I'm planning to write a science fiction novel called Exaltation Dominance.

My first motivation was to think about how a realistic alien invasion would look like. Then I asked myself 'what if these aliens are (hedonistic) utilitarians?' Of course, it wouldn't provide enough material for a novel to write that Earth was simply turned into utilitronium, so I had to think about more subtle scenarios.

As a result of this thinking I've invented an alien civilization called "The Exaltation". The purpose of this thread is to discuss about the philosophy of that civilization.

First of all some boundary conditions: In the world of the novel there's no faster than light travel, no time travel, no travel between "parallel universes" or different Everett branches[/url] (see Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics), and no construction of artificial universes. On the other hand there is vastly superhuman intelligence and happiness, realizable with sufficiently advanced technology. Also, the are artificial forms of matter which allow for the construction of machines and computers on the femtometer scale.

Now let's come to the backstory of the novel: About 30000 years ago, on the other side of the galaxy an alien planetary civilization is about to reach a technological Singularity. These aliens are called "Groundlings", because they call their planet "Ground". In contrast to the human civilization the Groundlings have a much stronger and more influential utilitarian tradition. A group of their utilitarian philosophers create the "Exaltation Initiative", a project to turn the universe into a really really happy place. But that's of course complicated on very many levels, so they develop a large master plan which involves the design of a new culture, the Exaltation.

An important reasoning is to design the Exaltation in a way that maximizes the expected (hedonistic) utility of the part of the universe the Groundlings can influence. They come to the conclusion that the direct approach of launching a utilitronium shockwave is probably not the best way to go, since they might meet other similarly advanced civilizations out there, which might be seriously opposed to this idea and would be able to retaliate against too aggressive expansion. So, they design the Exaltation to conquer the universe rather by convincing others rather than by brute force. Others should come to the conclusion that it would be awesome to join the Exaltation, rather than to oppose it.

This results in a rather principled and democratic approach to utilitarianism. Basic rights and rules become much more important than utility calculations. These rules can be overridden, but only in well-defined exceptions and with popular and juridical support.

To understand the core principle of the Exaltation, you need to know that the Exaltation has a measure of hedonic utility H(i,f,t), depending on individuals i, feelings f, and time t. It’s defined by scientific and democratic consensus, and measured via neural implants in all sentient beings. What the Exaltation cares about is rather H(i,t) as defined as the sum of all H(i,f,t) values over all current feelings f = f(i,t). You can have a positive momentary total hedonic intensity H(i,t), even if you are having a few nasty negative feelings H(i,f,t), as long as your positive feelings outweigh them. As an individual and member of the Exaltation your average total hedonic intensity H(i) is very important. It’s defined as the average of all your H(i,t) values from birth to now.

Through experimentation the Exaltation has found out a maximum positive hedonic intensity value M for unaugmented animals. With hedonic augmentation technology the Exaltation can enable its members to surpass the limitation to M by far. The core principle of the Exaltation is that its members need to keep their average total hedonic intensity H(i) above 2M at all times - otherwise they will be expelled from the Exaltation for a while!

Further principles are:
* Infliction of significant involuntary suffering or deactivation on other sentient beings is not allowed - unless required for self-defense.
* Everyone is free to join the Exaltation, except for those who have been recently expelled.
* All members of the Exaltation must be provided with sufficient resources to avoid significant involuntary suffering, or deactivation. And with the resources to maintain their H(i) above 2M at all times.
* The Exaltation does not break treaties with external factions.
* Direct manipulation of the will of “enlightened” sentient beings is not allowed. Being “enlightened” means having a certain level of knowledge about the world and philosophy as framework to look at the world and values. Not sure whether any currently living human being would qualify. Probably not.
* The Exaltation is divided into political entities called “scopes” to which Exaltation members can subscribe and unsubscribe to freely. Scopes can have their own principles, rules, and laws, but are required to respect the basic principles of the Exaltation.
* The Exaltation owns all the natural resources (land, space, sun energy, raw materials) in its territory. They cannot be sold or handed over to private owners. That way the Exaltation can charge fees on resource use. This creates economic abundance for the Exaltation and removes the need for taxation.
* The Exaltation is a democracy of “enlightened” sentient beings.
* It’s the purpose of the Exaltation to fill up local mindspace with diverse minds with optimal density of hedonic utility H(i). There is a main project for this purpose: The Fractal Ocean. Minds are kept in optimal hedonic states at all times within the Fractal Ocean. It’s actually a kind of “utilitronium”, but it is also optimized for diversity, in order to minimize duplicated mind states.
* On the level of the Exaltation there is no copyright. You can copy and modify whatever you want to - even whole minds! Of course scopes can try to provide some copyright protection, but members outside of that scope don’t need to respect that local copyright protection. You can try to keep your data private, but the Exaltation provides incentives to liberate all data as far as possible.
* There is a distinction between temporary and permanent minds. Temporary minds have a fixed “expiry date” and will be deactivated at that date. But they need to be configured so that they love their temporary existence and really want to be deactivated when their time comes.
* Members of the Exaltation are rather free to create new temporary minds, but have to earn the right to create new permanent minds. You earn that right by doing lots of really utilitarian stuff, being generally useful and enriching to the Exaltation. Well, the Exaltation is really extremely meritocratic.
* Every member of the Exaltation has the right to be supported in her own development by an advisor.
* Religion has the same status as pure fiction. The Exaltation represents a secular spirituality and philosophy.

Exaltation Dominance depicts the integration of life on Earth into the Exaltation. It’s a rather “weirdtopian” process. After 30000 years of travel, one of the colonization seeds of the Exaltation reaches the solar system, establishes bases in the cores of the sun and the Earth and proceeds to radically uplift all sentient beings and the biosphere as a whole. Then the intellectually, technologically, hedonically and empathically uplifted and enlightened life on Earth - every individual on its own - gets the choice to join the Exaltation, or to remain “free” but in the shadow of Exaltation Dominance. That’s an offer you almost cannot reject.

Any thoughts?

relevant:

"If the character gets catapulted into a fantasy world, they actually notice the resemblance to their fantasy books, wonder about it, and think to themselves, "If this were a fantasy book, the next thing that would happen is X..." (which may or may not happen, because Watt-Evans doesn't write typical fantasy books). It's not done as a postmodern self-referential schtick, but as a faithfulness-to-reality; they think what a real rational person would think, in their shoes."

http://lesswrong.com/lw/2q/on_juvenile_fiction/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/s7/lawrence_wattevanss_fiction/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/3m/rationalist_fiction/

Sounds cool! Reminds me of "childhoods end". But are you sure this is the best use of your time?

Ruari, thanks for that feedback. Didn't know about "Childhoods End" yet. Looks like it would be reasonable for me to read that to see how a good and popular story about that topic might look like.

Do you think there's an even better use of my time? Well, I'm developing a reputation economy and plan to implement it to optimize the economy - and become very wealthy in the process. But that's only an indirect help to incease the ethical baseline. Exaltation Dominance also serves to present my more advanced "society design" ideas.

At the moment I don't use my time very productively due to health and financial problems, and due to the fact that my social environment is woefully inadequate for someone like me. If someone could pay me to focus on the really important stuff that might help the world tremendously.

Also worth looking up Charles Stross' books (esp Singularity Sky). I didn't find them particularly compelling, but they're H+ oriented hard sci-fi.

My problem with them, much of H+ and the vision you've presented above is the idea that any civilisation that wanted to optimise for anything would bother having a bunch of discrete minds running about. It seems so obviously better to have a pseudo-hive-brain, albeit one that stretches so far across space that the lightspeed limitation will serve as a natural (but non-discrete) partition, that even if they persuaded civilisations in with a description something like you've mentioned above, they'd surely all switch in a very short amount of time.

It also seems like some of the numbers you give above are too obviously arbitrary, eg 2M.

Presumably in response to both of those concerns you could argue that if your book's going to have any influence in the actual world you need to make it palatable, but I would say at the very least you need to come up with some claims about why the numbers are as they are.

On a slightly different mode of criticism, why bother with temporary minds? Aside from the fact that there probably wouldn't be a clear difference (even ignoring my objection about non-discreteness, a mind that has been deactivated could be reactivated again at some future point, and a 'permanent' mind might be temporarily shut down to save resources, so the difference just seems to be one of scale), it seems like your society could function pretty well with just one or the other.

In the real world, people reading might react against the perceived inequality, regardless of how the minds in your world viewed it (Aldous Huxley managed to get people to condemn a lifestyle that made 99.9999% of those living it very happy - and he did it so well that his book's name is synonymous with such concerns), so it seems like you could spare yourself at least that political hurdle.

Arepo wrote:Also worth looking up Charles Stross' books (esp Singularity Sky). I didn't find them particularly compelling, but they're H+ oriented hard sci-fi.

I know Singularity Sky. It'a bit chaotic. Intelligent development help would look different.

Arepo wrote:My problem with them, much of H+ and the vision you've presented above is the idea that any civilisation that wanted to optimise for anything would bother having a bunch of discrete minds running about. It seems so obviously better to have a pseudo-hive-brain, albeit one that stretches so far across space that the lightspeed limitation will serve as a natural (but non-discrete) partition, that even if they persuaded civilisations in with a description something like you've mentioned above, they'd surely all switch in a very short amount of time.

Well, the real problem seems to be how to count individuals once all of them are connected to each other in deep ways. Sounds like bureaucratic nightmare. Why do you think "pseudo-hive-minds" are inherently preferable to individuality. Why wouldn't it suffice to stay an individual but link together with other minds when desired? The answer may be that after a certain level of deep linking and interweaving you become one with those you connected your mind with. That's a rather natural way to keep population numbers low, btw.

Arepo wrote:It also seems like some of the numbers you give above are too obviously arbitrary, eg 2M.

I tried to minimize the arbitrariness of that number. 2 is the successor of one. 1 may be more natural, but the philosophy of the Exaltation is to make a clear difference between hedonically augmented and unaugmented minds. If the minimum was "M", then the difference between them may become arbitrarily small.

Arepo wrote:Presumably in response to both of those concerns you could argue that if your book's going to have any influence in the actual world you need to make it palatable, but I would say at the very least you need to come up with some claims about why the numbers are as they are.

Which other numbers do you mean?

Arepo wrote:On a slightly different mode of criticism, why bother with temporary minds? Aside from the fact that there probably wouldn't be a clear difference (even ignoring my objection about non-discreteness, a mind that has been deactivated could be reactivated again at some future point, and a 'permanent' mind might be temporarily shut down to save resources, so the difference just seems to be one of scale), it seems like your society could function pretty well with just one or the other.

It would be more restrictive to disallow temporary minds. The point is that with temporary minds you can make new minds on demand for certain time limited purposes. Creating new permanent minds like that may be troublesome, because they would accumulate quickly and lead to overpopulation. Using temporary minds probably creates more overall wealth - at the very least for the permanent minds.

Arepo wrote:In the real world, people reading might react against the perceived inequality, regardless of how the minds in your world viewed it (Aldous Huxley managed to get people to condemn a lifestyle that made 99.9999% of those living it very happy - and he did it so well that his book's name is synonymous with such concerns), so it seems like you could spare yourself at least that political hurdle.

True. Temporary minds would be an inferior class and there would be a lot of inequality even without this additional temporal stratification of society. I haven't found a good answer yet how to deal with inequality when there's the possibility to create minds of incredibly diverse sizes and configurations. My hope is that it might be possible that people won't care much about inequality if everything looks "fair". Temporary minds are a relatively new concept that I've come up with rather recently. I guess they could become a really explosive issue. Perhaps it would be really better to ban them. Having a fixed expiry date certainly is an obstacle to freedom and self-determination. Having such different classes probably is hard to be seen as fair. Yeah, I guess I'll add it to the Exaltation principles that the Exaltation is communist in the sense of not allowing classes of minds with different rights, such as temporary minds.

Thanks for your valuable feedback!

Mike Radivis wrote:Ruari, thanks for that feedback. Didn't know about "Childhoods End" yet. Looks like it would be reasonable for me to read that to see how a good and popular story about that topic might look like.

Do you think there's an even better use of my time? Well, I'm developing a reputation economy and plan to implement it to optimize the economy - and become very wealthy in the process. But that's only an indirect help to incease the ethical baseline. Exaltation Dominance also serves to present my more advanced "society design" ideas.

At the moment I don't use my time very productively due to health and financial problems, and due to the fact that my social environment is woefully inadequate for someone like me. If someone could pay me to focus on the really important stuff that might help the world tremendously.

Oh Childhood's End isn't utilitarian or about the singularity or anything, but it is about a radical shift in how the earth exists, and your story just kind of reminded me of it.

Have you considered applying to work for an EA org?:D The deadline is very soon!

If someone could pay me to focus on the really important stuff that might help the world tremendously.

You would have to prove that paying you is the optimal charity.

As for your story, I don't understand why they don't launch an intelligent hedonium shockwave that communicates and negotiates functionally with powerful other factions. It seems that would create the most pleasantness-over-unpleasantness in the universe.

As for the project of writing a story, you should do it only if you have literally nothing better to do, e.g. if you have zero other skills or if you think that you're such a unique storyteller or the topic is so unique that the world really needs it, despite thousands of good stories with similar content already being out there. Or if it is more fun to you than anything else, and you can't find the motivation to do the more utility-maximizing other things that are less fun.

Hedonic Treader wrote:

If someone could pay me to focus on the really important stuff that might help the world tremendously.

You would have to prove that paying you is the optimal charity.

Ah, thanks for pointing that out. I might consider developing a new strategy accordingly.

Hedonic Treader wrote:As for your story, I don't understand why they don't launch an intelligent hedonium shockwave that communicates and negotiates functionally with powerful other factions. It seems that would create the most pleasantness-over-unpleasantness in the universe.

Blank hedonium shockwaves lack charisma and subtlety. Those are attributes which may be vital for negotiating effectively. And the Exaltation is not much worse than a pure hedonium shockwave, so the increased diplomatic abilty probably outweighs the lack in "pureness". Anyway, it's a gamble and depends on which other factors are expected to be out there.

Hedonic Treader wrote:As for the project of writing a story, you should do it only if you have literally nothing better to do, e.g. if you have zero other skills or if you think that you're such a unique storyteller or the topic is so unique that the world really needs it, despite thousands of good stories with similar content already being out there.

The story / philosophical world design is so unique that the world needs it. That you don't see why the Exaltation might be better than a pure "hedonium shockwave" just proves that point.

Hedonic Treader wrote:Or if it is more fun to you than anything else, and you can't find the motivation to do the more utility-maximizing other things that are less fun.

Well, it's extemely exciting to write such stories, but also extremely difficult.

Mike Radivis wrote:

Hedonic Treader wrote:As for your story, I don't understand why they don't launch an intelligent hedonium shockwave that communicates and negotiates functionally with powerful other factions. It seems that would create the most pleasantness-over-unpleasantness in the universe.

Blank hedonium shockwaves lack charisma and subtlety. Those are attributes which may be vital for negotiating effectively. And the Exaltation is not much worse than a pure hedonium shockwave, so the increased diplomatic abilty probably outweighs the lack in "pureness". Anyway, it's a gamble and depends on which other factors are expected to be out there.

I think there needs to be a distinction between:

1) The Groundlings' actual philosophical conviction of what utility is to them, and
2) The functionality of implementing it in a universe where there are probably other factions who disagree

1 is not trivial because even here on felicifia, we don't have a consensus. I'd say pure hedonium is optimal, Brian Tomasik would probably agree, but Peter Hurford would disagree, and so on. The question is, what do the Groundlings actually think about that?

2 is a different hypothesis: That you can convince other aliens better if you assume a different utility pattern than you would otherwise implement. This seems dubious to me, for at least these reasons:

• There might not be any aliens of relevant power
• The powerful aliens might have a utility definition that is not more accepting of the Exaltation than a hedonium shockwave
• Charisma and subtlety as functional properties of communication can be provided by a superintelligence choosing the right avatars and communication patterns

Given the premises, it seems improbable that there are aliens powerful enough to stop the shockwave and care, in a practically relevant manner, about the difference between the Exaltation and hedonium even if communication by the shockwave is implemented flawlessly.

Well, it's extremely exciting to write such stories, but also extremely difficult.

Yeah, my stories always sucked, except for one that focused solely on sex, and even that was met disapprovingly by people who thought it was immoral. I very rarely write fiction now, and purely as a way to amuse myself.

Hedonic Treader wrote:

Mike Radivis wrote:Blank hedonium shockwaves lack charisma and subtlety. Those are attributes which may be vital for negotiating effectively. And the Exaltation is not much worse than a pure hedonium shockwave, so the increased diplomatic abilty probably outweighs the lack in "pureness". Anyway, it's a gamble and depends on which other factors are expected to be out there.

I think there needs to be a distinction between:

1) The Groundlings' actual philosophical conviction of what utility is to them, and
2) The functionality of implementing it in a universe where there are probably other factions who disagree

1 is not trivial because even here on felicifia, we don't have a consensus. I'd say pure hedonium is optimal, Brian Tomasik would probably agree, but Peter Hurford would disagree, and so on. The question is, what do the Groundlings actually think about that?

Well, I'd say the Groundlings basically think what I think about the topic, but have more elaborate and clearer ideas. My opinions have shifted quite a bit recenltly.

There are severe complications coming from my ontology, which I call Mathematical Structure Realism. It basically claims that every universe which can be described mathematically also exists. And that this is not only true for physical universes, but also mental universes, also known as minds. On the largest scale of things that makes utilitarianism pointless when seem from the mental omniverse, because every possible mental and hedonic configuration already exists in it. There's nothing you can add or distract.

But we live in a physical universe and we somehow need to act, so we can try to "localize" utlitarianism and stop caring about the mental omniverse. Instead, we focus on the mental universe of our own physical universe - I call that "local mindspace". That's a reasonable restriction as we don't have access to the mental omniverse or other physical universes anyway. The utlitarian idea is then to maximize happiness in local mindspace.

Actually that is rather tricky, because it implies that plastering our cosmos with homogenous hedonium is a rather bad idea, because if it consisted of a single mind repeated all over spacetime, then it would actually count as a single mind in local mindspace, as its mental state alone determines its identity in mindspace. So, you need to add some diversity to get a high number of actually different minds in local mindspace.

Adding random diversity by using quantum randomness for modifying minds doesn't really help. Mathematical Structure Realism especially implies that the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is correct. That means you don't get "random" results from quantum randomness, but they are deterministic in the wave function of the world. Their "realizations" are simply spead over different Everett branches of the universe. Well, that's actually good, as may increases diversity over the quantum multiverse (which is what we should actually care about when we want to maximize expected utility), but that means that it won't make a difference if you use the same mind randomization quantum algorithm multiple times, as all kinds of results are already realized in the quantum universe. What you really need is a diversity of quantum algorithms, or simple more classical forms of mental diversity.

My latest considerations (from today actually) also include a concept I call "localization". It is problematic to create minds which are not "coupled" to local spacetime in the sense that they have no information about local spacetime. That's a problem, because from their point of view they are not part of a local mindspace, but simply "somewhere" in the mental omniverse. But utilitarianism is about minds, so their perspective counts! If they say they are not part of a local mindspace, then their statement must be taken seriously. These minds need to be "localized" to our local mindspace by giving them knowledge and awareness of actually being there. I call that spaciotemporal-mental coupling. This necessitates the addition of some non-valence qualia, as information about where you are and what you know does not have any valence (a priori). The more "locality information" the better, because a lack of localization has similar "spreading" effects as using quantum randomness.

What I'd therefore want to optimize is something like the product "Valence qualia intensity" * "Diversity of minds" * "Spaciotemporal-mental coupling ("localization")". This would prescribe creating something like creatively designed diverse optimally hedonic minds with a distribution of minds centered around a balance between value qualia and qualia used for localization. I'll call a substrate which actually maximizes that product VIDL (Valence Intensity Diversity Localization) utilitronium.

So, I'd say the Groundlings from the Exaltation Initiative would want to create something even far more complex and sophisticated than VIDL utilitronium (because I don't expect to have respected nearly all conceptual subleties of meaningful utilitronium design). In principle the Fractal Ocean I mentioned initially is a kind of approximation to this ideal utilitronium. But due to its complexity it needs some creative design work. The Exaltation therefore needs a lot of utlitronium designers. Ideally these would form the majority of the "regular" minds in the Exaltation - meaning the minds not swimming in the Fractal Ocean.

Hedonic Treader wrote:2 is a different hypothesis: That you can convince other aliens better if you assume a different utility pattern than you would otherwise implement. This seems dubious to me, for at least these reasons:

[*] There might not be any aliens of relevant power

That might be possible. As I said, the Exaltation bets on other aliens of relevant power existing.

Hedonic Treader wrote:[*] The powerful aliens might have a utility definition that is not more accepting of the Exaltation than a hedonium shockwave

Why should that be the case? If the other aliens are even "more" utilitarian, then they would simply argue about the strategic utility of clothing utilitarianism in the guise of the Exaltation. As a large scale conflict would diminish utility severely, a suitable stategic compromize will probably be found. And it would look rather similar to the original Exaltation philosophy.

If the other aliens are less utilitarian than the Exaltation then they will probably prefer the more "liberal" principles of the Exaltation to full blown "blank utilitarianism". They would be more likely to make concessions to a relatively considerate political entity like the Exaltation than to a manic "out of control" hedonium shockwave, which would be probably seen as some kind of cancerous growth that needs to be inhibited.

Hedonic Treader wrote:[*] Charisma and subtlety as functional properties of communication can be provided by a superintelligence choosing the right avatars and communication patterns

That is true to some degree, but I think charisma and subtlety are not only properties of the messenger, but also of the message. Otherwise (super)intelligences promoting the following ideologies would be equally convincing:
* Blank utilitarianism
* The Exaltation
* Catholicism
* Libertarianism
* Any random kind of deontology

I think that's highly unlikely!

Hedonic Treader wrote:Given the premises, it seems improbable that there are aliens powerful enough to stop the shockwave and care, in a practically relevant manner, about the difference between the Exaltation and hedonium even if communication by the shockwave is implemented flawlessly.

The chances of convincing a generic alien civilization should be much higher for the Exaltation than for a hedonium shockwave, because agreeing with the latter would most certainly imply self-destruction, while the former only mandates a certain degree of self-transformation!

I know what I write must be terribly confusing. It would requine at least one book to make my thoughts clear and more convincing.