I posted this as a comment to Robin Hanson’s “Seeing ANYTHING Other Than Huge-Civ Is Bad News” —
————
I feel these debates are too agnostic about the likely telos of aliens (whether grabby or not). Being able to make reasonable conjectures here will greatly improve our a priori expectations and our interpretation of available cosmological evidence.
Premise 1: Eventually, civilizations progress until they can engage in megascale engineering: Dyson spheres, etc.
Premise 2: Consciousness is the home of value: Disneyland with no children is valueless.
Premise 2.1: Over the long term we should expect at least some civilizations to fall into the attractor of treating consciousness as their intrinsic optimization target.
Premise 3: There will be convergence that some qualia are intrinsically valuable, and what sorts of qualia are such.
Conjecture: A key piece of evidence for discerning the presence of advanced alien civilizations will be megascale objects which optimize for the production of intrinsically valuable qualia.
Speculatively, I suspect black holes and pulsars might fit this description.
Reasonable people can definitely disagree here, and these premises may not work for various reasons. But I’d circle back to the first line: I feel these debates are too agnostic about the likely telos of aliens (whether grabby or not). In this sense I think we’re leaving value on the table.
If aliens need only powerful computers to produce interesting qualia, this will be no different from other large scale projects, and boils down to some Dyson spheres-like objects. But we don’t know how qualia appear.
Also, a whole human industry of tourism is only producing pleasant qualia. Extrapolating, aliens will have mega-tourism: almost pristine universe, where some beings interact with nature in very intimate ways. Now it becomes similar to some observations of UFOs.
I posted this as a comment to Robin Hanson’s “Seeing ANYTHING Other Than Huge-Civ Is Bad News” —
————
I feel these debates are too agnostic about the likely telos of aliens (whether grabby or not). Being able to make reasonable conjectures here will greatly improve our a priori expectations and our interpretation of available cosmological evidence.
Premise 1: Eventually, civilizations progress until they can engage in megascale engineering: Dyson spheres, etc.
Premise 2: Consciousness is the home of value: Disneyland with no children is valueless.
Premise 2.1: Over the long term we should expect at least some civilizations to fall into the attractor of treating consciousness as their intrinsic optimization target.
Premise 3: There will be convergence that some qualia are intrinsically valuable, and what sorts of qualia are such.
Conjecture: A key piece of evidence for discerning the presence of advanced alien civilizations will be megascale objects which optimize for the production of intrinsically valuable qualia.
Speculatively, I suspect black holes and pulsars might fit this description.
More:
https://opentheory.net/2019/09/whats-out-there/
https://opentheory.net/2019/02/simulation-argument/
————
Reasonable people can definitely disagree here, and these premises may not work for various reasons. But I’d circle back to the first line: I feel these debates are too agnostic about the likely telos of aliens (whether grabby or not). In this sense I think we’re leaving value on the table.
If aliens need only powerful computers to produce interesting qualia, this will be no different from other large scale projects, and boils down to some Dyson spheres-like objects. But we don’t know how qualia appear.
Also, a whole human industry of tourism is only producing pleasant qualia. Extrapolating, aliens will have mega-tourism: almost pristine universe, where some beings interact with nature in very intimate ways. Now it becomes similar to some observations of UFOs.