Surely the central premise is not true in our world? Many animals are kind to non-kin, and this seems to continue alongside increased animal intelligence. I don’t see why the default path to higher intelligence would not look like homo sapiens, where the initial ancestors capable of forming a society are “stupid” and don’t optimize completely for genetic fitness, allowing pro-social patterns to take hold.
I suspect “friendships” form within the psyche, and are part of how we humans (and various other minds, though maybe not all minds, I’m not sure) cohere into relatively unified beings (after being a chaos of many ~subagents in infancy). Insofar as that’s true of a given mind, it may make it a bit easier for kindness to form between it and outside minds, as it will already know some parts of how friendships can be done.
Spoiler block was not supposed to be empty, sorry. It’s fixed now. I was using the Markdown spoiler formatting and there was some kind of bug with it I think, I reported it to the LW admins last night. (also fwiw I took the opportunity now to expand on my original spoilered comment more)
I like the story, but (spoilers):
Surely the central premise is not true in our world? Many animals are kind to non-kin, and this seems to continue alongside increased animal intelligence. I don’t see why the default path to higher intelligence would not look like homo sapiens, where the initial ancestors capable of forming a society are “stupid” and don’t optimize completely for genetic fitness, allowing pro-social patterns to take hold.
I suspect “friendships” form within the psyche, and are part of how we humans (and various other minds, though maybe not all minds, I’m not sure) cohere into relatively unified beings (after being a chaos of many ~subagents in infancy). Insofar as that’s true of a given mind, it may make it a bit easier for kindness to form between it and outside minds, as it will already know some parts of how friendships can be done.
This comment confuses me:
Is the spoiler block supposed to be empty, as it appears to be?
Spoiler block was not supposed to be empty, sorry. It’s fixed now. I was using the Markdown spoiler formatting and there was some kind of bug with it I think, I reported it to the LW admins last night. (also fwiw I took the opportunity now to expand on my original spoilered comment more)