Humans in funny suits are more meaningful to humans.
I'm rather baffled by the "failure of imagination" line about Star Trek. That only applies if the purpose is to tell a story about how actual alien contact would go, as opposed to telling a series of stories about humanity. The author of that line is suffering a failure of imagination about the purpose of science fiction, which is rather different than the purpose of an exercise in pure imagination.
To write a culture that isn't just like your own culture, you have to be able to see your own culture as a special case - not as a norm which all other cultures must take as their point of departure.
Most North Americans that fall into the rather arbitrary "white" category do not see their culture as a special case. "White" North Americans tend to see themselves as the "plain vanilla" universal human. Everyone else is a "flavor." In truth, vanilla is also a flavor, of course.
How do I know this? Because I'm of Korean extraction, and I've been playing Irish Traditional music for the past 23 years. For some reason, the fact that I play such music is more notable than "white" people of Hungarian, German, English, Polish, and French extraction that I've met -- but only in the cases where such persons do not have "funny" accents. In this context, a "funny" accent that isn't from the British isles is just as good as different skin tone and facial features.
There's more to this I could say. I've also been walking around as a well educated middle class native-born member of this culture, while wearing different facial features. I grew up in isolation from my "own" ethnic community. In this, I have a certain advantage concerning awareness of my own culture. (And even so, I became aware of how unaware I usually am of it when travelling abroad.)
It is an interesting exercise to think what might/must be common to all intelligences and what could vary.
The first thing that strikes me is whether we have one large intelligence or many small intelligences interacting. Humans collectively are pretty bright, and as we get more humans and better tech for communicating, it seems that the effective General Intelligence of the planet continues to rise. But even 25 humans together in our ancestral environment are probably at least a few times the GI of each individual human. But what of an intelligence that develops large but in isolation? Communication would presumably be quite difficult with such a creature as it would not have needed to communicate to get to where it was. It might not even care that we are intelligent if it developed in isolation.
I think Orson Scott Card's "hive mind" was a nice attempt at an alien intelligence developed with significant differences from human. Sort of what would happen if the ants or bees had an intelligence explosion at the hive level, not at the individual organsim level. That humans could communicate with Card's queen may have been the weaker part, presumably a hive mind would have minimal communication with other hive minds and so not have evolved much interest or algorithms supporting communication with something like an equal.
In humans, we have many organisms nearly identical that must cooperate to bring up effective GI of the group. Other sci-fi writers have written races with different levels of intelligence in the organisms that make up the civ. In some sense, Homo sapiens is just unlucky that all the other Homo XXX are extinct. Our closest living relatives are quite a bit less organized than we are, and way too different to interbreed with. Had we grown up with a few different Homo XXX in our civ. we'd probably find it a lot less obvious that dictatorship or racial prejudice or slavery is "wrong." It seems likely that the more efficient ways to organize society would reflect the inequality of the organisms. (And after all we do keep dogs as slaves with neither the dogs nor many humans complaining about this. Clearly it is a sliding scale.)
we do keep dogs as slaves
Slavery is defined as "humans as property" and so has a negative connotation. This term is not applicable to livestock and pets, unless you are a member of PETA.
Variation within the one ecosphere we have studied is pretty extreme- we have life that oxidizes iron as an energy source, life that uses electromagnetic energy as an energy source, and life that consumes the stored energy created by other life as an energy source. We have life that uses carbon and phosphorus chains to build its structure, life that uses arsenic to build its structure, and life that uses other life to build it a structure.
It is more likely than not that any alien life will either share a common ancestor, or be significantly different from anything on Earth- not in the sense of having different moral beliefs, but in the sense of appearing to be natural phenomena rather than intelligent or even alive.
appearing to be natural phenomena rather than intelligent or even alive.
What's the difference between natural and alive?
Sorry- in the realm of physics, rather than the realm of biology.
Yes, what is the difference in that realm?
Supernovae are physics, enzymes are biology, catalysts are chemistry. The disciplines are arbitrary and without good lines between them, but they effect the terms of the discussion about them. Complex crystals with unusual physical properties are likely to be studied destructively to determine the nature of those physical properties. Anything with a high chemical energy density might be used as fuel.
In short, there is no way to tell the difference between alien minerals and alien life. Further, I don't expect alien civilization to easily determine that the primary intelligence on Earth is carbon-based, rather than silicon and iron based. The most noticeable difference between Earth and Mars at interstellar distances is EM radiation, most of which is directly created by iron-based artifacts. It would not be too far off to describe us as a collection of artifacts which are operated by us, even after establishing two-way communication.
In short, there is no way to tell the difference between alien minerals and alien life.
That's why I was asking the question. I suspect that for every non-anthropomorphic definition of life there is a handy counter-example out there.
The most noticeable difference between Earth and Mars at interstellar distances is EM radiation, most of which is directly created by iron-based artifacts.
I am not sure whether this is an invalid point of view. Or that humans are the latest generation of machines designed to preserve and proliferate mitochondria. Or any other outside view of life.
It's not likely that we will encounter something like anything we have thought of, because can think of a trivial number of the possibilities.
The mental processes of children is not 'miniature adult' thinking. If (if) we adults are accurately interpreting the mental processes of children, here are two of the differences:
They do not appear to be capable of understanding / learning / remembering that objects outside of their vision continue to exist. That's why peek-a-boo is so magical in infants.
They do not appear to be capable of understanding / learning / remembering that objects that change size can keep the same mass. If you have two balls of clay that are roughly spherical and the same size, children age 7-12 will say they are 'the same.' If you manipulate one sphere into a different shape, they will say one of the pieces of clay has more clay in it now.
As alien as these are to adult thinking, these little aliens turn into adults. And we only sort-of remember those earlier ways of thinking.
If within our own lifetime we undergo such alien thought changes, alien thoughts in actual aliens will be alien indeed.
And then there's the mentally ill, those with brain damage, people on drugs, and don't forget that most strange of all mental states, plain old sleep and dreaming.
If within our own lifetime we undergo such alien thought changes, alien thoughts in actual aliens will be alien indeed.
Indeed. However, I am beginning to think that by emphasizing the magnitude of the alienness of alien thought, we are intending to avoid complacency but we are also creating another kind of "woo."
Today's post, Humans in Funny Suits was originally published on 30 July 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
It's really hard to imagine aliens that are fundamentally different from human beings.
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Interpersonal Morality, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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