i tentatively think an automatically-herbivorousand mostly-asocial species/space-of-minds would have been morally best to be the one which first reached the capability threshold to start building technology and civilization.
herbivorous → less ingrained biases against other species[1], no factory farming
asocial → less dysfunctional dynamics within the species (like automatic status-seeking, rhetoric, etc), and less ‘psychologically automatic processes’ which fail to generalize out of the evolutionary distribution.[2]
i expect there still would be some such biases, because it’s not as if other species were irrelevant or purely-cooperative in the evolutionary environments of more-asocial minds. but i’d expect them to be more like “x species is scary, its members tend to prey on beings such as myself,” rather than the other-eater intuition “x species is morally unvaluable, it’s okay to hurt or kill them”
(example of ‘failed generalization’: humans treat their observations as direct evidence about the world, but never needed to distinguish between observations they make directly and observations of something being shown to them. this is a problem when humans can be selectively shown observations in a non-statistically-representative way. tho, this one might effect asocial animals too, since ‘treating observations as evidence’ is generally useful.
the main failed generalization that i would actually want to point to in humans, but that’s harder to write about, is how they default to believing things each other say, normally don’t have probabilistic models of beliefs (because they’re acting as a part of a larger cultural belief-selection process), and in general default to heuristic behavior that is more fitting for a kind of ‘swarm intelligence/species’)
I think asociality might prevent the development of altruistic ethics.
same, but not sure, i was in the process of adding a comment about that
Also it’s hard to see how an asocial species would develop civilization.
they figure out planting and then rationally collaborate with each other?
these might depend on ‘degree of (a)sociality’. hard for me to imagine a fully asocial species though they might exist and i’d be interested to see examples.
i tentatively think an automatically-herbivorous
and mostly-asocialspecies/space-of-minds would have been morally best to be the one which first reached the capability threshold to start building technology and civilization.herbivorous → less ingrained biases against other species[1], no factory farming
asocial → less dysfunctional dynamics within the species (like automatic status-seeking, rhetoric, etc), and less ‘psychologically automatic processes’ which fail to generalize out of the evolutionary distribution.[2]
i expect there still would be some such biases, because it’s not as if other species were irrelevant or purely-cooperative in the evolutionary environments of more-asocial minds. but i’d expect them to be more like “x species is scary, its members tend to prey on beings such as myself,” rather than the other-eater intuition “x species is morally unvaluable, it’s okay to hurt or kill them”
(example of ‘failed generalization’: humans treat their observations as direct evidence about the world, but never needed to distinguish between observations they make directly and observations of something being shown to them. this is a problem when humans can be selectively shown observations in a non-statistically-representative way. tho, this one might effect asocial animals too, since ‘treating observations as evidence’ is generally useful.
the main failed generalization that i would actually want to point to in humans, but that’s harder to write about, is how they default to believing things each other say, normally don’t have probabilistic models of beliefs (because they’re acting as a part of a larger cultural belief-selection process), and in general default to heuristic behavior that is more fitting for a kind of ‘swarm intelligence/species’)
I think asociality might prevent the development of altruistic ethics.
Also it’s hard to see how an asocial species would develop civilization.
same, but not sure, i was in the process of adding a comment about that
they figure out planting and then rationally collaborate with each other?
these might depend on ‘degree of (a)sociality’. hard for me to imagine a fully asocial species though they might exist and i’d be interested to see examples.
chatgpt says..
I feel like they would end up converging on the same problems that plague human sociality.