Similarities: Each species considers suffering, in general, negative utility. Each species considers survival very high in utility. (Though at least some humans consider the possibility of sacrificing their species for the others’ benefit, so this is not necessarily highest in value.) Each species has a kind of âfunâ that’s compatible with the others’, and that’s high in utility. They are all made of individuals, reproduce sexually, can communicate among themselves and at least somewhat compatibly with the others.
Differences:
* crystal pogo-sticks:
- this appears to indicate that they have some equivalent of empathy for other species
- have other “compatible pleasures” with humans, e.g. living & eating, reproduction, and art;
- but consider suffering of winnowed children acceptable (indeed, good) because it is useful for the existence and evolution of their species (the main selective pressure); so the existence and evolution of their species is considered to have massive positive utility. The relationship appears hard-wired in their thinking processes due to natural evolution (because that’s how evolution worked for them).
- avoid their suffering, and that of other species’
- this is not conditioned on the other species’ eating of their children: they tried to âhelpâ humans adopt children-eating although humans don’t already do it; therefore, they assign positive utility to other species’ utility independently of whether or not they eat their children. Also, they didn’t instantly kill the humans, even though they could have had at the start.
- appear to be very good team players as a species, even hard-wired for that. In fact, this appears to be the top of their value pyramid.
* noisy bipeds:
- enjoy various pleasures, like living & eating, reproduction, and art and humor;
- avoid their own suffering, and that of others (empathy); this is hard-wired into their brains, as a survival mechanism. But they consider low-level suffering (of children and adults) acceptable (indeed, good) because: it is useful for the existence of their species (learning to avoid things with unpleasant consequences); natural evolution hard-wired biped’s brains to like the results of suffering (this goes as far as valuing more something obtained effort-fully than the same thing obtained effortlessly); in the ancestral environment, many useful things could not be obtained without some suffering, so a complex system of trade-offs evolved in the brain.
- much of their team-playing is rational: they have instincts to cheat, and those are rationally countered if an unpleasant outcome is anticipated (though anticipation is also influenced by cooperative instincts; the rational part has at least some part in balancing them).
* happy tentacly lumps:
- avoid suffering; no explicit indication why, presumably evolved as in the other two species.
- have empathy; this might be evolved or engineered, not clear; but it’s not an absolute value, if we trust their statement that they’re willing to alter it if it causes them unavoidable suffering.
- don’t seem to assign any value to suffering, however.
- like happiness a lot, but this doesn’t seem to be the absolute core value: they’ve not short-circuited their pleasure centers. So there must be something higher: experiencing the Universe? Liking happiness was probably originally evolved (it’s a mechanism of evolution), but might have been tampered with then.
- they seem rational team-players, too: it promises more future happiness rather than less future suffering.
*
I’m a bit less versed in the Prisoner’s Dilemma than I suspect most here are, so I’ll summarize what I understand. There’s supposed to be, for each âplayerâ, the best personal outcome (everyone else cooperates, you cheat), the worst personal outcome (you cooperate, everyone else cheats) and the global compromise (everyone cooperates, nobody gets the bad outcome). I suppose in more that two players there are all sorts of combinations (two ally and cooperate, but collectively cheat against the other); I’m not sure how relevant that is here, we’ll see. In real situations there are also more than two options, even with just two players (like the ultimatum game, you may “cheat” more or less). There’s also another difference between the game and reality: in real life you may not really know the utility of each outcome (either because you mis-anticipated the consequences of each option, or because you don’t know what you really want; I’m not sure if these two mean the same thing or not).
Let’s see the extreme options. â+â means what each species considers the best outcome and â-â means what it considers worst if each species defects (as far as I can tell).
* crystal pogo-sticks:
+ everyone starts having a hundred children and eating them just before puberty.
- they are forced to keep living and multiplying, but prevented from eating their children; they don’t even want to eat them, the horror!
- same as above, but they’re also happy about it and everything else.
* noisy bipeds:
+ they keep living and evolving as they do now; the crystal pogo-sticks stop eating self-aware children and are happy about it; and the happy tentacly lumps keep being happy and help everyone else being as happy as they want; either they start liking âusefulâ suffering or they stop empathizing with suffering of people who do want it.
- everyone starts having a hundred children and eating them just before puberty.
- everyone stops suffering and tries to be as happy as possible, having sex all the time. The current definition of âhumanityâ no longer applies to anything in the observable Universe.
* happy tentacly lumps:
+ everyone stops suffering and tries to be as happy as possible, having sex all the time. Horrible things like the current âhumanityâ and âbaby-eatersâ no longer exist in the observable Universe :))
- everyone starts having a hundred children and eating them just before puberty.
- humans keep suffering as much as they want, and keep living and evolving as they do now; the crystal pogo-sticks stop eating self-aware children and are happy about it, but may keep as much suffering as the humans believe acceptable; and they themselves keep being happy, help everyone else being as happy as they want, and start liking âusefulâ suffering.
This doesn’t mean necessarily that each outcome is actually possible. As far as I can tell from the story, only the happy tentacles can actually cheat that way. The worst that humans can do from the tentacle’s POV is start a Dispersion: run back and start jumping randomly between stars, destroying the first few stars after jumping. Depending on who they want to screw most, they may also destroy the meeting point, and/or send warning and/or advice to the crystal pogo-sticks. I think the pogo-sticks can do the same (it appears from the story that the star-destroying option is obvious, so they could start a Dispersion, too). This wouldn’t prevent problems forever, but it would at least give time to the Dispersed to find other options.
The âcompromiseâ proposed by the happy tentacly lumps doesn’t seem much worse than their best option, though: the only difference I can see is that everyone starts eating unconscious children. (I don’t see why they wouldn’t try humor and more complex pleasures anyway: they haven’t turned themselves into orgasmium, so they presumably want to experience pleasurable things, not pleasure itself.) I don’t understand crystalline psychology well enough, but it seems pretty close to the worst-case scenario for them. And it’s actually a bit worse than the worst-case tentacle-defecting scenario for the humans.
The tentacly lumps may think fast, but it seems to me that either they don’t think much better, or they’re conning everyone else. They’re in quite a hurry to act, which is suspicious a bit:
OK, it’s reasonable that they’re concerned about the crystalline children. But they also know that the other species have trouble thinking as fast as them, and there’s another option that I’m surprised nobody mentioned:
As long as everyone cooperates, everyone can just agree to temporarily stop doing whatever the others find unacceptable, and use the time to find more solutions, or at any case understand the solution others propose. They may find each other âvarelseâ and start a war, but I see no reason for any species to do it _rightnow, even if they know they’d win it. (This assumes they all cooperate in the Prisoner’s Dilemma as a matter of principle, of course.)
*
While the crystal pogo-sticks and the noisy bipeds won’t much enjoy putting a temporary stop to having children (say, a year or a decade, even a century), I don’t see why having the âhappy tentacly compromiseâ _rightnow would be higher in their preference ordering, since apparently nobody ages significantly. Even a temporary stop to disliking not having children doesn’t seem a problem (none of the three species seem inclined to reproduce unlimitedly, so they must have some sort of reproductive controls already beyond the natural ones). The happy tentacly lumps are carefully designed in the story to not have any unwanted attributes themselves except that they want and can transform the other species without their will. The humans (and myself) seem to consider their private habits, as far as they shared them, merely a bit boring relative to others, and the crystalline pogo-sticks seem to consider not eating children dis-likable but acceptable in other species, at least temporarily (since they didn’t attack anyone). So the only compromise they’d have to do is temporarily stop empathizing with small amounts of suffering (i.e., that of the other species not having children during the debate) and not forcibly convert them until afterwards.
As far as I can tell after a day of thinking, the result of the debate would include the crystalline pogo-sticks understanding that not eating children and cooperating are compatible in other species (they do have the concept of âmistaken hypothesisâ, and they just got a lot more data than they had before; also they didn’t instantly attack a species that never eats its children), and also accept some way of continuing their way of life without eating conscious children. Depending on the reproduction (& death, if applicable) rates of each species, and their flexibility, it might even be technically possible to let them reproduce normally, but modify their children such that they don’t suffer during the winnowing, and the eaten ones become a separate non-reproducing species voluntarily.
As for the humans, from my reading of the story I understand that the happy tentacly lumps mostly object to involuntary human suffering, i.e. the children. They don’t like the voluntary suffering, but it doesn’t seem to me they’d force the issue on adults. So they should at least accept letting the existing adults decide if they want to keep their suffering, such as it is. I don’t find it unacceptable a compromise where children get to grow up without any suffering they don’t want, especially (but not necessarily) if the growing is engineered so that the final effect is essentially the same (i.e., they become as ânormalâ humans and accept suffering in âusualâ circumstances, even if they didn’t grow up with it). Of course, we’re psychologically closer to the Confessor than to the rest of the humans in the story, so what we consider acceptable is as irrelevant as his to what decision they’d take.
The happy tentacly lumps might have simply anticipated all this, and decided on the best outcome they want. (In case they’re really really smart and practically managed to simulate the others species.) This would explain why they didn’t propose the above, but would make the story moot. In that case the situation is somewhat analogue to an AI in the box, except that you can’t destroy the box nor the AI inside, you can only decide to keep it there. My decision there would be to put as big a pile of locks as I can on the box, and hope the AI can’t eventually get out by itself. The analogue of which would be Dispersion. (But the analogy is not an isomorphism: the AI is in an open box right now, and it doesn’t seem to try to jump out, i.e. it didn’t blow up the human ship yet, which is why the story is still interesting.)
Let’s make a bit of summary.
Similarities: Each species considers suffering, in general, negative utility. Each species considers survival very high in utility. (Though at least some humans consider the possibility of sacrificing their species for the others’ benefit, so this is not necessarily highest in value.) Each species has a kind of âfunâ that’s compatible with the others’, and that’s high in utility. They are all made of individuals, reproduce sexually, can communicate among themselves and at least somewhat compatibly with the others.
Differences:
* crystal pogo-sticks:
- this appears to indicate that they have some equivalent of empathy for other species
- have other “compatible pleasures” with humans, e.g. living & eating, reproduction, and art;
- but consider suffering of winnowed children acceptable (indeed, good) because it is useful for the existence and evolution of their species (the main selective pressure); so the existence and evolution of their species is considered to have massive positive utility. The relationship appears hard-wired in their thinking processes due to natural evolution (because that’s how evolution worked for them).
- avoid their suffering, and that of other species’
- this is not conditioned on the other species’ eating of their children: they tried to âhelpâ humans adopt children-eating although humans don’t already do it; therefore, they assign positive utility to other species’ utility independently of whether or not they eat their children. Also, they didn’t instantly kill the humans, even though they could have had at the start.
- appear to be very good team players as a species, even hard-wired for that. In fact, this appears to be the top of their value pyramid.
* noisy bipeds:
- enjoy various pleasures, like living & eating, reproduction, and art and humor;
- avoid their own suffering, and that of others (empathy); this is hard-wired into their brains, as a survival mechanism. But they consider low-level suffering (of children and adults) acceptable (indeed, good) because: it is useful for the existence of their species (learning to avoid things with unpleasant consequences); natural evolution hard-wired biped’s brains to like the results of suffering (this goes as far as valuing more something obtained effort-fully than the same thing obtained effortlessly); in the ancestral environment, many useful things could not be obtained without some suffering, so a complex system of trade-offs evolved in the brain.
- much of their team-playing is rational: they have instincts to cheat, and those are rationally countered if an unpleasant outcome is anticipated (though anticipation is also influenced by cooperative instincts; the rational part has at least some part in balancing them).
* happy tentacly lumps:
- avoid suffering; no explicit indication why, presumably evolved as in the other two species.
- have empathy; this might be evolved or engineered, not clear; but it’s not an absolute value, if we trust their statement that they’re willing to alter it if it causes them unavoidable suffering.
- don’t seem to assign any value to suffering, however.
- like happiness a lot, but this doesn’t seem to be the absolute core value: they’ve not short-circuited their pleasure centers. So there must be something higher: experiencing the Universe? Liking happiness was probably originally evolved (it’s a mechanism of evolution), but might have been tampered with then.
- they seem rational team-players, too: it promises more future happiness rather than less future suffering.
*
I’m a bit less versed in the Prisoner’s Dilemma than I suspect most here are, so I’ll summarize what I understand. There’s supposed to be, for each âplayerâ, the best personal outcome (everyone else cooperates, you cheat), the worst personal outcome (you cooperate, everyone else cheats) and the global compromise (everyone cooperates, nobody gets the bad outcome). I suppose in more that two players there are all sorts of combinations (two ally and cooperate, but collectively cheat against the other); I’m not sure how relevant that is here, we’ll see. In real situations there are also more than two options, even with just two players (like the ultimatum game, you may “cheat” more or less). There’s also another difference between the game and reality: in real life you may not really know the utility of each outcome (either because you mis-anticipated the consequences of each option, or because you don’t know what you really want; I’m not sure if these two mean the same thing or not).
Let’s see the extreme options. â+â means what each species considers the best outcome and â-â means what it considers worst if each species defects (as far as I can tell).
* crystal pogo-sticks:
+ everyone starts having a hundred children and eating them just before puberty.
- they are forced to keep living and multiplying, but prevented from eating their children; they don’t even want to eat them, the horror!
- same as above, but they’re also happy about it and everything else.
* noisy bipeds:
+ they keep living and evolving as they do now; the crystal pogo-sticks stop eating self-aware children and are happy about it; and the happy tentacly lumps keep being happy and help everyone else being as happy as they want; either they start liking âusefulâ suffering or they stop empathizing with suffering of people who do want it.
- everyone starts having a hundred children and eating them just before puberty.
- everyone stops suffering and tries to be as happy as possible, having sex all the time. The current definition of âhumanityâ no longer applies to anything in the observable Universe.
* happy tentacly lumps:
+ everyone stops suffering and tries to be as happy as possible, having sex all the time. Horrible things like the current âhumanityâ and âbaby-eatersâ no longer exist in the observable Universe :))
- everyone starts having a hundred children and eating them just before puberty.
- humans keep suffering as much as they want, and keep living and evolving as they do now; the crystal pogo-sticks stop eating self-aware children and are happy about it, but may keep as much suffering as the humans believe acceptable; and they themselves keep being happy, help everyone else being as happy as they want, and start liking âusefulâ suffering.
This doesn’t mean necessarily that each outcome is actually possible. As far as I can tell from the story, only the happy tentacles can actually cheat that way. The worst that humans can do from the tentacle’s POV is start a Dispersion: run back and start jumping randomly between stars, destroying the first few stars after jumping. Depending on who they want to screw most, they may also destroy the meeting point, and/or send warning and/or advice to the crystal pogo-sticks. I think the pogo-sticks can do the same (it appears from the story that the star-destroying option is obvious, so they could start a Dispersion, too). This wouldn’t prevent problems forever, but it would at least give time to the Dispersed to find other options.
The âcompromiseâ proposed by the happy tentacly lumps doesn’t seem much worse than their best option, though: the only difference I can see is that everyone starts eating unconscious children. (I don’t see why they wouldn’t try humor and more complex pleasures anyway: they haven’t turned themselves into orgasmium, so they presumably want to experience pleasurable things, not pleasure itself.) I don’t understand crystalline psychology well enough, but it seems pretty close to the worst-case scenario for them. And it’s actually a bit worse than the worst-case tentacle-defecting scenario for the humans.
The tentacly lumps may think fast, but it seems to me that either they don’t think much better, or they’re conning everyone else. They’re in quite a hurry to act, which is suspicious a bit:
OK, it’s reasonable that they’re concerned about the crystalline children. But they also know that the other species have trouble thinking as fast as them, and there’s another option that I’m surprised nobody mentioned:
As long as everyone cooperates, everyone can just agree to temporarily stop doing whatever the others find unacceptable, and use the time to find more solutions, or at any case understand the solution others propose. They may find each other âvarelseâ and start a war, but I see no reason for any species to do it _rightnow, even if they know they’d win it. (This assumes they all cooperate in the Prisoner’s Dilemma as a matter of principle, of course.)
*
While the crystal pogo-sticks and the noisy bipeds won’t much enjoy putting a temporary stop to having children (say, a year or a decade, even a century), I don’t see why having the âhappy tentacly compromiseâ _rightnow would be higher in their preference ordering, since apparently nobody ages significantly. Even a temporary stop to disliking not having children doesn’t seem a problem (none of the three species seem inclined to reproduce unlimitedly, so they must have some sort of reproductive controls already beyond the natural ones). The happy tentacly lumps are carefully designed in the story to not have any unwanted attributes themselves except that they want and can transform the other species without their will. The humans (and myself) seem to consider their private habits, as far as they shared them, merely a bit boring relative to others, and the crystalline pogo-sticks seem to consider not eating children dis-likable but acceptable in other species, at least temporarily (since they didn’t attack anyone). So the only compromise they’d have to do is temporarily stop empathizing with small amounts of suffering (i.e., that of the other species not having children during the debate) and not forcibly convert them until afterwards.
As far as I can tell after a day of thinking, the result of the debate would include the crystalline pogo-sticks understanding that not eating children and cooperating are compatible in other species (they do have the concept of âmistaken hypothesisâ, and they just got a lot more data than they had before; also they didn’t instantly attack a species that never eats its children), and also accept some way of continuing their way of life without eating conscious children. Depending on the reproduction (& death, if applicable) rates of each species, and their flexibility, it might even be technically possible to let them reproduce normally, but modify their children such that they don’t suffer during the winnowing, and the eaten ones become a separate non-reproducing species voluntarily.
As for the humans, from my reading of the story I understand that the happy tentacly lumps mostly object to involuntary human suffering, i.e. the children. They don’t like the voluntary suffering, but it doesn’t seem to me they’d force the issue on adults. So they should at least accept letting the existing adults decide if they want to keep their suffering, such as it is. I don’t find it unacceptable a compromise where children get to grow up without any suffering they don’t want, especially (but not necessarily) if the growing is engineered so that the final effect is essentially the same (i.e., they become as ânormalâ humans and accept suffering in âusualâ circumstances, even if they didn’t grow up with it). Of course, we’re psychologically closer to the Confessor than to the rest of the humans in the story, so what we consider acceptable is as irrelevant as his to what decision they’d take.
The happy tentacly lumps might have simply anticipated all this, and decided on the best outcome they want. (In case they’re really really smart and practically managed to simulate the others species.) This would explain why they didn’t propose the above, but would make the story moot. In that case the situation is somewhat analogue to an AI in the box, except that you can’t destroy the box nor the AI inside, you can only decide to keep it there. My decision there would be to put as big a pile of locks as I can on the box, and hope the AI can’t eventually get out by itself. The analogue of which would be Dispersion. (But the analogy is not an isomorphism: the AI is in an open box right now, and it doesn’t seem to try to jump out, i.e. it didn’t blow up the human ship yet, which is why the story is still interesting.)