Have you read Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky? It’s a beautiful and relatively recent science fiction book and winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award. It approaches the theme of other beings, artificial consciousness, emergent consciousness, empathy, and quite a few other things. That doesn’t entirely cut it, but to me it seems like it is speaking directly to your post.
Without spoiling too much, it follows an event in which engineered retroviruses designed to make apes intelligent, hurled into a newly-terraformed planet by human colonists, accidentally makes the portia genus of jumping spider more intelligent instead. The book launches into imaginative and precise evolutionary worldbuilding, tracing the rise of an entire civilisation swarming with what are to us alien minds. (Portia are more on the level of octopi than bears as far as otherness is concerned.) Portia are a type of jumping spider native to rainforests in the East Indies. Despite having only 200,000 neurons or so, they are considered some of the most intelligent critters at their scale. They sustain themselves entirely off eating other types of spiders, by spending hours calculating the best angle of attack and silently crawling around the enemy web, before attacking at once. They seem to be capable of thinking up plans, and are masters of spatial reasoning (they non-coincidentally have particularly good eyes for their size). The word “arachnid” might send a shiver down your spine right now, but by the end of reading this book, I swear, your arachnophobia will be cured (perhaps not at the instinctual level, but at the intellectual do-I-like-spiders-and-think-they-are-cool level). What would you expect a civilisation of intelligent portia to be like? What threats do you think they would face? Well, jot down your predictions and go find out! https://www.amazon.com/Children-Time-Adrian-Tchaikovsky/dp/1447273303
Have you read Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky? It’s a beautiful and relatively recent science fiction book and winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award. It approaches the theme of other beings, artificial consciousness, emergent consciousness, empathy, and quite a few other things. That doesn’t entirely cut it, but to me it seems like it is speaking directly to your post.
Without spoiling too much, it follows an event in which engineered retroviruses designed to make apes intelligent, hurled into a newly-terraformed planet by human colonists, accidentally makes the portia genus of jumping spider more intelligent instead. The book launches into imaginative and precise evolutionary worldbuilding, tracing the rise of an entire civilisation swarming with what are to us alien minds. (Portia are more on the level of octopi than bears as far as otherness is concerned.) Portia are a type of jumping spider native to rainforests in the East Indies. Despite having only 200,000 neurons or so, they are considered some of the most intelligent critters at their scale. They sustain themselves entirely off eating other types of spiders, by spending hours calculating the best angle of attack and silently crawling around the enemy web, before attacking at once. They seem to be capable of thinking up plans, and are masters of spatial reasoning (they non-coincidentally have particularly good eyes for their size). The word “arachnid” might send a shiver down your spine right now, but by the end of reading this book, I swear, your arachnophobia will be cured (perhaps not at the instinctual level, but at the intellectual do-I-like-spiders-and-think-they-are-cool level). What would you expect a civilisation of intelligent portia to be like? What threats do you think they would face? Well, jot down your predictions and go find out! https://www.amazon.com/Children-Time-Adrian-Tchaikovsky/dp/1447273303