I think there’s a bit of evidence for this in how parents notice (quickly!) differences between toddlers preferences and temperaments within a family. They are attentive and responsive to the child as an individual
Conversation
On my model, it's hard to make a ton of progress on this for the same reason it would be hard for humans to understand and care for a sentient, language-incapable alien race if we discovered one.
1
1
2
I'd expect the civilizational effort to make lots of progress on this to be similar to the effort required in the alien case: lots of neuroscience and theory-building.
1
Not a lot of 'put an alien in a room with an incredibly compassionate and attentive layperson and have the layperson use trial-and-error and behavioral observation to infer things about the alien'. (Nor even a huge planetwide effort to do the latter.)
1
I think that might work pretty well with the alien 🤷🏽♀️, and that humans are much easier. I think humans these days do a pretty good job caring for and befriending octopuses?
(I would expect stuff like more micronutrient deficiencies to be hard in a way that this doesn’t address)
1
1
"I think that might work pretty well with the alien 🤷🏽♀️"
😲 I did not expect you to say that!!
My gut tells me that you aren't putting enough weight on hypotheses where e.g. octopuses have truly alien minds.
2
E.g., where octopuses have exactly 138 different 'subjective points of view' inside them (stably and with no individual variance across, because of the exact details of the complicated octopus-machinery). And octo-POV #28 is in horrible agony whenever octo-POV #96 is happy.
1
And octo-POV #71 has thousands of times as much 'experience-ness' as a human being, and is only happy when the octopus-as-a-whole is very hungry.
1
(Because octo-POV evolved to optimize for finding food, hence it feels happy when it's food-finding time, even though some other octo-POVs aren't happy about that and even though the external behavior just looks like 'octopus wants food'.)
1
Not saying this is the shape of sentient-octopus-brain I expect, but I think if someone assigns the right probability to the much larger reference class of crazy hypotheses like that one, they'll be very pessimistic about understanding aliens' welfare via trial-and-error.
2
2


