[SEQ RERUN] Humans in Funny Suits

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.)

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.

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.

It seems like one could spend some time thinking about how humans developed intelligence in order to find potential rules for that process.

As such, it seems that any intelligent beings we are likely to ever encounter will have been a result of runaway self-referential modeling resulting in procreation (ie plotting to gain power over others of the same species). For them to become a technological species, they would need to find a way to communicate ideas beyond simply showing or teaching. This means some form of language. Sound is a convenient method, but there are others. Sign language, light emission, chemical communication, even something wild like manipulation of magnetic fields are all possibilities.

One must go further to think about how such aliens would act. In my experience, most human interaction boils down to a few specific rules and a few specific goals. The rules as I see them are:

1. A person owns their own body.
2. A person can own things, and places.

To own something means to have exclusive use of and authority over. Use and authority can be transferred to others if the owner agrees to do so, which he will do if he sees a benefit to his goals in such a transfer.

The goals are probably universal:

1. Live long enough to
2. Reproduce
3. Ensure progeny reproduces as well.

These seem simple enough to be universal, which leads me to think that alien psychology won't be that alien, absent physiological differences. That is, unless they have developed the technology necessary to push them through more Singularities than we have been through, perhaps to the point of negating one or more of the above goals. If they are immortal, and no longer seek to reproduce, then they will be utterly foreign to us. I would suspect that a human that has lived for 250 million years would probably be just as foreign, though. Maybe that just means that we have to catch up.