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Updated: May 29, 2025
"Association of otherwise dissimilar things because of some apparent similarity is a recognized element of nonsapient animal behavior." He frowned again. "That could be an explanation. I'll have to think of it." About this time tomorrow, it would be his own idea, with grudging recognition of a suggestion by Victor Grego. In time, that would be forgotten; it would be the Mallin Theory.
There was a brief flicker of red while he was listing his publication that paper, entirely the work of one of his students, which he had published under his own name. He had forgotten about that, but his conscience hadn't. "Dr. Mallin," the oldest of the three judges, who sat in the middle, began, "what, in your professional opinion, is the difference between sapient and nonsapient mentation?"
"The ability to think consciously," he stated. The globe stayed blue. "Do you mean that nonsapient animals aren't conscious, or do you mean they don't think?" "Well, neither. Any life form with a central nervous system has some consciousness awareness of existence and of its surroundings. And anything having a brain thinks, to use the term at its loosest.
Grego took his eyes from the globe. "Ernest Mallin's studying all the filmed evidence we have and all the descriptions of Fuzzy behavior, and trying to prove that none of it is the result of sapient mentation. Ruth Ortheris is doing the same, only she's working on the line of instinct and conditioned reflexes and nonsapient, single-stage reasoning.
"This, finally, brings us to one of the recognized overt manifestations of sapience. The sapient being is a symbol user. The nonsapient being cannot symbolize, because the nonsapient mind is incapable of concepts beyond mere sense images." Ybarra drank some water, and twisted the dial of his reading screen with the other hand. "The sapient being," he continued, "can do one other thing.
"The nonsapient animal is conscious only of what is immediately present to the senses and responds automatically. It will perceive something and make a single statement about it this is good to eat, this sensation is unpleasant, this is a sex-gratification object, this is dangerous.
We just want your opinion in general terms, now." "Well, the sapient mind can generalize. To the nonsapient animal, every experience is either totally novel or identical with some remembered experience. A rabbit will flee from one dog because to the rabbit mind it is identical with another dog that has chased it.
Dr. van Riebeek, who is especially interested in the evolutionary aspect of the question, suggests that the introduction of novelty because of drastic environmental changes may have forced nonsapient beings into more or less sustained conscious thinking and so initiated mental habits which, in time, gave rise to true sapience.
The cloudcats were comfortable, Hovan said, even if they were confined; the human prisoners were almost certainly confined somehow, too. Merely treating intelligent beings as nonsapient was a cause for dishonor, it seemed, which spoke well of Traiti honor. True, the dishonor might be in underestimating a possible enemy but that didn't quite seem to fit, somehow.
"If we depict sapient mentation as an iceberg, we might depict nonsapient mentation as the sunlight reflected from its surface. This is a considerably less exact analogy; while the nonsapient mind deals, consciously, with nothing but present sense data, there is a considerable absorption and re-emission of subconscious memories.
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