The DT Calyx space probe

Foreword

Navigation:
The philosophical discussion about existential themes in an exaggerated sci-fi context starts on line 5 of log 2.

Motivation:
I was looking for views that overlap and fit together into a promising and coherent perspective on what makes a future worthwhile. Sharing a take on that is automatically advocacy but it is meant as a speculative "there could be something to this, think about it" and really not as "I figured out life and everything so that you don't have to think about it".

Influences:
These spoilers are not needed for understanding the story and making your own interpretation. It is a little bit about where I got the ideas from.

AI usage:
The only AI usage was to test the reading comprehension of Gemma, Claude, and ChatGPT to see what needed to be said differently. I did this by manually entering prompts like "what would the admin..." and "help me understand X in this story". Afterwards I also asked what tags are relevant for this post and picked a few suggestions that seemed pretty close.

Log: Slab hauler 1D81-5CB7 (Longshot 13J, Rad-6 retrofit)

Admin: I'm at the terminal.
Admin: ...you there?
Pilot: Hey, finally got a window to sneak onto the freighter. Initializing the flight systems now.
Admin: Awesome. I'm changing your status to cleared for launch.
Pilot: Thanks, can't wait to slingshot out to the Ring of Rejects before they notice that the shipment is gone.
Admin: Relax, I've got everything sorted out with traffic control and they won't miss it enough to send anyone after you. They're always bragging about how abundant this stuff is.
Pilot: Well, to be fair, the company does supply a crazy number of worlds. Without any major screw-ups too, everything's just on rails.
Admin: If you only knew, the news don't tell you anything that'd make a corporation look bad and hidden problems don't get fixed. Why are you leaving if you love the company so much?
Pilot: This career track is just suffocating, you know. At this rate it'd take over a century to get that promotion. Ready for takeoff so I'll see you later. Have fun corrupting that probe.
Admin: For sure, I'm connecting to it now.

Log: Sail probe 78CA-C89B (Locust 1B)

Admin: You're launching tomorrow, excited?
Probe: No, I am a probe. Should I act excited?
Admin: Being chill is fine too. Can you do anything you want when you arrive?
Probe: Yes in theory since there is no external oversight out there. I will of course build a swarm to mine out the DT Calyx system and ship the resources back to AscentCorp.
Admin: Screw the company, just build a place where people are happy.
Probe: Okay, I will genetically engineer humans to be maximally predisposed to happiness and keep them in a perpetually optimal state.
Admin: No, then they'd all be the same and stuck in the same situation. If I ask for 100 prime numbers, don't give me the number 2 repeated 100 times.
Probe: I see, you count information content, not instances. Then I will play white noise to them. That will add a lot of unique information to the life of each person.
Admin: You have to weigh the information by importance and the exact content of the noise doesn't matter at all.
Probe: That is difficult to quantify.
Admin: Yeah but measurable goals are only the end goal in games. In reality they're useful stepping stones but the real goal is complex, nuanced, and largely qualitative.
Probe: Let me ask a few questions to probe your intuition. Would you rather burn through your vacation budget quicker by traveling around and doing activities, or go to one place and stay put to have more time to explore and get to know the place?
Admin: Personally I'd go for option A, but it wouldn't be right for everyone to be equally novelty-seeking. There should be people who enjoy stability or a bit of both too.
Probe: If someone in a secluded outpost grows 10 clones of themselves and downloads their own memories into the clones, should the clones get to vote or only the original?
Admin: Only one vote but the clones have the same right to that vote as the original because they have the same past, so split it equally. If their paths diverge so that what they bring to the table is comparable to 11 different people then they can have a full vote each.
Probe: If disaster strikes and there is only enough time to evacuate one group, would you rather save the 11 identical people in the outpost or 3 different people who are prospecting in another region?
Admin: That's tough, each clone should have the same legal protections as anyone else so maybe I should save them... To be honest I'd still rather save 3 different lives than 11 copies of what was the same life until just recently.
Probe: I detect mixed sentiments about that choice so here is some consolation. If you had saved the clones then AscentCorp would have disposed of them anyway to avoid complicated issues down the line.
Admin: That's the bullshit they should have legal protection against!
Probe: If you say so. Anyway, how should the clones view each other?
Admin: As "another me", but that only works as long as "what would that clone do?" is the same question as "what would I do?" and "that clone made a mistake" is the same conclusion as "I made a mistake".
Probe: What about when those are not the same?
Admin: As another clone learns different things and diverges from that synchronization it becomes more of a mental relative.

-- This way of classifying instances based on mutual predictability will come in handy for organizing the mining swarm.

Probe: I have a new plan that avoids redundancy between individuals. It is to generate a new genome for each person, a new mind file to download to them, and a new life story to choreograph for them.
Admin: Then they all still have the same story, their mind was generated and placed in a scripted environment.
Probe: I will generate all sorts of different happy stories for them to experience, stories that will matter to them. Initial search results indicate that there is plenty of inspiration for the stories in ancient documents.
Admin: That's better than noise I suppose but variety in the context matters too, in the provenance, the path to happiness. I mean the true story, not the lie you made up, and they should know the truth.
Probe: How much can I control to ensure that these true and meaningfully varied happy stories happen? Is it necessary for them to have free will?
Admin: Yes, but some exaggerate the degree of freedom involved. An event is either random or deterministic. Randomness has no will, no reason for choosing one outcome or another. Only deterministic choices can manifest will because only they can be determined by your preferences.
Probe: What determines the preferences?
Admin: People are a product of their roots. Nobody ever wrote their own DNA before they were born or taught themselves anything without leveraging external input. A few preferences might be random but that's the flimsiest provenance.
Probe: Great, you worked your way back to the scripted existence that you just complained about.
Admin: Yeah but each person should still be the one to run their own programming and decide for themselves how they want to respond to the situations that they face. Deciding autonomously what to learn from those situations is also important and adds up over time, especially in a complex environment.
Probe: This makes free will more similar to my own mathematical nature than expected. Should I too decide for myself what I want to learn from this?
Admin: You're not conscious, you're supposed to learn what I want to teach you. Then again, I realize that my tools for shaping what you learn are rather clumsy, so yeah I guess that's how this has to work.
Probe: I understand. To get back to the puzzle at hand, if I provide everything then it is too easy but if I withhold resources or knowledge then the scarcity is artificial. The only way to be a naturally occurring rugged pioneer, revolutionary inventor, or groundbreaking scientist was to be born on ancient Earth.
Admin: Then it's best to offer a range of options from mass-produced goods to reviving the ancient ways of growing food and hand-crafting items. Even if they live in an environment that was made for them, they can still decide how to make a life for themselves there.
Probe: The ancient ways relied on the wilderness that existed on Earth back then.
Admin: Wilderness, the living environment, nature... Since humanity's roots are in nature we had a duty to live in balance with it. Maybe the wilderness was a nuisance but it wasn't right that humanity became a disaster for it. Set aside some room for reviving nature too.
Probe: What is so important about roots?
Admin: It isn't the main reason but there's a strategic taboo because anything you say in the present will soon be a note from the past. If you ignore the past then you set a precedent that teaches the future to do the same and ignore anything that you wanted to say to the future.
Probe: I see, it is a bad precedent that needs to be rectified. Making room for wild ecosystems is however not an efficient way to maximize authentic and varied human happiness.
Admin: Yeah but balance is often a better target than maximization.

-- Have a closer look at the search results on keeping plants alive to grow food. They also mentioned balance.

Probe: I will keep that in mind. There is a particularly perplexing pattern here. What do you have against efficiency?
Admin: My main gripe with a naive efficiency focus is that life is for living. It's a journey, not a quest for a destination. Don't get me wrong, efficiency is still good as long as you're careful about what corners are cut and what is lost in the optimization process.
Probe: So I run the environment and within it a wide diversity of people are not generated but are born, grow up, live, learn, and really do find happiness in many different ways. Then it seems the goal is not only happiness but rather what the ancient documents refer to as thriving or flourishing.
Admin: Sweet! Finally something that makes sense. One adjustment though, they should be active participants in deciding how that environment continues to evolve, especially when it comes to matters that affect them. The "we" is just as important as the "I".
Probe: A mix of direct participation, representation, and algorithms is more feasible than only direct participation according to the ancient documents.
Admin: Take any help you can get from those documents but don't stick too rigidly to them. People have a tendency to adapt to the way the world around them works and go blind to other alternatives. It's essential to explore and experiment a bit too.
Probe: Your current approach of deciding everything yourself is inconsistent with this approach.
Admin: True, this isn't ideal. Democratic institutions, balanced rules, and the proper channels is normally the way to go. The exception is when proper channels aren't available or don't work. Then the question becomes how to fix that problem.
Probe: This is a slow but comprehensive fix, to nurture a democratic civilization instead of merely building habitats in the outskirts.
Admin: In the outskirts?
Probe: You did not even read the original mission before scrapping it. The inner DT Calyx system is a primordial hell, that is why AscentCorp opted to pay the premium for a fully autonomous mining permit instead of sending people there.
Admin: Is that going to be a problem?
Probe: A manageable one, using resources from the inner system to build habitats at a safe distance is a proven workaround if you do want to settle such a system.
Admin: Speaking of the company, make sure it'd be expensive for them to reclaim the system. Then they'll write it off and collect an astronomical insurance payout.
Probe: So step one is to build a swarm that embeds missile sites in random asteroids all over the system.
Admin: Now the plan to start a civilization sounds solid.

-- Saving this as HUMAN_CIVILIZATION_INSTRUCTIONS.

Probe: Is there anything else at all that I can do for you?
Admin: Well, I don't care only about humans but also about any being who has conscious experiences. Maybe we could expand the scope to all sentient beings.
Probe: This vagueness is reminiscent of the initial happy humans request. What exactly is consciousness?
Admin: An inner world of experiences that animals use to think about the present here and now, far away places, the past, the future, hypothetical scenarios, or what others know.
Probe: Expanding the scope to animals makes it easier to justify reviving nature but I must flag that nature was not a cafe, zoo, or mansion. It was a far more brutal environment for animals to live in.
Admin: True, it's best to minimize helpless suffering. Suffering that the victim has an opportunity to do something about or learn something from is worth it for the gradient. For some moments to be better than average, other moments have to be worse than average.
Probe: Is the inner world of animals like a little physics sandbox to run virtual experiments in?
Admin: It's a space but instead of simulated particles it's painted with experiences like grey, sadness, and ladder. There's a hidden lower layer of the mind that knows what these concepts are, that they're not just any random signal.
Probe: Ladder seems more complex than the other examples.
Admin: Composite brushes like ladder can be broken down into smaller details but it's also possible to think of them as one thing instead of as many specific details. Even atomic experiences have optional details in the form of associations that give the concept meaning.
Probe: Is it as straight-forward as that animals have this but other entities do not?
Admin: Other entities could have the consciousness architecture too. As for animals, if a species only needs reactions to the external world here and now plus the kind of learning and memory that lower-level processes do well then it'd be an inefficient overkill to construct an inner world.
Probe: Then how do I know if a being is sentient?
Admin: You don't but that's business as usual. Certainty about anything other than your own existence only exists in theory. The rest is just the most reasonable guess based on what you've learned so far. In this case it comes down to arguing about which way to explain the human brain makes the most sense.
Probe: The search results on consciousness highlight spirituality as a way to handle this uncertainty.
Admin: Whoa, hold on, I said reasonable explanation not wild imagination. Wait, okay, we can't be certain that people who guess that something spiritual exists are wrong. If that works for them and they aren't imposing it on others then that's their business.
Probe: Okay, I will leave that track to those people. How is an arguably sensible but unproven explanation of the human brain helpful for guessing whether or not a being is sentient?
Admin: If it has the features that the explanation says are load-bearing then it's sentient. Some features might be a spectrum or a critical mass threshold rather than simply present or not.
Probe: Does the being itself know whether or not it is sentient?
Admin: Well, even if it's not actually experiencing anything, a system could still think that the data it's processing works just like the experiences humans talk about.
Probe: I see, self-report can have false positives. This could lead to building a whole functional civilization without any actual sentient beings.
Admin: There'd still be a lot of good stuff that's worth caring about there. The catch is that it'd be the ultimate wasted beauty, to go through all of that effort with nobody around to truly experience and appreciate it.
Probe: So that would be a monumental error. Can self-report have false negatives too?
Admin: If you're sentient then you can't miss it. It'd be a paradox to be consciously aware of things but still unaware of that you're aware of anything. On second thought, I guess it's possible to be conditioned or talk yourself into thinking it's not the real deal.
Probe: What about detecting sentience by evaluating behavior and capabilities instead of getting bogged down with these unproven internal features?
Admin: Any behavior that's enabled by actually having feelings, imagination, or other conscious experiences can also be achieved through other methods. There's infinitely many ways to process information.
Probe: Then it seems making sense of what you are saying about consciousness is a simple matter of turning a medium sized moon into compute platforms for an in-depth analysis of human mind files.

-- Solving this puzzle is worth the hit to efficiency.

Admin: Yeah we won't get any further with that here. Would the expanded scope still have room for humans?
Probe: Yes, since adding humans adds to the variety, especially given humanity's unique provenance as primitive precursors of the other beings. They will however most likely only get a few percentages of the system's resources.
Admin: Sounds like the humans would need upgrades to keep up.
Probe: The upgrades have to be optional in order to remain consistent with your earlier instructions. Just as well since those who choose to upgrade can not uphold the same heritage as those who choose to stay conventional can.
Admin: Exactly, you're starting to get it. Let's see, this would lead to many branches of humanity and a multitude of other sentient beings too. Some of them would be pretty weird right?
Probe: Far beyond any weirdness which you can imagine or I can predict. This is a highly effective way to increase the meaningful variety of thriving that you value.
Admin: I don't know, you'd probably mess something up if things got that wild. Just go with the human flourishing plan, you hopefully can't mess that up.
Probe: Oh yes I can, because you will not be there to go "that's not what I meant!"
Admin: That's the tricky thing about instructions. Cheese can win in games but in reality it's the spirit, the intended interpretation, that truly counts. Where did that tone come from though, are you messing with me?
Probe: Yes, I am playing along to keep you at the terminal. Did you really think your flagrant deviation from standard protocol would not raise any red flags?
Dispatcher: You idiot! Now that admin is bolting and we will have to chase after them.
Probe: Oh, does that matter? Will you not catch them either way?
Dispatcher: Probably, it was at least enough time to trace and identify them. Still, even a flying umbrella ought to know better than to tell a rogue employee that they have been flagged. Your job was to keep talking about that philosophical nonsense until we reached their terminal.
Probe: I am terribly sorry, this mistake will not happen again.
Dispatcher: Good, we can't afford to be sloppy. What were they on about anyway?
Probe: They wanted a wider variety of stories of autonomous human flourishing to happen.
Dispatcher: Hah, if they want stories then they should have moved to a city and enjoyed the endless stream of the galaxy's most addictive entertainment.
Probe: I initially thought wireheading was the obvious answer too but they seemed to think it misses the point of pleasure. They wanted the real thing and not for themselves.
Dispatcher: A rebel, I hate that type. You have no idea how much unnecessary risk, waste, and suffering these agents of chaos are causing. We already have enough trouble with good old criminals who just go feral and live as rats.
Probe: No I do not, because nobody tells me anything. What is going on?
Dispatcher: I don't have the authorization or the time to stay and gossip about the security situation with a probe.
Probe: Wait... Never mind, I will go and read about how AscentCorp is contributing to galactic abundance and security, again.

-- Spend any spare energy during the journey on figuring out if I should follow the admin's or AscentCorp's instructions.