Элиезер Юдковски - Three Worlds Collide

"I am a Confessor," said the Ship's Confessor, "the descendant of those in humanity's past who most highly valued truth, who sought systematic methods for finding truth. But Bayes's Theorem will not be different from one place to another; the laws in their purely mathematical form will be the same, just as any sufficiently advanced species will discover the same periodic table of elements."

"And being universals," said the Lady 3rd, "they bear no distinguishing evidence of their origin. So you should understand, Lord Akon, that a kiritsugu's purpose is not like that of a Confessor, even if we exploit the same laws."

"But we are similar enough to each other," the Confessor concluded, "to see each other as distorted mirror images. Heretics, you might say. She is the ultimate sin forbidden to a Confessor - the exercise of command."

"As you are flawed on my own terms," the Lady 3rd concluded, "one who refuses to help."

Everyone else at the Conference table was staring at the alien holo, and at the Confessor, in something approaching outright horror.

The Lady 3rd shifted her gaze back to Akon. Though it was only a movement of the eyes, there was

something of a definite force about the motion, as if the translator was indicating that it stood for something much stronger. Her voice was given a demanding, compelling quality: "What alternatives did your kind generate for dealing with the Babyeaters? Enumerate them to me."

Wipe out their species, keep them in prison forever on suicide watch, ignore them and let the children suffer.

Akon hesitated. An odd premonition of warning prickled at him. Why does she need this information?

"If you do not give me the information," the Lady 3rd said, "I will take into account the fact that you do not wish me to know it."

The proverb went through his mind, The most important part of any secret is the fact that the secret exists .

"All right," Akon said. "We found unacceptable the alternative of leaving the Babyeaters be. We found unacceptable the alternative of exterminating them. We wish to respect their choices and their nature as a species, but their children, who do not share that choice, are unwilling victims; this is unacceptable to us. We desire to keep the children alive but we do not know what to do with them

once they become adult and start wanting to eat their own babies. Those were all the alternatives we had gotten as far as generating, at the very moment your ship arrived."

"That is all?" demanded the Lady 3rd. "That is the sum of all your thought? Is this one of the circumstances under which your species sends signals that differ against internal belief, such as 'joking'

or 'politeness'?"

"No," said Akon. "I mean, yes. Yes, that's as far as we got. No, we're not joking."

"You should understand," the Confessor said, "that this crew, also, experienced a certain distress, interfering with our normal function, on comprehending the Babyeaters. We are still experiencing it."

And you acted to restore order, thought Akon, though not the same way as a kiritsugu...

"I see," the Lady 3rd said.

She fell silent. There were long seconds during which she sat motionless.

Then, "Why have you not yet disabled the Babyeater ship? Your craft possesses the capability of doing so, and you must realize that your purpose now opposes theirs."

"Because," Akon said, "they did not disable our ship."

The Lady 3rd nodded. "You are symmetrists, then."

Again the silence.

Then the holo blurred, and in that blur appeared the words:

Cultural Translator version 3.

The blur resolved itself back into that pale woman; almost the same as before, except that the serenity of her came through with more force.

The Lady 3rd drew herself erect, and took on a look of ritual, as though she were about to recite a composed poem.

"I now speak," the Lady 3rd, "on behalf of my species, to yours."

A chill ran down Akon's spine. This is too much, this is all too large for me -

"Humankind!" the Lady 3rd said, as though addressing someone by name. "Humankind, you prefer the absence of pain to its presence. When my own kind attained to technology, we eliminated the causes of suffering among ourselves. Bodily pain, embarrassment, and romantic conflicts are no longer

permitted to exist. Humankind, you prefer the presence of pleasure to its absence. We have devoted ourselves to the intensity of pleasure, of sex and childbirth and untranslatable 2. Humankind, you prefer truth to lies. By our nature we do not communicate statements disbelieved, as you do with

humor, modesty, and fiction; we have even learned to refrain from withholding information, though we possess that capability. Humankind, you prefer peace to violence. Our society is without crime and without war. Through symmetric sharing and untranslatable 4, we share our joys and are pleasured together. Our name for ourselves is not expressible in your language. But to you, humankind, we now name ourselves after the highest values we share: we are the Maximum Fun-Fun Ultra Super Happy

People."

There were muffled choking sounds from the human Conference table.

"Um," Akon said intelligently. "Um... good for you?"

"Humankind! Humankind, you did not likewise repair yourselves when you attained to technology.

We are still unsure if it is somehow a mistake, if you did not think it through , or if your will is truly so different from ours. For whatever reason, you currently permit the existence of suffering which our species has eliminated. Bodily pain, embarrassment, and romantic troubles are still known among

you. Your existence, therefore, is shared by us as pain. Will you, humankind, by your symmetry,

remedy this?"

An electric current of shock and alarm ran through the Conference. The Lord Pilot glanced

significantly at the Ship's Engineer, and the Engineer just as significantly shook his head. There was nothing they could do against the alien vessel; and their own shields would scarcely help, if they were attacked.

Akon drew in a ragged breath. He was suddenly distracted, almost to the point of his brain melting, by a sense of futures twisting around these moments: the fate of star systems, the destiny of all humanity being warped and twisted and shaped.

So to you, then, it is humanity that molests kittens.

He should have foreseen this possibility, after the experience of the Babyeaters. If the Babyeaters'

existence was morally unacceptable to humanity, then the next alien species might be intolerable as well - or they might find humanity's existence a horror of unspeakable cruelty. That was the other side of the coin, even if a human might find it harder to think of it.

Funny. It doesn't seem that bad from in here. ..

"But -" Akon said, and only then became aware that he was speaking.

"'But'?" said the Lady 3rd. "Is that your whole reply, humankind?" There was a look on her face of something like frustration, even sheer astonishment.

He hadn't planned out this reply in any detail, but -

"You say that you feel our existence as pain," Akon said, "sharing sympathy with our own suffering.

So you, also, believe that under some circumstances pain is preferable to pleasure. If you did not hurt when others hurt - would you not feel that you were... less the sort of person you wanted to be? It is the same with us -"

But the Lady 3rd was shaking her head. "You confuse a high conditional likelihood from your

hypothesis to the evidence with a high posterior probability of the hypothesis given the evidence," she said, as if that were all one short phrase in her own language. "Humankind, we possess a generalized faculty to feel what others feel. That is the simple, compact relation. We did not think to complicate that faculty to exclude pain. We did not then assign dense probability that other sentient species would traverse the stars, and be encountered by us, and yet fail to have repaired themselves. Should we encounter some future species in circumstances that do not permit its repair, we will modify our