used to try to determine the level of intelligence of that species. Current day scientists put a lot of stock in the Anthropic Principle, at least in the sense that they expect intelligent life to have a nervous system that functions like our does. Even xenobiologists that expect a physical nervous system radically different from our own aren't sure that they'll know what they're looking at when they see it. By this measure, if we ever accepted that some species with such a radically different biology was indeed sentient, we'd have much better clues to search for. Until then, only species that really resemble us are likely to be spotted in this way.

Answer 6

As of now, objective methods to detect sentience do not exist.

Sentience is the capacity to experience feelings and sensations, but there are no instruments that can detect whether something/someone has that capacity, nor to detect existence of any sort of feeling or sensation (also known as qualia), be it experienced or not. No one knows what stuff they are made of, not even so much as to be able to tell whether existence of that stuff can be detected with any physical instrument ever.

It is relatively easy to study how something going on in the brain correlates with what a [human] test subject experiences: when the subject is seeing specific colors, their brain exhibits certain activity patterns. Thus it is possible to map brain areas and the corresponding qualia.

However, no one has been able to formulate any scientifically testable hypothesis as to why activity patterns are associated with specific experiences. Not only pertaining to specific things going on in the brain, but even in the broader sense: why and how things are being experienced in the first place. This is the hard problem of consciousness, and the missing bridge between the physical and sentient is known as explanatory gap.

As far as we know, anyone can be a so-called philosophical zombie: something that looks like a person and acts like a person, but has no inner life at all. Basically a robot that physically is 100 % human, completely indistinguishable from one, but completely void mindwise: not seeing colors, only processing visual information, not hearing sounds, only processing auditory information etc.

The only reason we can do that mapping of neural correlates is because our test subjects can give feedback about their experiences and we trust that the feedback is what we would give if we were the test subject experiencing blue directly when we would say "I see color blue". There is a very serious leap of faith involved in the process.

So, as of now, and maybe forever, the situation is as follows: even if we can detect something in a living being that is very likely associated with experience, there is no way to tell for sure whether any sort of experience in fact goes along with it.

This can lead to very different two conclusions and two very different approaches:

• a compassionate one: sentience is taken for granted, and every lifeform is considered [potentially] sentient and treated accordingly, or
• a nihilistic one: if you cannot measure it, it does not exist, therefore alien lifeforms are deemed non-sentient, unless there is a very good reason to assume otherwise

The first one can be based on panpsychism: the view that the whole universe is sentient in some sense, and the sentience we are aware of (which we actually take for somewhat granted) arises from it, and so does sentience of every other lifeform, too.

Answer 7

They would need to have a visible way of communicating with each other. (if it are plants who communicate by thought it would take us a long time to find out probably).

They will also need to have some sort of language available, I know that there is a free PDF of NASA for xeno linguistics or something like that, here is a link:

http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/files/Archaeology_Anthropology_and_Interstellar_Communication_TAGGED.pdf

They should also have a visible form of society, on a large scale. So no monkey congress/ tribes but more in the way of villages/ caravans/ nomads.