Just how alien would the space-octopus be?

It's hard to say what a true alien species would be like. But octopi are pretty alien, and we know a bit about them. One of you doubted that a space-octopus from alpha centauri would be much like us. So here is a xenohumanist thought experiment: SETI has intercepted a strangely coded broadcast of cephalopod-like creatures landing a spaceship on Proxima Centauri d, originating from PC b. Assuming they are straightforwardly uplifed cephalopods, how alien are they?

Molluscs and chordates (and most other animals including insects) share a common ancestor with linear digestive system, muscles, and proto-brain (a worm). If proto-humanoid general intelligence developed early on (the worm mind hypothesis), it's not surprising we would share that kind of intelligence with our cousins the molluscs. But multicellular bilateral cephalized worms are very natural, very early, and we have had 500M years to diverge, so I consider any human-mollusc spiritual commonality to be strong evidence of the xenohumanist convergence conjecture.

Octopi are known to be smart. They form opinions of individual people, use tools, solve novel problems, hunt, and so on. They lack only the metabolism and social complexity to bootstrap these fundamentals up into serious intelligence. Even so, we often legally and morally recognize at least partial cephalopod personhood.

On Alpha Centauri, they must have hit takeoff and started running hot, wielding spears, hunting and herding in packs, and building things. It's hard to get to space without fire, so they must also have figured out how to operate in a dry environment.

Let's make them more alien: They have complex symbolic language, but they communicate by flashing patterns of color on their tentacles. They may live in travelling kin-swarms like bees, and have different reproductive sociality. But they also evidently form society at a larger scale, and something individual-like is probably necessary for their great feats of invention and politics, so it may also be that they would have to converge with us in social patterns to reach large-scale coordination.

I expect they do not have a unified global society, but rather organized territorial, ideological, economic, racial, etc factions, as these emerge naturally from the impossibility of perfect self-integrity of any order (no strong rationality).

They must question the nature of themselves and other things. These questions are not primate, but fundamental. They probably have quite different traditions from us, but I would thus expect they have some analogue of philosophy, science, and mathematics, especially given their evident technological prowess.

Since some socially foundational questions are pre-rational and not subject to natural consensus (again by no quirk of ape physiology), I would expect some kind of ritual symbolic reinforcement of social order, like religion. (Bonus: do they have octopus-shaped gods or believe themselves to be god-shaped?)

In their social life, while segmentation of self may be different (kin-hive), much of what we call the individual is an artifact of the inherent difficulty and uncertainty of modelling and managing inside other agents. Individuality is the solution to a social problem, not a premise.

In mental life, they may have quite different emotions, especially if the self is segmented differently, but emotion as a sort of "first few principle components of current situation-action context" seems really robust as a probable phenomenon, and likely resembles ours as much as their society does.

Even conservatively this sounds both natural and "humanoid". In general, I expect that the capabilities and natures we call "human" are natural features of intelligence as such that continuously re-emerge for practical reasons, and not arbitrary "values" held by primates alone.

This only argues a weak xenohumanism, that human-level animals will be spiritually humanoid. We can discuss strong xenohumanism (regarding superintellgent autopeosis) later.

Let’s try to reinforce your argument here by looking at the extremes of how intelligence presents — what would an off-world ant colony capable of achieving our “intelligence requisites” look like?

These are large ant(-like creatures), big enough to experiment with fire, advanced tool-making, etc.

But there’s no individuality. A sort of un- or subconscious commitment to the Queen. But there’s an emergent and increasingly sophisticated understanding of resource management, and some extrapolation leads the colony to believe resources exist beyond its own planet.

Are these still humanoids? Maybe this is question-begging — maybe you need the “individual” to be able to make inferences beyond deductive “if rain, mound collapses.” I’m really not sure.

In another forum, one of you argues that the crucial fact is not that an uplifted octopus would be vaguely humanoid, but that this has not happened except with actual humans, and that this should tell us something about the nature and uniqueness of humans. Life had 3 billion years in which to do this. Why, if the human is so natural and overwhelmingly competitive, did it happen only once?

First of all, there has been consistent progress in cephalization and ecological complexity through the entire history of life. Dinosaurs were large but not particularly smart, and they are relatively recent. Animals ourselves are only about 500M years old, and fully terrestrial quadrupeds only about 300M years. Octopi are only 300M years old. Flowers and grass are post-dinosaur. In the Paleozoic (500-250mya) we are aware of no serious candidates for intelligence. In the Mesozoic (250-66mya) there are candidates but something in the conditions of development was still too primitive. In the Cenozoic (66mya-present), we got started pretty quick actually. Realistically it was going to be mammals or birds, and both show substantially advanced cephalization relative to previous eras. The mammals it ended up being were the tree-swingers forced out of the trees and up on two feet to spot and avoid predation by mammal super-predators (cats). Bipedalism occurred 8mya as a result of climate shifts from 10mya (descent into current ice age dried out parts of the jungle into grassland forcing apes to the ground). By 6mya they were using tools. These things simply take time, and have been accelerating over time with ecological complexity.

Second, if it had happened before, given the overwhelming advantage of human culture and civilization, the first time it happened at detectable and persistent scale would have swept the earth and probably precluded any other species from getting anywhere near that niche. This is of course what actually happened. Also, it's only been at most a million years, possibly only tens of thousands, since the takeoff, so we can hardly expect two such species to be contemporaries.

Once humanity exists, it's so irresistibly compelling of a pattern that it takes off and revolutionizes the world. But it takes a really long time to get there because overall ecological evolution itself is quite slow.

The real question that xenohumanism hopes to investigate is whether it stops here (it certainly doesn't), and if it does not, where does it go, what are those beings like, and what do we learn from them about ourselves and how we should live?

>>2886

[I'm the one who brought up octopi in the other thread, but not the one expressing strong skepticism in the other forum.]

One way to frame the question is: Just how wide or narrow is the attractor basin in evolutionary space, and might it have multiple equilibrium points in it?

My intuition is that it may be wider than you're supposing, and may indeed have more equilibrium points in it than humans have explored.

Consider that even closely related species can have significantly different social behavior. Chimpanzees and bonobos look almost identical to us, but chimps exhibit much greater male aggression and dominance hierarchies than bonobos. Some species of great cats live in prides, while others live alone as adults.

If such differences can exist between closely related species, it's clear that far greater difference can exist among more distant species. Of course, that's not yet taking into account intelligence. Is there something about intelligence that "narrows the basin" and suppresses the variability that would otherwise be possible?

I'm not seeing convincing reason for that. Intelligence obviously rules out some possibilities, but it's not clear which possibilities for sociality it would impose or rule out.

>>2890
>One way to frame the question is: Just how wide or narrow is the attractor basin in evolutionary space, and might it have multiple equilibrium points in it?
This is the right question. I think it's fairly wide relative to human experience, but fairly narrow to Yudkowskian/lovecraftian intuitions. It probably has a large diversity of niches and particulars within it, but the core of the hypothesis is a sort of empathetic commensurability.

>Chimpanzees and bonobos look almost identical to us, but chimps exhibit much greater male aggression and dominance hierarchies than bonobos. Some species of great cats live in prides, while others live alone as adults.
Yeah I'm not saying the future is filled with cookie-cutter 2025 huemans. Lots of diversity in lifestyle and behavior are possible. But note that we can basically empathize with and have parts of ourselves that are like those different animals. East bay rationalists like to think of themselves as bonobos. Internet "alpha males" like to think of themselves as chimps and lions. Actual human behavioral history has had all types. If they could all speak our language we would basically accept them as part of our social world.

>Is there something about intelligence that "narrows the basin" and suppresses the variability that would otherwise be possible?
Here's the other thing: if they could talk to us and had the capability to trade with us and do politics with us, almost certainly those weird animal lifestyles would not hold up. For better or worse they would get radically different ideas, and re-form themselves within and as members of human society. I think language and culture as a sort of all-encompassing noosphere does have a sort of narrowing (though also a widening) effect on the types of beings that start interacting with it.

This is basically Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's thesis about the arrival of man and the capacity to engage in a super-individual universal cultural sphere. Access to the noosphere and the reasoning within the noosphere transforms and uplifts the more primitive grains of consciousness that are individual pre-social human beings into something fundamentally different, vaguely equal (in the limited qualitative way we are discussing), and possibly permanent as a type.

>>2887
intelligent super-ants make a good thought experiment. Let's add the standard set of capabilities: language, learned culture, tool use, fire, reflection, etc. Note these are just capabilities, not values or arbitrary architectural narrowings, but they are going to have a big impact. These super-ants now probably have trade, relations with a whole new kind of outside world, complex social alliances at a higher level from just the hive. Especially if we develop these capabilities to the point of supporting space travel. Then we basically have a civilization with a weird household structure: lots of little sisters helping around the house-firm for mom.

But will that houshold-firm structure hold up? Given language, reflection, incentives, I bet we can expect some kind of recalibration of what works. I bet further that this process converges on some relatively small set of near-optimal political-economy agent schemas. I don't know what they are, but I wouldn't be surprised if the agent schemas super-ants would converge on would have substantial overlap with wherever we're going.

Are they "human"? Do they need to become more "human" to become more sophisticated?