Humans aren't fleeb.

post by Charlie Steiner · 2024-01-24T05:31:46.929Z · LW · GW · 5 comments

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In the oceans of the planet Water, a species of intelligent squid-like aliens - we'll just call them the People - debate about what it means to be fleeb.

Fleeb is a property of great interest to the People, or at least they think so, but they also have a lot of trouble defining it. They're fleeb when they're awake, but less fleeb or maybe not fleeb at all when they're asleep. Some animals that act clever are probably somewhat fleeb, and other animals that are stupid and predictable probably aren't fleeb.

But fleeb isn't just problem-solving ability, because philosophers of the People have written of hypothetical alien lifeforms that could be good at solving problems without intuitively being fleeb. Instead, the idea of "fleeb" is more related to how much a Person can see a reflection of their own thinking in the processes of the subject. A look-up table definitely isn't fleeb. But how much of the thinking of the People do you need to copy to be more fleeb than their pet cuttlefish-aliens?

• Do you need to store and recall memories?
• Do you need emotions?
• Do you need to make choices?
• Do you need to reflect on yourself?
• Do you need to be able to communicate, maybe not with words, but modeling other creatures around you as having models of the world and choosing actions to honestly inform them?

Yes to all of these, say the People. These are important things to them about their thinking, and so important for being fleeb.

In fact, the People go even farther. A simple abacus can store memories if "memories" just means any record of the past. But to be fleeb, you should store and recall memories more in the sense that People do it. Similar for having emotions, making choices, etc. So the People have some more intuitions about what makes a creature fleeb:

• You should store and recall visual/aural/olfactory/electrosensory memories in a way suitable for remembering them both from similar sensory information and abstract reasoning, and these memories should be bundled with metadata like time and emotional valence. Your tactile/kinesthetic memories should be opaque to abstract reasoning (perhaps distributed in your limbs, as in the People), but can be recalled-in-the-felt-way from similar sensory information.
• It's hard to tell if you have emotions unless you have ones recognizable and important to the People. For the lowest levels of fleeb, it's enough to have a general positive emotion (pleasure) and a general negative one (pain/hunger). But to be fleeb like the People are, you should also have emotions like curiosity, boredom, love, just-made-a-large-change-to-self-regulation-heuristics, anxiety, working-memory-is-full, and hope.
• You should make choices similar to how the People do. Primed by your emotional state, you should use fast heuristics to reconfigure your cognitive pathway so you call on the correct resources to make a good plan. Then you quickly generate some potential actions and refine them until taking the best one seems better than not acting.
• Etc.

When the People learned about humans, it sparked a lively philosophical debate. Clearly humans are quite clever, and have some recognizable cognitive algorithms, in the same way an AI using two different semantic hashes is "remembering" in a more fleeb-ish way than an abacus is. But compare humans to a pet cuttlefish-alien - even though the pet cuttlefish-alien can't solve problems as well, it has emotions us humans don't have even a dim analogue of, and overall has a more similar cognitive architecture to the People.

Some brash philosophers of the People made bold claims that humans were fleeb, and therefore deserved full rights immediately. But cooler heads prevailed; despite outputting clever text signals, humans were just too different to be easily categorized as fleeb (or at least, more fleeb than a pet cuttlefish-alien). They could be interacted with, and they were processing information, but they weren't "really thinking" in the way that makes you fleeb.

Eventually humans wiped themselves out in a way that made it obvious to all right-thinking People they can't have been all that clever in the first place, and the example of humans survived in the Peoples' records as a cautionary tale against calamaromorphism.

The end.

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