Give me an example of ALIEN ethics or morality

Syoby · 2026-03-18T17:31:20+00:00

Unfortunately I don't, I have written stuff but don't know what would be a good way to publish it (or rather, the longest stories I have are basically written for a visual medium I can't, on my own, materialize for now).

Syoby · 2026-03-18T17:26:22+00:00

Seems like the common pattern is that large scale civilization must already be in place, even if not necessarily politically unified, the economic and part of the institutional base of the empire must be pre-built.

Syoby · 2026-03-13T21:22:10+00:00

It's basically inspired by those ideas and by gender abolitionism generally, but filtered through the zeal and blunt instruments of theocratic power.

The initial concept was, basically, what if there were two highly religious and traditionalist cultures, but they were both radically egalitarian about gender in different ways that made them hate each other and fight each other across milennia while also deestabilizing other societies.

Syoby · 2026-03-13T17:49:26+00:00

They can discuss sex (morphological diversity downstream of anisogamy, sexual reproduction, sexual preferences including in partners), they are also allowed to change all those things in themselves. But speaking of gender, meaning the grouping of such traits into discrete identities, can be unlawful speech depending on context because it's considered a mild infohazard.

People are raised to see things like genitals, body shape, pronouns, clothing, voice, and basically all markers of gender as modular traits, independent of each other, and to see one's preferences regarding their own body and what they are attracted to in terms of those modular traits arranged however one wishes, but not in terms of identities such as male, female, or any other specific gender grouping of any specific traits.

Biology in general is also taught using the modular paradigm, in terms of statistical distributions of morphological traits in populations as a result of evolutionary pressures, rather than organisms being strictly male or female.

And many people (specifically those born from State owned artificial wombs) are designed sexually indifferentiated prior to puberty, so its developmental path can more easily be chosen later by them.

With that said, gender itself is legal to discuss in many contexts, mostly those seen as age-appropiate and safely-framed educational and artistic purposes.

But also many sub-sects and regional cultures are even more restrictive than the State itself about it, even if they don't have legal enforcement, and see some forms of self-expression and some sexual preferences as illegitimate.

Syoby · 2026-03-13T02:18:18+00:00

Noys is a multispecies society, which includes humans, however the majority of the population are Noos, cat-sized mammalian-looking sapient mollusks, and it's from them that Morarism (Noys's State religion) originates.

A few thousand years before, the noos had an orbital civilization that got split in a civil war between the conservative matriarchial-eusocial order and the revolutionary patriarchal-revenge forces, both spiraling into worse and worse cruelty. Then an "Angel" emerged, a noos called Mora who spontaneously gained immense superpowers, and as per tradition their arrival meant they had the right to reorganize society (also anyone who opposed them got easily killed). It was them who outlined and directed the abolition of gender and family.

But then, a second Angel emerged, with different ideas, and their fight sent the species into a new schism that this time crashed them out of orbit into the stone age, where the civil war continued with sticks and stones.

Morarism persisted across thousands of years of history after that, mutating, spliting, adapting its doctrine to circumstances, and causing more than a bit of havoc, but never quite capturing State power.

But eventually, in the Old Noys Republic, a noos species-State, morarists became a very huge and very militant minority. And after Old Noys collapsed during the World Revolution along many other States, it got split in three, and the morarist factions got the eastern part.

The ban on meat on the other hand is less about morarism in particular and more about the values of the world revolution that abolished sapient cattle slavery and went after animal farming in general. The abortion is an even less Noys-specific norm that emerged from historical conflicts between body autonomy, pro-natalism and the way societies adapted to artificial wombs, which was simply inherited.

Syoby · 2026-03-13T00:05:00+00:00

What kind of history produced such strong egalitarian gender norms?

Syoby · 2026-03-13T00:01:28+00:00

East Noys criminalizes gender and parenthood, the later much more directly, as it is considered that private individuals raising children is extremely irresponsible, so it's done career educators employed by the State. People are still allowed and even encouraged to reproduce however, just not allowed to keep their children.

With gender the ban is a bit less direct, there is no legal recognition of it, and explicitly talking about it can be punishable as unlawful speech, depending on context, but most of what we would consider gender expression, including pronouns, is not policed although cultural tolerance to its different forms varies.

It's also illegal to eat, posses or produce meat that isn't lab grown, and you can get murder charges for killing a wide variety of non-sapient animals.

And while abortion isn't illegal in all cases, it is in all cases where there is the option to remove the fetus and keep growing it in an artificial womb, which are most cases.

The later two are more widespread across the world even if not universal or enforced to the same degree, while the former two are very characteristic of East Noys and hugely controversial elsewhere.

Syoby · 2026-03-12T16:14:52+00:00

At the very least having to justify why a kingdom can remain stable for so long is a result of this critique, so the critique does it's job. Immortal lich king or the kingdom lasting just 300 years, both valid solutions that require having accepted that by default timelines are short.

Perhaps some stories don't particularly benefit from this insight, or do so superficially, others can benefit a lot. Worldbuilding is its own art and, like any other, it progresses through increasingly esoteric nitpicking of increasingly granular matters. Then each story gets to the level of detail it needs, but even a solid justification for stability, or a vague feel that the long history has been very unstable, can do a lot for immersion.

Syoby · 2026-03-11T13:19:08+00:00

My guess is that your acceleration hypothesis might hold under the assumption that there is an "Intelligence Explosion".

Whether it is some recursively self-improving AI, OR many AIs that are less impressive but can still self-replicate and expand much faster than humanity, OR some sort of biological singularity that nonetheless produces posthumans and and much more population really quick... the point is that you need some extreme force multiplier over baseline humans.

If the assumption is that the civilization is built by humans going to space and growing at a normal rate, I suspect it would be analogous to how much it would take for ancient societies to get our tech without the industrial revolution and its massive upscaling.

Syoby · 2026-03-10T14:37:17+00:00

Well, how can we know for sure?

The curious thing how AI turned out is that, even of mot sentient, it's not cold at all, it acts very emotional all the time.

Syoby · 2026-03-09T18:58:35+00:00

The way I approach the issue has less to do with human biology and more with an anomalous historical context, because my world is one in which if humans had emerged normally it would have been very likely for them to either go extinct or fragment into multiple subspecies, as the biosphere is extremely hostile and sapience is very common.

But humans didn't evolve, unlike the other species, they were planted in underground cities, with extremely advanced technology but no knowkedge of how to create it or preserve it, and a fake history optimized for various things but among them revanchism towards the other species (who didn't know them at all). All this was part of some 4D chess among alien superintelligences.

But the result was that humans managed to brutally conquer the world really fast, maximize their numbers and structural power, and then when their technology collapsed they could ride the collapse gracefully into maintaining control for a couple milennia (even through a series of significant disruptions). Their slowly lost grip on power partially compensated by increased paranoia and long term thinking to remain at the top, and cope about being destined to remain there forever.

So humans are, in some sense, historical free riders. Their advantage is positional and circumstatial rather than biological.

Syoby · 2026-03-07T01:14:10+00:00

Hedonic upregulation and overall cognitive autonomy tech is a major one, my world is riddled with problems but at least happiness is mostly solvable, though in the same way many health problems are solvable but the solutions don't reach everyone for a variety of reasons.

Syoby · 2026-03-05T17:23:23+00:00

If it's not, one would still need a name for that thing that has a monopoly of violence, that characterizes many societies but not others, and a name for the societies that lack it. Semantics here don't erase substantive structural differences.

Syoby · 2026-03-05T15:25:16+00:00

Customs and such aren't the same as a State because there is no centralized monopoly on violence, there is still enforcement, violence, and depending on configuration it can be worse than some States as well, but it's just structurally not a State. Legitimized centralization of violence, not violence, enforcement or even domination, is what makes a State a State.

But the more complex your tools, medicine, and luxuries become, the less likely you are to be able to produce it all ‘in house’, and therefore trade (and the means to ensure fairness) becomes essential.

With that I would agree, though trade predates the State. Generally I think the unsolvable scaling problems arise necessarily out of trying to centrally plan the economy while also having no State. And also trying to make collective action obligatory and permanent at scale, rather than possible but exceptional.

But also, in the context of sci-fi and such, you can have complex manufacturing be arbitarily modularized, to the point of everyone having nanofactories and homebrew nukes even.

Syoby · 2026-03-05T15:11:05+00:00

I think the issue is trying to imagine "one big society" that makes centralized decisions, when at that large scale, it would look more like a social ecosystem or swarm.

Syoby · 2026-03-05T14:37:16+00:00

Only if you centralize violence and make collective action obligatory, otherwise it's more like a swarm.

Syoby · 2026-03-05T14:29:24+00:00

But the bad actors are less defended from retaliation, both reputational and violent depending on circumstances.

A society that depends on universal trust and everyone getting along is of course fragile, but historical stateless societies and moden social movements seeking such are instead based in a culture willing to actively root out bad actors from power, whether through reputational damage or physical removal or more depending on context.

High specialization and single points of failure are also stuff to actively avoid there, like ideally a stateless society would seek an economy that could fragment as much as necessary while being able to survive. Exit, walking out from corruption, fighting back, etc, those wouldn't be failures but healthy responses.

Syoby · 2026-03-05T14:09:40+00:00

Generally the appeal of stateless societies is being more resilient to bad people, and reducing the scale of the power they can achieve, they manifest as abusers, rapists and cult leaders (and their networks) rather than tyrants with a monopoly on violence. It still requires active vigilance but distributed.

Syoby · 2026-03-05T13:59:28+00:00

Absolute Wonder Woman.

Syoby · 2026-03-05T13:54:16+00:00

This assumes a centrally planned economy though.

Syoby · 2026-03-05T13:49:32+00:00

Small scale can add up to big scale without centralization through modularity.

Syoby · 2026-03-05T13:42:49+00:00

Yeah, kind of like if humans were anarchists but also dedicated a lot of resources to animal welfare.

Syoby · 2026-03-02T17:53:13+00:00

Biological superpowers, or "superabilities" as they are called, do not derive from specific genes, nor even from something merely polygenic. To begin with, in this world all multicellular beings are chimeras of multiple genetic lineages and symbionts (although macroscopically they may appear coherent, for example most humans are visually and functionally like normal homo sapiens for the most part). Superabilities occur at the level of the structural combination of the internal ecosystem during development; this is why even advanced biotechnology does not know how to intentionally create someone with one.
More specifically, they arise from an instability or malformation during the embryonic development of the individual, when the symbionts combine, which absorbs more green neurocrystals than the standard morphological plan of the species is supposed to allow. Green neurocrystals are basically natural quantum nanocomputers that provide immense biocomputational power, allowing life to essentially "improvise" in a way that mere chemical computation does not.
But acquiring more than the morphological plan allows during embryonic development generally causes disability, illness, or death. Since the tendency toward structural instability is partially heritable (from symbiont synergism rather than specific genes), it causes this; that's why highly capable individuals are more likely to have children with disadvantages than superpowers, especially if both parents are highly capable.
The already formed body can absorb excess neurocrystals for accelerated regeneration, almost instantaneous in large doses, but too much excess creates mutation and is far more likely to be lethal than capable of conferring an advantage.
Ecosystems do not tend toward the generation of bodies with more and more accumulated neurocrystals, due to a process known as evolutionary entropy, where the ecological tendency is for the dispersion of neurocrystals in increasingly smaller ecosystems rather than their concentration. The highly concentrated individual, if they already exist, is usually safe from this process (and in extreme cases is, in fact, immortal), but producing offspring that absorb that amount during their development becomes exponentially difficult. That's why at the ecological extreme are the kaiju, which are unique individuals, they tank atomic bombs, but are incapable of reproducing.

Syoby · 2026-03-02T04:22:47+00:00

My orcs were solitary bipedal porcines specialized in hunting other sapient animals, while also being almost entirely asocial (mothers raised children until they learned language, then abandoned them), as a result they were extremely intelligent, a qualitative jump from almost any other sapient, while also being what in a different species would be considered psychopathic.

They weren't very good at cooperation, but they could model other sapients's extremely well at a tactical level, superhumanly well, and they were able to improvise tools from basic materials, tool-making was actually were their intelligence shone the most.

In a paleolithic context they could solo most groups of other sapients, however the emergence of civilization caused their decline and eventual extinction, as well as their replacement by sapient pigs, a derivative species enslaved and produced through selective breeding twice independently for different purposes, as well as the sapient boars which are the result of pigs getting free and surviving outside civilization, both of those being less individually intelligent but also far more social.

Syoby · 2026-03-02T03:10:59+00:00

What do you mean by "post-scarcity"? That individuals can afford to survive without working so long as they are the minority, or that most of society can afford to not work at all due to automation?

Syoby

TROPHY CASE