The remarkable thing about this story is the conflicting responses in the stories. The fact that a relatively homogeneous group of humans can have totally different intuitions about which ending is better and which aliens they prefer, to me, means that actually aliens (or an AI, whatever) have the potential to be, well- alien, far in excess of what is described in this story. Both aliens have value systems which, while different from ours are almost entirely comprehensible. I think we might be vastly underestimating how radically alien aliens could be.
If the alien value systems weren’t comprehensible how could we explain it in a story? Even if we didn’t comprehend it, we could probably still figure out if they deceive. If they don’t, we just figure out their demands and decide if their acceptable. If the demands aren’t, we either try to wipe them out or flee. If they do deceive, we can either guess what their final plan is, or wipe them out or flee. We wouldn’t fully understand their values and we don’t fully understand other humans values. When I see moral dilemma I realize I don’t fully understand my own values. The only way to understand another beings values would be to share thoughts and since we could never know if the thoughts were being shared accurately, we couldn’t be sure what others really value.
How can incomprehensible value systems be represented in story form? With abortive attempts at those who hold them trying to explain them. Like a garuda trying to explain how “theft of choice (of when and with whom to have sex)” is a different crime than “rape” to a human (who doesn’t value individual choice in the same way). Or like a superhappy who just knows that we’d absolutely love to be able to Untranslatable 4.
The remarkable thing about this story is the conflicting responses in the stories. The fact that a relatively homogeneous group of humans can have totally different intuitions about which ending is better and which aliens they prefer, to me, means that actually aliens (or an AI, whatever) have the potential to be, well- alien, far in excess of what is described in this story. Both aliens have value systems which, while different from ours are almost entirely comprehensible. I think we might be vastly underestimating how radically alien aliens could be.
If the alien value systems weren’t comprehensible how could we explain it in a story? Even if we didn’t comprehend it, we could probably still figure out if they deceive. If they don’t, we just figure out their demands and decide if their acceptable. If the demands aren’t, we either try to wipe them out or flee. If they do deceive, we can either guess what their final plan is, or wipe them out or flee. We wouldn’t fully understand their values and we don’t fully understand other humans values. When I see moral dilemma I realize I don’t fully understand my own values. The only way to understand another beings values would be to share thoughts and since we could never know if the thoughts were being shared accurately, we couldn’t be sure what others really value.
How can incomprehensible value systems be represented in story form? With abortive attempts at those who hold them trying to explain them. Like a garuda trying to explain how “theft of choice (of when and with whom to have sex)” is a different crime than “rape” to a human (who doesn’t value individual choice in the same way). Or like a superhappy who just knows that we’d absolutely love to be able to Untranslatable 4.