So, Naiven that possess non-sentient creatures are themselves non-sentient. How do the intelligent Vaylen control said creatures? It can’t be training, because then why would they put a Naiven in a non-sentient creature anyway? They would be served perfectly well without. It’s not Psychology or a mental link of any kind, because the Vaylen don’t have the ability.
Why would non-sentient creatures be considered viable hosts for Naiven if they are then just mindless beasts?
EXAMPLE: In Fires Over Omac, Kodiak Alpha is Ksatriyen whose body was created to look like the local kodiaks so that he could infiltrate and hull them. However, they are unintelligent. So how does he control them?
They still have access to their naiven memories. So they remember what they were gonna do, and they can still more-or-less communicate with Vaylen, they’re just limited in the concepts they can understand. I’d say they have a pretty high level of concrete thinking ability, so if you tell one to do something that you could probably train a monkey to do, it can do it the first time.
That would be assuming the indigenous life-forms were implanted with Vaylen, who were at some point sentient. However, I would think it would be difficult to find volunteers for that so most of the kodiaks would have been implanted with Naiven. From my understanding Naiven have no memories, prior goals or encodings. Can Naiven be chemically pre-encoded with a basic command language?
Technically, “naiven” means the worms, regardless of prior experience or lack thereof. So if a clan prince decides to leave his current host and find someone more interesting, for the period he’s out of that body he’s a “naiven.” (For that matter, the worm inside the brain is a “naiven” too, so if a vaylen got shot up the surgeon who operated might report that she was shot in the abdomen and head but the bullets missed the naiven).
Difficult to find volunteers? Not especially. It’s natural ksatriya duty. You’ll definitely have trouble finding someone willing to leave a human host, sure, but if you’re stuck in engineered artificial hosts with no likelihood of advancement to human hosts by other means, it might be worth spending a few months to a year in a bear (which is a step down from an engineered ksatriya body, but probably not a huge step down) for the chance at a fresh, wild-caught human.
Worst-case, you take some newborn naiven, dump them in mass-produced Shudren or mukhadish bodies for a few months, teach them to talk, then tank 'em up again for the trip over.
EDIT: I guess that’s the answer right there. It’s a gamble: you can live in a low experiential-quality engineered sentient body, or you can take a chance on living in an animal for a while in the hopes that you’ll live like a prince afterwards.
Huh, good catch on naiven. That said, the game seems to use the term in its incorrect human definition.
One thing to remember about Vaylen society: there’s no shortage of bodies, no shortage at all. There’s little shortage even of minimally-sentient bodies. Good bodies, now, well-engineered kshatriya or vaishyen bodies, those are a bit rare. Proper human bodies, those are treasure. So sentience isn’t a luxury, it’s like having a car (not everyone gets a sentient host, because vaylen breed much too fast. But there isn’t really a shortage, it’s just that they spawn like fish but don’t die young anymore). A nice engineered body is like a new car that runs right and suits your needs well. A human body is a Ferrari or a Rolls.
I get that. I was more concerned with how sentient vaylen would go about commanding non-sentient vaylen. I think zabieru’s point about lower caste Ksatriya volunteering for the duty, combined with the chemically encoded racial memories Mr. Moeller describes in the wiki are what I was looking for.