One interesting expansion of your idea, which also serves as a counter to an obvious flaw, is that a non-expansionist civilization will actively hinder its offspring from being expansionist, and will behave aggressively toward expansionist tendencies. Even with non-expansionist values themselves, expansionist tendencies have to be a thing in their native grammar and world model to be curbed, so they are obviously also something to curb and fight externally (or semi-internally).
By default there’s a drift argument you also alluded to: every time a civilization changes, or creates a subpopulation or offspring that varies from its own setup, if that variation turns toward expansionism, it will itself just propagate and crowd out the non-expansionist root.
Hence, any mature civilization will have active countermeasures against this. The norm enforcement serves its goals even if it’s local.
If course, this enforcement is, in turn, also local: it stabilizes lineages, not the galaxy, because single lineages might just never reach a non-expansionist basin. One could argue that a single expansionist variation will just erase all non-expansionist tendencies, but that’s not true, because any non-expansionist tendency is still self-preserving in an obvious autopoietic way.
Another structural problem I see: the filter, as you put it so far, sounds like a mortality rate. If it’s not a wall and enough civilizations get through, the expansionist nature of those that do, ultimately still ends up with them filling the galaxy. To explain Fermi, the filter must be basically total.
One interesting repair: the anti-expansion filter could be instantiated in a kind of dark forest analogy. Non-expansionist civilizations don’t only have an interest in curbing their own variations and offspring, they also have a motivation to build defensive and offensive measures to protect themselves from expansionist civilizations. For a certain balance of offense and defense (which seems fairly plausible as described in Dark Forest theories), this takes the form of non-expansionist civilizations being very cautious and very aggressive toward any expansionist tendencies. That results in an actual filter that would fit the observation.
One gap here is that this is mostly about being quiet, but expansionism in general is just loud and easier to detect. So expansionist civilizations would have to be quiet, and if instrumental principles congeal into first-principle held values, which I don’t think is too unlikely, quietness itself drifts toward genuine non-expansionism. All of this contributes to a non-expansionist value system being a dominant strategy.
So, an interesting open question: if the dark forest is one possible existence proof of how a pathway can create a non-expansionist attractor, which other attractors (maybe earlier in the development of a civilization?) could there be, and what properties make the attractors total enough to actually explain fermi?
A survivable non-expansionist stance is to be expansionist about non-expansion, to build a self-propagating expansion wave that only prevents or opposes other expansionist initiatives, and does nothing else.
One interesting expansion of your idea, which also serves as a counter to an obvious flaw, is that a non-expansionist civilization will actively hinder its offspring from being expansionist, and will behave aggressively toward expansionist tendencies. Even with non-expansionist values themselves, expansionist tendencies have to be a thing in their native grammar and world model to be curbed, so they are obviously also something to curb and fight externally (or semi-internally). By default there’s a drift argument you also alluded to: every time a civilization changes, or creates a subpopulation or offspring that varies from its own setup, if that variation turns toward expansionism, it will itself just propagate and crowd out the non-expansionist root. Hence, any mature civilization will have active countermeasures against this. The norm enforcement serves its goals even if it’s local. If course, this enforcement is, in turn, also local: it stabilizes lineages, not the galaxy, because single lineages might just never reach a non-expansionist basin. One could argue that a single expansionist variation will just erase all non-expansionist tendencies, but that’s not true, because any non-expansionist tendency is still self-preserving in an obvious autopoietic way. Another structural problem I see: the filter, as you put it so far, sounds like a mortality rate. If it’s not a wall and enough civilizations get through, the expansionist nature of those that do, ultimately still ends up with them filling the galaxy. To explain Fermi, the filter must be basically total. One interesting repair: the anti-expansion filter could be instantiated in a kind of dark forest analogy. Non-expansionist civilizations don’t only have an interest in curbing their own variations and offspring, they also have a motivation to build defensive and offensive measures to protect themselves from expansionist civilizations. For a certain balance of offense and defense (which seems fairly plausible as described in Dark Forest theories), this takes the form of non-expansionist civilizations being very cautious and very aggressive toward any expansionist tendencies. That results in an actual filter that would fit the observation. One gap here is that this is mostly about being quiet, but expansionism in general is just loud and easier to detect. So expansionist civilizations would have to be quiet, and if instrumental principles congeal into first-principle held values, which I don’t think is too unlikely, quietness itself drifts toward genuine non-expansionism. All of this contributes to a non-expansionist value system being a dominant strategy. So, an interesting open question: if the dark forest is one possible existence proof of how a pathway can create a non-expansionist attractor, which other attractors (maybe earlier in the development of a civilization?) could there be, and what properties make the attractors total enough to actually explain fermi?
A survivable non-expansionist stance is to be expansionist about non-expansion, to build a self-propagating expansion wave that only prevents or opposes other expansionist initiatives, and does nothing else.