i don’t remember the game too terribly well, so forgive me if this is wrong, but is there any reason to assume the Ing are actually self-aware? i know the game repeatedly states the Ing are intelligent and vicious, but those don’t necessarily indicate if they’re truly sapient. animals can certainly be intelligent, and organized into castes/hierarchies, and very hostile to interlopers on their territory, but they arent as mentally aware as we are. could it be that, for as dangerous and powerful as the Ing are, they’re not much more than advanced animals? (its kind of like Peter Watt’s Blindsight novel, where the aliens are much more advanced than humans, and are extremely hostile, but dont have self-awareness like us, its a really good book and its free, check it out its awesome) what im trying to get at is, perhaps we dont see the Ing’s perspective, not just to keep them mysterious and frightening, but because they dont have a perspective to see?
So you make an interesting point: ARE the Ing self-aware? I haven't read Blindsight, so I will take your recommendation to read it, but I can’t put that bit of perspective into play here.
As the Ing give us no information on their perspective, it's impossible to definitively say one way or another if Ing as a whole are sapient. As our only sources of insight into their behaviors come from Luminoth lore as well as what our scans of the Ing and the Darklings tell us, there's a few things we can extrapolate:
- The lowest Ing on the totem pole are Bladepods, Ingworm Caches, and Ingsphere Caches. These guys act as storage units, meaning the Ing understand the importance of useful items, resources, and equipment, as well as keeping them protected in strategic locations for later retrieval.
(What constitutes a useful resource for the Ing is unknown, as Samus's suit converts things into forms that it can absorb when destroying them.)
Regardless, I hope these Ing aren't self-aware because their existence is a sad one.
- The caste of a given Ing seems to be assigned at birth or at some point afterwards based on the current needs of the Horde; the word assigned is specifically used in the scan for the Ingworm Cache, and the various other scans of Ing forms do not seem to contradict this (Inglets being workers, for example). This isn't dissimilar to hive insects, though.
- Darklings, however, are where things get interesting. The Ing are extremely choosy about which Ing can handle what. Certain creatures, such as an Alpha Splinter, are prioritized by the Ing as targets for possession. War Wasps are specifically used by young, inexperienced Ing to gain experience and prove themselves before they're allowed stronger creatures. Pirate Commandos are ONLY allowed to be possessed by Hunter Ing. Certain creatures, like the Shredder, are targeted for use in specific areas where their adaptations make them particularly useful. It's clear that choosing a target to possess is something that an Ing has to put a great deal of consideration into, both in terms of their experience as well as what will be useful in the environment they find themselves in.
- Ing are demonstrated to possess known sapient creatures. The Luminoth lores indicate that Luminoth were possessed, and we see it happen to both (dead) humans as well as (live) Space Pirates. While the humans are not fully possessed by the time Samus encounters them (them being corpses probably hinders the Ing some), the Dark Pirate Troopers and Dark Pirate Commandos ARE fully possessed and display no loss in intelligence or tactical capacity as a result of their possession. Ing minds have thusly interacted with sapient minds and taken control of them without issue; if they did not have conscious thought before, they may have learned it from this exposure given their penchant for learning from the creatures they possess.
- Speaking of learning, the Ing discovered their penchant for integrating themselves into technology and technology into themselves through possession of Luminoth technology and Space Pirates in general. Given that the Ing do not seem interested in or capable of engineering anything themselves, any knowledge they gained regarding utilizing stolen technology must have been learned either through experimentation or through directly stealing knowledge from the Luminoth and Space Pirates they possessed. Regardless of how they learn, they DO learn and can spread the knowledge they gain to other members of the Horde. As a result of discovering Space Pirates, the Ing began actively hunting for technology to utilize- the Ing were aware enough that when they discovered a shortcoming in their abilities, they immediately began to use what they learned to patch that.
- The fact that the Ing were repeatedly able to outmaneuver the technologically superior Luminoth at every turn is an indicator that the Ing are tactically intelligent. Sure, a large part of the Ing's advantage was through zerg rushing the weakened Luminoth after the phazon meteor struck Aether, but they also were noted to possess Luminoth to disrupt the Luminoth's ability to organize and fight back, as well as stealing just about every single weapon and tool the Luminoth developed to use against them. Weapons they couldn’t use themselves, like the Light Beam, were instead locked away where the Luminoth couldn’t retrieve them. Others, like the Annihilator Beam or the Dark Suit, were integrated into their most powerful Darklings to guard the energy they stole. And going after the Energy Controllers in a bid to stabilize Dark Aether is an indication of complex understanding and thought; it's hard to imagine an animal intelligence grasping a concept such as planetary stability or energy instead of simply colonizing Light Aether as an expansion of territory.
Overall, I think that the Ing are definitely capable of complex thought. The intelligence they possess is much more than animal, and there's indicators that they do put a great deal of consideration into their actions, they understand tactics and complex subjects, and they are capable of quickly learning to utilize unfamiliar tools and integrate them into their bodies and their Horde. I would peg them as almost certainly being sapient in terms of cognitive ability and awareness.
As for whether they're specifically self-aware? That's a different, weirder question. Given their similarity to hive insects as well as their sheer, bizarre scale of organization, and the speed at which new information seems to propagate through the Horde? They might be operating through a hivemind to achieve that, and individual Ing may not be particularly aware of themselves outside the whole.
ANYWAY, nothing I've listed explicitly proves one way or the other that the Ing are of human-like intelligence or awareness. It's my interpretation of the limited information on them given, and you’re free to have a different one.
