Computation Civilizations vs Qualia Civilizations

Alien civilizations that optimize for computation will be hard to spot since the computation will likely be distributed & compressed. Dark Forest vibes, snaking across untapped energy gradients

Alien civilizations that optimize for qualia will be flashy, creating megascale artifacts with conspicuous energy signatures (to paraphrase Sutton, ‘because that’s where the symmetry is’). Perhaps we’ve already seen them

Kwame Appiah famously wrote that “in life, the challenge is not so much to figure out how best to play the game; the challenge is to figure out what game you’re playing.” Biological life has spawned into a cosmic game-in-progress; the challenge for 21st century philosophy is figuring out the rules of our game, the goal, and the factions we might meet (or summon via AI research) along the way

Research context:

- Qualia Astronomy & Proof of Qualia: https://opentheory.net/2022/06/qualia-astronomy/

- That is not dead which can eternal lie: the aestivation hypothesis for resolving Fermi's paradox: https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.03394

- What’s out there?: https://opentheory.net/2019/09/whats-out-there/

- Consciousness: a Cosmological Perspective (Sharpening the Simulation Argument): https://opentheory.net/2019/02/simulation-argument/

- A Paradigm for AI Consciousness: https://opentheory.net/2024/06/a-paradigm-for-ai-consciousness/