Элиезер Юдковски: Three Worlds Collide

The Ship's Confessor lowered his voice. "My Lord Pilot. I will not permit you to declare your crusade, when you have not said what you are crusading for. It is not enough to say that you do not like the way things are. You must say how you will change them, and to what. You must think all the way to your end. Will you wipe out the Babyeater race entirely? Keep their remnants under human rule forever, in despair under our law? You have not even faced your hard choices, only congratulated yourself on

demanding that something be done. I judge that a violation of sanity, my lord."

The Lord Pilot stood rigid. "What -" his voice broke. "What do you suggest we do?"

"Sit down," said the Ship's Confessor, "keep thinking. My Lord Pilot, my Lady Sensory, you are premature. It is too early for humanity to divide over this issue, when we have known about it for lessthan twenty-four hours. Some rules do not change, whether it is money at stake, or the fate of an intelligent species. We should only, at this stage, be discussing the issue in all its aspects, as thoroughly as possible; we should not even be placing solutions on the table, as yet, to polarize us into camps. You know that, my lords, my ladies, and it does not change."

"And after that?" said the Master of Fandom suddenly. "Then it's okay to split humanity? You wouldn't object?"

The featureless blur concealed within the Confessor's Hood turned to face the Master, and spoke; and those present thought they heard a grim smile, in that voice. "Oh," said the Confessor, " that would be interfering in politics. I am charged with guarding sanity, not morality. If you want to stay together, do not split. If you want peace, do not start wars. If you want to avoid genocide, do not wipe out an alien species. But if these are not your highest values, then you may well end up sacrificing them.

What you are willing to trade off , may end up traded away - be you warned! But if that is acceptable to you, then so be it. The Order of Silent Confessors exists in the hope that, so long as humanity is sane, it can make choices in accordance with its true desires. Thus there is our Order dedicated only to that, and sworn not to interfere in politics. So you will spend more time discussing this scenario, my lords, my ladies, and only then generate solutions. And then... you will decide."

"Excuse me," said the Lady Sensory. The Lord Pilot made to speak, and Sensory raised her voice.

" Excuse me, my lords. The alien ship has just sent us a new transmission. Two megabytes of text."

"Translate and publish," ordered Akon.

They all glanced down and aside, waiting for the file to come up.

It began:

THE UTTERMOST ABYSS OF JUSTIFICATION

A HYMN OF LOGIC

PURE LIKE STONES AND SACRIFICE

FOR STRUGGLES OF THE YOUNG SLIDING DOWN YOUR THROAT-

Akon looked away, wincing. He hadn't tried to read much of the alien corpus, and hadn't gotten the knack of reading the "translations" by that damned program.

"Would someone," Akon said, "please tell me - tell the conference - what this says?

There was a long, stretched moment of silence.

Then the Xenopsychologist made a muffled noise that could have been a bark of incredulity, or just a sad laugh. "Stars beyond," said the Xenopsychologist, "they're trying to persuade us to eat our own children."

"Using," said the Lord Programmer, "what they assert to be arguments from universal principles, rather than appeals to mere instincts that might differ from star to star."

"Such as what, exactly?" said the Ship's Confessor.

Akon gave the Confessor an odd look, then quickly glanced away, lest the Confessor catch him at it.

No, the Confessor couldn't be carefully maintaining an open mind about that. It was just curiosity over what particular failures of reasoning the aliens might exhibit.

"Let me search," said the Lord Programmer. He was silent for a time. "Ah, here's an example. They point out that by producing many offspring, and winnowing among them, they apply greater selection pressures to their children than we do. So if we started producing hundreds of babies per couple and then eating almost all of them - I do emphasize that this is their suggestion, not mine - evolution would proceed faster for us, and we would survive longer in the universe. Evolution and survival are

universals, so the argument should convince anyone." He gave a sad chuckle. "Anyone here feel convinced?"

"Out of curiosity," said the Lord Pilot, "have they ever tried to produce even more babies - say, thousands instead of hundreds - so they could speed up their evolution even more?"

"It ought to be easily within their current capabilities of bioengineering," said the Xenopsychologist,

"and yet they haven't done it. Still, I don't think we should make the suggestion.""

"Agreed," said Akon.

"But humanity uses gamete selection," said the Lady Sensory. "We aren't evolving any slower. If anything, choosing among millions of sperm and hundreds of eggs gives us much stronger selection pressures."

The Xenopsychologist furrowed her brow. "I'm not sure we sent them that information in so many words... or they may have just not gotten that far into what we sent them..."

"Um, it wouldn't be trivial for them to understand," said the Ship's Engineer. "They don't have separate DNA and proteins, just crystal patterns tiling themselves. The two parents intertwine and stay that way for, um, days, nucleating portions of supercooled liquid from their own bodies to construct the babies.

The whole, um, baby, is constructed together by both parents. They don't have separate gametes they could select on."

"But," said the Lady Sensory, "couldn't we maybe convince them, to work out some equivalent of gamete selection and try that instead -"

"My lady," said the Xenopsychologist. Her voice, now, was somewhat exasperated. "They aren't really doing this for the sake of evolution. They were eating babies millions of years before they knew what evolution was. "

"Huh, this is interesting," said the Lord Programmer. "There's another section here where they construct their arguments using appeals to historical human authorities."

Akon raised his eyebrows. "And who, exactly, do they quote in support?"

"Hold on," said the Lord Programmer. "This has been run through the translator twice, English to Babyeater to English, so I need to write a program to retrieve the original text..." He was silent a few moments. "I see. The argument starts by pointing out how eating your children is proof of sacrifice and loyalty to the tribe, then they quote human authorities on the virtue of sacrifice and loyalty. And ancient environmentalist arguments about population control, plus... oh, dear. I don't think they've realized that Adolf Hitler is a bad guy."

"They wouldn't," said the Xenopsychologist. "Humans put Hitler in charge of a country, so we must have considered him a preeminent legalist of his age. And it wouldn't occur to the Babyeaters that Adolf Hitler might be regarded by humans as a bad guy just because he turned segments of his society into lampshades - they have a custom against that nowadays, but they don't really see it as evil. If Hitler thought that gays had defected against the norm, and tried to exterminate them, that looks to a Babyeater like an honest mistake -" The Xenopsychologist looked around the table. "All right, I'll stop there. But the Babyeaters don't look back on their history and see obvious villains in positions of power - certainly not after the dawn of science. Any politician who got to the point of being labeled

"bad" would be killed and eaten. The Babyeaters don't seem to have had humanity's coordination problems. Or they're just more rational voters. Take your pick."