My guess would be that the most common variety of alien is “unconscious brethren”, followed by “unconscious squiggle maximizer”, then “conscious brethren”, then “conscious squiggle maximizer”.
It might sound odd to call an unconscious entity “brother”, but it’s plausible to me that on reflection, humanity strongly prefers universes with evolved-creatures doing evolved-creature-stuff (relative to an empty universe), even if none of those creatures are conscious.
Somehow, thinking of ourselves from the perspective of an unconscious alien really drives home how extremely weird and meaningless-from-other-perspectives alien values are.
Like, we care about this very specific configuration of reflection, and if an entity doesn’t have that very specific configuration, that changes its moral value from “a person, of neigh inconceivable moral worth” to “an object or a houseplant; meh whatever.” But from the unconscious-alien perspective, this distinction is inane. We look crazy and spastic, that such small differences in algorithm make such an enormous difference to to our sensibilities.
I think that this is good news about trade with other maximally advanced civilizations! Values in the universe might be super orthogonal, and so the gains from trade might be huge! We agree to adjust our computing substrate to have just the right shape of molecular squiggle, and they agree to run their optimization algorithms with just the right flavor of reflection, such that instead of their shard being dead and valueless, it is filled with joyful conscious life. The universe becomes many times more valuable by our lights, and all we had to do was incorporate a design choice that is so insignificant by our lights that we wouldn’t have even bothered to pay any attention to it, otherwise.
Somehow, thinking of ourselves from the perspective of an unconscious alien really drives home how extremely weird and meaningless-from-other-perspectives alien values are.
Like, we care about this very specific configuration of reflection, and if an entity doesn’t have that very specific configuration, that changes its moral value from “a person, of neigh inconceivable moral worth” to “an object or a houseplant; meh whatever.” But from the unconscious-alien perspective, this distinction is inane. We look crazy and spastic, that such small differences in algorithm make such an enormous difference to to our sensibilities.
I think that this is good news about trade with other maximally advanced civilizations! Values in the universe might be super orthogonal, and so the gains from trade might be huge! We agree to adjust our computing substrate to have just the right shape of molecular squiggle, and they agree to run their optimization algorithms with just the right flavor of reflection, such that instead of their shard being dead and valueless, it is filled with joyful conscious life. The universe becomes many times more valuable by our lights, and all we had to do was incorporate a design choice that is so insignificant by our lights that we wouldn’t have even bothered to pay any attention to it, otherwise.
Oooh, sounds right to me!