Are humans worthy of colonizing the universe? Are we particularly awesome and benevolent, moreso than a random mind sampled from mindspace?
The following isn’t a full argument, but I want to point toward two things humans seem to do:
- First, our brains are set up in such a way that we stochastically seek out pleasant states of mind. (I think this is a contingent fact about humans, not a universal for intelligent beings);
- Second, we model other beings through empathy (i.e. we’re ‘qualia resonators’ and take on aspects of the phenomenology of those around us, insofar as we can perceive it).
These two things combine in a very interesting way: left to our individual devices, we tend to adapt our environment such that it embodies many beings with positive valence, and their positive valence becomes our positive valence. The domestication and adaptation of wolves is a good example: dogs are basically four-legged happiness machines that we keep around because their fantastic qualia rubs off on us.
Now of course there are a million caveats: we’re often bad at these things, empathy-based behavior has a ton of failure-modes, this doesn’t address hedonic set-points or game-theoretic traps, etc. But the way these two things interact is a big reason I like humanity, and want to preserve it.