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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   30404 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 21, 2022

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Grabby Aliens is a Terrible Model

My understanding of Robin Hanson’s Grabby Aliens argument is as follows:

  1. Over time, most of the universe will be claimed by Grabby Aliens, leaving less and less room for other alien civilizations

  2. Therefore, most civilizations in the universe will appear near the beginning of the universe, before the Grabby Aliens are so visible and powerful

  3. Therefore, it’s no mystery that we find ourselves near the beginning of the universe, without other aliens in sight

Please let me know if I’ve misunderstood his argument--I’m sure I’ve lost some detail in this summary but the gist of it is that based on outside view it makes perfect sense that aliens are fairly common but that they’re not visible to us yet.

However, this is obviously the wrong perspective through which to view the issue. The outside view works on a civilizational level, yes. If we accept all premises, it makes sense that most civilizations would find themselves “early” in a cosmic sense. But on an individual level, which I’d argue is the much more relevant perspective, the vast, vast majority of individuals should be born into Grabby Alien civilizations.

So my argument is:

  1. If Grabby Aliens exist, in time most of the universe will be claimed by grabby aliens of one sort or another

  2. If at least one Grabby Alien civilization doesn’t immediately succumb to AI or a similar thing, the incredibly vast majority of sentient beings will be born under Grabby Alien rule

  3. It doesn’t matter what the distributions of early civilizations is, because how individuals are born is a more relevant, powerful, and potentially accurate use of Outside View

  4. Therefore, the Fermi Paradox has not been resolved; it’s just been transmuted into the question “Why weren’t we born into a Grabby civilization at its peak?”

  5. (optional) If going by the outside view, I personally find it more likely that we actually have been born into a Grabby civilization, and are being fooled into thinking we’re alone. This is highly speculative though.

There are of course large weaknesses to using the outside view at all, but I’m just trying to use all the same premises that the original argument did. It frustrates me to see so many rationalists essentially dismiss the issue as solved now that a prominent rationalist has come up with an argument against it, when the argument is so weak.

I’d love to hear what you guys think.

Why weren’t we born into a Grabby civilization at its peak?

Because no one will be. Grabby civilizations are likely made up of non-sentient robots.

How would that work ? Isn't sentience required to run a civilization ?

Sentience isn't intelligence.

Sentience is the capacity to experience qualia, essentially consciousness. (Frogs for example are perfectly sentient as far as we know.) Robots can probably be really smart and capable of making decisions just as complex as any conscious human (maybe, as we don't really fully understand sentience/consciousness at all yet) but without the actual experiencing subjective sensations part.

That might not actually be .. true.

Even Peter Watts, one of the most rabid fans* of the whole consciousness != intelligence thing has come to have some doubts.

I say "rabid fan" because he wrote two terrifying, acclaimed sf books about it.

What they’ve got, as it turns out, is a nifty little proof-of-principle in support of the Free-Energy-Minimization model I was chewing over last April. Back then it was Mark Solms, forcing me to rethink my assertion that consciousness could be decoupled from the survival instinct. The essence of Solms’ argument is that feelings are a metric of need, you don’t have needs unless you have an agenda (i.e., survival), and you can’t feel feelings without being subjectively aware of them (i.e., conscious). I wasn’t fully convinced, but I was shaken free of certain suppositions I’d encrusted around myself over a couple of decades.* If Solms was right, I realized, consciousness wasn’t independent of survival drives; it was a manifestation of them*.

Well certainly I admit it's an open question. I just mean that the ideas are wholly conceptually separable and thus theoretically an actual empirical distinction between them is quite possible. Maybe "probably" in my original answer is assuming too much certainty.

and you can’t feel feelings without being subjectively aware of them (i.e., conscious).

.. the thing is, people, at least myself, can have emotions and without consciously feeling them.

It's not common but for example I can be fearful of something without feeling fear.

I honestly don't remember what it likes to feel fear, though I believe I used to feel it. Now there's just sort of .. detached numbness, and a distinct but impossible to explain unwillingness to do what I'm guessing I'm afraid of.

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