Species, Instinct, and Culture

As someone who is actively and openly attempting to rip apart the blight most refer to as "gender," I am familiar with many aspects of how human instinct often spills over into our culture. I won't go into the details of that specific example, but will instead use my favorite.

When we humans go to war, we demonize the enemy. I don't mean this lightly. We degrade our opponents in our mind so much that we cease to think of them as humans. The germans become The Hun. The Vietnamese become Zipper-Heads. This leads to plenty of racism, but we do do it for a reason: We cannot withstand the trauma of having killed another decent human being, so we convince ourselves that they were neither decent nor human.

Now, how would such instinctive behaiviors on a deep psychological level be delt with?

About a race's psyche, it should be inherited from its evolution. I plan on formalizing a list of mental faculties and etc which could be evolved by the player, different combinations would lead to different psychic archetypes that would show the "style" of your race.
For instance humans have a strong sense of empathy, and this explains to a point why you demonize your opponents in a war. You don't want to imagine yourself on the shoes of the guy you just shot down, and think of his family and children. Now what if we didn't have empathy?
The list goes on.

Djohaal wrote:

About a race's psyche, it should be inherited from its evolution. I plan on formalizing a list of mental faculties and etc which could be evolved by the player, different combinations would lead to different psychic archetypes that would show the "style" of your race.
For instance humans have a strong sense of empathy, and this explains to a point why you demonize your opponents in a war. You don't want to imagine yourself on the shoes of the guy you just shot down, and think of his family and children. Now what if we didn't have empathy?
The list goes on.

Good idea. Please do remember to include different solution for these problems. A concept race of mine, the Caelumnen, deal by singing/playing insturments and/or dancing in combat. It's not nearly as effective though, so many are still scarred afterwards.

Tenebrarum wrote:

Djohaal wrote:

About a race's psyche, it should be inherited from its evolution. I plan on formalizing a list of mental faculties and etc which could be evolved by the player, different combinations would lead to different psychic archetypes that would show the "style" of your race.
For instance humans have a strong sense of empathy, and this explains to a point why you demonize your opponents in a war. You don't want to imagine yourself on the shoes of the guy you just shot down, and think of his family and children. Now what if we didn't have empathy?
The list goes on.

Good idea. Please do remember to include different solution for these problems. A concept race of mine, the Caelumnen, deal by singing/playing insturments and/or dancing in combat. It's not nearly as effective though, so many are still scarred afterwards.

Well for music to play such a role for them, I reckon they'd need a very strong auditive capabilties. Perhaps even to the point of a kind of synesthesia, where it caused strong emotions and other stimuli. Empathy would be present too. I need to read up my psychiatry basics again to set out a working list though.

Djohaal wrote:

Well for music to play such a role for them, I reckon they'd need a very strong auditive capabilties. Perhaps even to the point of a kind of synesthesia, where it caused strong emotions and other stimuli. Empathy would be present too. I need to read up my psychiatry basics again to set out a working list though.

I like ^^

The whole race has a bit of a Stargirl feel about them. (If you've read that book. I highly recomend it.) I was inspired by the way every non-human race is always portrayed as serious, logical(Usually), and traditionalistic in Sci-Fi, and I wondered why a race couldn't go the other direction.

Sorry. Veering off topic there.

An interesting dynamic would rise if a race had non-consensual telepathy or hivemind for instance. While empathy would be pretty much maxed out, it also means you can't lie or have secrets. Everybody would know...

Djohaal wrote:

An interesting dynamic would rise if a race had non-consensual telepathy or hivemind for instance. While empathy would be pretty much maxed out, it also means you can't lie or have secrets. Everybody would know...

I don't think telepathy can exist.

For hive-mind, I think of it in two ways. Either one hive = one induvidual conciousness, or just look at the Geth from the Mass Effect series. Some of Legion's talk in ME2 gave a near-perfect image of what it must be like, even how alien non-hive races must seem.

Tenebrarum wrote:

Djohaal wrote:

An interesting dynamic would rise if a race had non-consensual telepathy or hivemind for instance. While empathy would be pretty much maxed out, it also means you can't lie or have secrets. Everybody would know...

I don't think telepathy can exist.

For hive-mind, I think of it in two ways. Either one hive = one induvidual conciousness, or just look at the Geth from the Mass Effect series. Some of Legion's talk in ME2 gave a near-perfect image of what it must be like, even how alien non-hive races must seem.

Well not because it can't exist it means we shouldn't implement it if people agree. We'll have FTL travel as far as I know....
The consciousness would require some sort of connectivity, so either all members of the hive would have to keep constant contact through some way such as sounds, physical contact on exposed nervous terminals, a symbiont plant doing the contact like planetfungus on alpha centauri, or telecomunications in the case of the geth. The moment you are accepting some sort of transcendent consciousness that'd commune without some sort of communication you might as well accept telepathy.

This adds for a third point, if the hivemind is mantainded through some sort of transmitted signal, its efficiency would be a big problem as population density has to be kept up so signal transportation takes less time. "hives" would have to be clustered and hive-to-hive communication would become increasingly slow as they spread through the planet. As a single hivemind grew spatially, it'd become slower and more inneficient due to communication lag between it's elements. However at each telecommunications breakthrough they'd gain a massive improvement at efficiency as sounds/nervous impulses/pheromones would get replaced by radio and other technologies.

In any case, psyche. What sort of other catagories will we deal with here?

Religion, diet and culture? I wodner how an exclusively carnivore lifeform would evolve agriculture. What about photossynthesizing animals?

Djohaal wrote:

Religion, diet and culture? I wodner how an exclusively carnivore lifeform would evolve agriculture. What about photossynthesizing animals?

Wait, what?
No, I meant catagories within psyche. As in, what'll we have besides empathy?

Doesn't this fit better in the NE?

~sciocont wrote:

Doesn't this fit better in the NE?

No, because we're talking about psychology, not sociology.

Tenebrarum wrote:

~sciocont wrote:

Doesn't this fit better in the NE?

No, because we're talking about psychology, not sociology.

But the concept better applies to sociology, given that we're working with it much moe in the game. Individual creatures (of a species) most likely won't have terribly different AI, but factions will. Therefore, if you are talking about the psychology of a species in general, that's better defined as sociology.

~sciocont wrote:

[But the concept better applies to sociology, given that we're working with it much moe in the game. Individual creatures (of a species) most likely won't have terribly different AI, but factions will. Therefore, if you are talking about the psychology of a species in general, that's better defined as sociology.

My point is that this does not change from faction to faction. It changes from species to species.

Tenebrarum wrote:

~sciocont wrote:

[But the concept better applies to sociology, given that we're working with it much moe in the game. Individual creatures (of a species) most likely won't have terribly different AI, but factions will. Therefore, if you are talking about the psychology of a species in general, that's better defined as sociology.

My point is that this does not change from faction to faction. It changes from species to species.

Personally, I don't think it would vary nearly as much in the universe as you may think. It won't depend on your species, because, as you have pointed out, biological factors can be easily overcome. No matter your lineage, you will have different factions within any sentient species. Imagining a species as having a static outlook is foolish (not suggesting you're saying a species will).

Well, the line between sociology and psychology is blurry.

I'm interested to think what a species which was more independent would do.

Some things that I think will be more or less constant if you are going to develop a "civilization" are:
Caring for offspring: This makes evolutionary sense because it allows the brain more time to develop. The results would most likely be a "parental" instinct, which would make them more likely to protect juveniles of their species... or, in case of war, be more traumatized by killing the little ones than their adult counterpart.
Group living: At least part of the time, members of your civilization would live in groups, whether they be based on family (pride of lions, pack of wolves, clan...) or some more formal organization. This makes evolutionary sense because you need division of labor (even as basic as some hunt and some gather) in order to invent and progress. This means that there will be rituals or other sociological factors that will be there to mediate disputes, and/or some form of leadership.

Hmmm... anyone else can think of something psycological that might favor the development of civilization?

Mysterious_Calligrapher wrote:

Caring for offspring: This makes evolutionary sense because it allows the brain more time to develop. The results would most likely be a "parental" instinct, which would make them more likely to protect juveniles of their species... or, in case of war, be more traumatized by killing the little ones than their adult counterpart.

What if your a insectoid race, that focuses on extreme numbers?

There is a very little chance that the members of that race would be cared for.

caekdaemon wrote:

Mysterious_Calligrapher wrote:

Caring for offspring: This makes evolutionary sense because it allows the brain more time to develop. The results would most likely be a "parental" instinct, which would make them more likely to protect juveniles of their species... or, in case of war, be more traumatized by killing the little ones than their adult counterpart.

What if your a insectoid race, that focuses on extreme numbers?

There is a very little chance that the members of that race would be cared for.

I doubt they'd be particulary intelligent either. Or perhaps I'm not thinking out of the box enough.

caekdaemon wrote:

What if your a insectoid race, that focuses on extreme numbers?

There is a very little chance that the members of that race would be cared for.

Unless information is passed down, civilization fails to exist. Note how R-Selected speciesare invariably not at the aware stage.

~scio: I understand what you're saying, but look at my examples. Humans do not overcome instincts. We still find fatty foods tasty. We still are communal but terratorial. We still hate. These are all disadventageous, but we cannot get rid of them no matter how hard we try. And we have tried. Different races will think differently than we do. I do agree that there will be more overlap then not, but it's things like these that will give different races true flavors about them.

We can get started with a basic list from cognitive sciences and psychiatry. It goes a wee bit like this:

perception,
introspection
memory
creativity
imagination
conception
belief
reasoning
volition
emotion

Of course we can branch down a dozen functions out of them. Perception can be divided among the senses and the interpretation of thereof, while emotion is a whole big department by itself...

Ok then, Rex.
I think the best example for soiltary intelligence can be found in octopi- they evolved extreme intelligence without living in communities- they can solve problems alone. This ia almost a complete opposite approach than humans took.

~sciocont wrote:

Ok then, Rex.
I think the best example for soiltary intelligence can be found in octopi- they evolved extreme intelligence without living in communities- they can solve problems alone. This ia almost a complete opposite approach than humans took.

Actually not only they evolved extreme intellgience (for an invertebrate anyway) but also they have a relatively short lifespan. Usually smarter organisms are relatively long-lived.

Djohaal wrote:

~sciocont wrote:

Ok then, Rex.
I think the best example for soiltary intelligence can be found in octopi- they evolved extreme intelligence without living in communities- they can solve problems alone. This ia almost a complete opposite approach than humans took.

Actually not only they evolved extreme intellgience (for an invertebrate anyway) but also they have a relatively short lifespan. Usually smarter organisms are relatively long-lived.

Octopi are much smarter than almost all animals, vertebrates and invertebrates.

Yay! Remember though, these are not drastic changes that'd be made. We're not re-writing the AI for each race, just tweaking it.

On Octopi: Sentience/sapience yes. Civilization no.