"non-human, non-humanoid characters."
Jan. 25th, 2016 02:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kiki_eng"Something about them in their own world and how it works for them"
sinesofinsanity, what is this thing you do to me?
Right. Okay. So you've got your woodland creatures carving out human lives. Stuff like Redwall and Disney's Robin Hood and William Horwood's Duncton Wood, which totally looks like some adorable Redwall shenanigans on the cover, but is some serious Game of Thrones shit inside and I am pretty angry about that cover, still. It's fine.
So, yeah, a lot of the time when humans tell stories about non-humans they're basically doing humans dressed up as animals and there's some furry stuff going on there, I feel. Sometimes there are more animal behaviours incorporated into the characterisation, like The Jungle Book (it has been such a long time since I have read or seen that thing) or Anne McCaffrey's Dragons of Pern, but everything is very much through a human lens. It's a really human thing to do, I feel; we draw faces on everything and see them everywhere and anthroporphise and personify everything.
Sometimes we create new creatures - instead of tucking human minds into rats and trees we tuck them into something new, something alien. Some imagined monster, like in Monster's Inc. or some kind of alien life, like Pilot and Moya on Farscape.
The Goa'uld and Tokra of Stargate are good examples of our striving to find something truly alien, but they're basically angry humans in tiny little snake-let bodies who put on human suits. That same universe also has the crystal entities (SG-1 S1E07) and energy entities (SG-1 S4E20) that do a bit of a better job at the alien thing. I feel like we're always going to relate to other life in human terms, though, I don't think that there's really a way of getting away from that. I do think it's cool, how we look for and find life in different places.
We dream about it in computers, and the robots we make tend to be very human even if they're not humanoid, like the robots of Mystery Science Theater 3000. Often we get sentient computers who lash out because of some bit of programming - glitch or no - or in order to ensure their own survival. There are so many episodes like that. Farscape's bots were dog-like maintenance robots, which is actually a pretty cool deviation from making everything human-like.
The Daleks are really great - angry jellyfish creatures in metal shells. I feel kind of cynically that their motives are still pretty human, though - the quest to destroy everything not of their tribe. ...and then there was Oswin, who was a Dalek who had been human. I really do not feel that Daleks and humans are that far apart.
I am a fan of this thing where we explore the possibilites of life and what that means, that we look for sentient life in the deep ice or in black oil (The X-Files, and both of those are so creepy) and that we do actually find it in real life in such extreme temperatures and places where there is no oxygen, and we do find some incredible intelligence in creatures who are not human. Dolphins and octopi, man, I feel we should be treating them with a fair amount of respect, and, failing that, fear.
You know in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy* the dolphins leave us to be demolished along with the rest of the planet to make room for a hyper-pass. I am just saying. There is also the thing where we have primates, who would probably be classified as humanoid, but they are all these different species, and we do get tool-using primates and primates signing with us, which is very cool.
*which also has the mattresses, and the re-incarnated creature destined to be killed by Arthur Dent - there is some really great stuff in those books
I feel like any character we create is always going to be defined in human terms. ...and I think that's going to be true even after we find alien life. I really don't think we can get away from or change how we relate to the things around us; we are always going to be human. (Unless we become robots.)
sinesofinsanity, what is this thing you do to me?Right. Okay. So you've got your woodland creatures carving out human lives. Stuff like Redwall and Disney's Robin Hood and William Horwood's Duncton Wood, which totally looks like some adorable Redwall shenanigans on the cover, but is some serious Game of Thrones shit inside and I am pretty angry about that cover, still. It's fine.
So, yeah, a lot of the time when humans tell stories about non-humans they're basically doing humans dressed up as animals and there's some furry stuff going on there, I feel. Sometimes there are more animal behaviours incorporated into the characterisation, like The Jungle Book (it has been such a long time since I have read or seen that thing) or Anne McCaffrey's Dragons of Pern, but everything is very much through a human lens. It's a really human thing to do, I feel; we draw faces on everything and see them everywhere and anthroporphise and personify everything.
Sometimes we create new creatures - instead of tucking human minds into rats and trees we tuck them into something new, something alien. Some imagined monster, like in Monster's Inc. or some kind of alien life, like Pilot and Moya on Farscape.
The Goa'uld and Tokra of Stargate are good examples of our striving to find something truly alien, but they're basically angry humans in tiny little snake-let bodies who put on human suits. That same universe also has the crystal entities (SG-1 S1E07) and energy entities (SG-1 S4E20) that do a bit of a better job at the alien thing. I feel like we're always going to relate to other life in human terms, though, I don't think that there's really a way of getting away from that. I do think it's cool, how we look for and find life in different places.
We dream about it in computers, and the robots we make tend to be very human even if they're not humanoid, like the robots of Mystery Science Theater 3000. Often we get sentient computers who lash out because of some bit of programming - glitch or no - or in order to ensure their own survival. There are so many episodes like that. Farscape's bots were dog-like maintenance robots, which is actually a pretty cool deviation from making everything human-like.
The Daleks are really great - angry jellyfish creatures in metal shells. I feel kind of cynically that their motives are still pretty human, though - the quest to destroy everything not of their tribe. ...and then there was Oswin, who was a Dalek who had been human. I really do not feel that Daleks and humans are that far apart.
I am a fan of this thing where we explore the possibilites of life and what that means, that we look for sentient life in the deep ice or in black oil (The X-Files, and both of those are so creepy) and that we do actually find it in real life in such extreme temperatures and places where there is no oxygen, and we do find some incredible intelligence in creatures who are not human. Dolphins and octopi, man, I feel we should be treating them with a fair amount of respect, and, failing that, fear.
You know in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy* the dolphins leave us to be demolished along with the rest of the planet to make room for a hyper-pass. I am just saying. There is also the thing where we have primates, who would probably be classified as humanoid, but they are all these different species, and we do get tool-using primates and primates signing with us, which is very cool.
*which also has the mattresses, and the re-incarnated creature destined to be killed by Arthur Dent - there is some really great stuff in those books
I feel like any character we create is always going to be defined in human terms. ...and I think that's going to be true even after we find alien life. I really don't think we can get away from or change how we relate to the things around us; we are always going to be human. (Unless we become robots.)
(no subject)
Date: 2016-01-27 03:19 am (UTC)I think you're right. And I think that we will always try to ascribe human emotions and human motivations to alien characters, which may get us into a lot of trouble if and when we meet alien intelligences.
I think we tend to do the same thing with machine intelligences as well, which will also be a problem when
SkynetAIs become a reality.I don't think we can help it, and I think it works both ways. An alien intelligence is going to be totally baffled by what we do and how we do it; it's totally out of their experience as well...
(no subject)
Date: 2016-01-27 04:14 am (UTC)I don't know about aliens. I feel like there is so much life on earth that I'm not sure I can imagine something completely beyond what we've seen occurring, but I do also feel that difficulties would ensue in some kind of cultural exchange.
(no subject)
Date: 2016-01-27 04:31 am (UTC)How do we communicate with intelligences that don't even share a common environment with us? How do you establish a commonality with something that lives in the ocean?
And that's without even getting into the debate of what constitutes sentience and self-awareness.
I don't think artificial intelligence is actually that far away - we're creating computers now that are faster than ever, with more and more available memory. We're using human brains as a model, trying to get computers to think more like humans...
My worry is that I don't think we're mature enough to handle the birth of a new type of intelligence.
(no subject)
Date: 2016-01-28 01:41 am (UTC)...and, yeah, I'm not sure how intelligent humans are, really.