Thanks for your reply, lots of interesting points :)
Consciousness may not be binary, in that case, we don’t know if humans are low, medium, or high consciousness, I only know that I am not at zero. We should then likely assume we are average. Then, the relevant comparison is no longer between P(humanity is “conscious”) and P(aliens creating SFCs are “conscious”) but between P(humanity’s consciousness > 0) and P(aliens-creating-SFC’s consciousness > 0)
I particularly appreciate that reframing of consciousness. I think it’s probably both binary and continuous though. Binary in the sense that you need a “machinery” that’s capable of producing consciousness i.e. neurons in a brain seem to work. And then if you have that capable machinery, you then have the range from low to high consciousness, like we see on Earth. If intelligence is related to consciousness level as it seems to be on Earth, then I would expect that any alien with “capable machinery” that’s intelligent enough to become spacefaring would have consciousness high enough to satisfy my worries (though not necessarily at the top of the range).
So then any alien civilisation would either be “conscious enough” or “not conscious at all”, conditional on (a) the machinery of life being binary in its ability to produce a scale of consciousness and (b) consciousness being correlated with intelligence.
So I’m not betting on it. The stakes are so high (a universe devoid of sentience) that I would have to meet and test the consciousness of aliens with a ‘perfect’ theory of consciousness before I updated any strategy towards reducing P(ancestral-human SFC) even if there’s an extremely high probability of Civ-Similarity Hypothesis being true.
Thanks for your reply, lots of interesting points :)
I particularly appreciate that reframing of consciousness. I think it’s probably both binary and continuous though. Binary in the sense that you need a “machinery” that’s capable of producing consciousness i.e. neurons in a brain seem to work. And then if you have that capable machinery, you then have the range from low to high consciousness, like we see on Earth. If intelligence is related to consciousness level as it seems to be on Earth, then I would expect that any alien with “capable machinery” that’s intelligent enough to become spacefaring would have consciousness high enough to satisfy my worries (though not necessarily at the top of the range).
So then any alien civilisation would either be “conscious enough” or “not conscious at all”, conditional on (a) the machinery of life being binary in its ability to produce a scale of consciousness and (b) consciousness being correlated with intelligence.
So I’m not betting on it. The stakes are so high (a universe devoid of sentience) that I would have to meet and test the consciousness of aliens with a ‘perfect’ theory of consciousness before I updated any strategy towards reducing P(ancestral-human SFC) even if there’s an extremely high probability of Civ-Similarity Hypothesis being true.