Is there any crucial consideration I’m missing? For instance, are there reasons to think agents/civilizations that care about suffering might – in fact – be selected for and be among the grabbiest?
David Deutsch makes the argument that long-term success in knowledge-creation requires commitment to values like tolerance, respect for the truth, rationality and optimism. The idea is that if you do not have such values you end up with a fixed society, with dogmatic ideas and institutions that are not open to criticism, error-correction and improvement. Errors will inevitably accumulate and you will fail to create the knowledge necessary to achieve your goals.
On this view, grabby aliens need values that permit sustained knowledge growth to meet the challenges of successful long-term expansion. An error-correcting society would make moral as well as scientific progress, and so would either value reducing suffering or have a good moral explanation as to why reducing suffering isn’t optimal.
This is somewhat like a variation of the Instrumental Convergence Thesis, whereby agents will tend to converge on various Enlightenment values because they are instrumental in knowledge creation, and knowledge-growth is necessary for successfully reaching many final goals.
the only moral values that permit sustained progress are the objective values of an open society and more broadly of the Enlightenment. No doubt the ET’s morality would not be the same as ours, but nor will it be the same as the 16th century conquistadors. It will be better than ours.
the Borg way of life… doesn’t create any knowledge. It continues to exist by assimilating existing knowledge. … A fixed way of life. … it is never going win in the long run against an exponentially improving way of life
David Deutsch makes the argument that long-term success in knowledge-creation requires commitment to values like tolerance, respect for the truth, rationality and optimism. The idea is that if you do not have such values you end up with a fixed society, with dogmatic ideas and institutions that are not open to criticism, error-correction and improvement. Errors will inevitably accumulate and you will fail to create the knowledge necessary to achieve your goals.
On this view, grabby aliens need values that permit sustained knowledge growth to meet the challenges of successful long-term expansion. An error-correcting society would make moral as well as scientific progress, and so would either value reducing suffering or have a good moral explanation as to why reducing suffering isn’t optimal.
This is somewhat like a variation of the Instrumental Convergence Thesis, whereby agents will tend to converge on various Enlightenment values because they are instrumental in knowledge creation, and knowledge-growth is necessary for successfully reaching many final goals.
Here are two relevant quotations about alien values from a talk David Deutsch gave on optimism.