Alien Psychology Part 2

OK, I admit it. Part 1 was an impressionistic mish-mash of ideas: so let's try to add some precision here.

If the aliens are inscrutable, then I think that means that we fail to come up with what is technically called an intentional description of them. This means we can't seem to model the alien in terms of coherent beliefs, goals and plans.

Note that this doesn't mean that there are no such consistent intentional descriptions. Arguably without such the aliens wouldn't count as agents - intelligent entities - at all. The aliens may in fact be perfectly aware of their own goals, beliefs and plans. The fact that we can't conceptualise the aliens in this way is what makes them incomprehensible to us.

In fact we may recognise the aliens as intentional without any understanding of what their goals, plans and beliefs are either in general or in particular cases. If we don't recognise the aliens as intentional at all, our only recourse will be to classify them as some unpredictable and exotic 'natural phenomenon'.

Now let's move to the universality of OCEAN. I suspect that the issue of alien personality is rather beside the point as regards their comprehensibility, for the reasons already discussed above .. but let's persevere.

Openness dimension: this measures interest in ideas and a more general neophilia. It correlates with IQ. Any entity which can handle symbolic thought and doesn't live in the eternal present, like an insect, is surely somewhere on this dimension.

Conscientiousness: all entities face difficulties along with the option of perseverance or cutting their losses and doing something else. Complex projects extend in time as well as space and do not reward a heavy discounting of the future. If our aliens are worth worrying about, they'll be on the 'C' end of this scale.

Extraversion-Introversion: biology knows this as 'approach vs avoidant' behaviour. Enough said.

Agreeableness: the biological default between two animals is (i) indifference if their niches don't overlap; (ii) fight or flee if they do. Warmth and affection, affiliative behaviour, is a mammalian kin-nurturing trait which has been leveraged in social animals such as humans. If the aliens work together they'll be on this scale. (And if they don't they'll be a lot less scary).

Neurotic-Stable: this captures the superego-ego-id trichotomy which Freud discussed. People who score stable successfully inhibit, in socially-acceptable ways, the moment-by-moment impulses of the unconscious; neurotic people less so. Only if the aliens have our sort of layered brain will this dimension apply.

So it seems that the universality of the five-factor model is reasonably well-founded. But it's slightly beside the point when considering the sheer otherness of incomprehensible aliens.

Alien Psychology Part 1

My favourite SF stories concern aliens so different from ourselves that they are incomprehensible - not least because this will probably be true. The gold standard here is Stanislaw Lem in his books Solaris and His Master's Voice.

I'm interested in how we could understand the nature of such alien incomprehensibility. The standard model of personality is the five-factor model with the acronym OCEAN (*).  This model has been applied with some success to animals and although it's somewhat atheoretic and definitely not rooted in evolutionary psychology, one can sort of see why a social animal of our sort (not as social as ants, not as selfish as, say, polar bears) would have its personality space structured along those five dimensions.

One way to design the alien would be to move their personality somewhere else in the OCEAN space, somewhat removed from the locus of human occupancy. So the aliens might be very 'Open': smart and enquiring; intellectual, cool and detached but still kind of benevolent. Or we could work on their 'Agreeableness': they can be super-friendly and trusting, or super-aggressive and suspicious.

But I'm more interested in the really alien aliens, ones so different that they don't classify in the OCEAN space at all. These aliens are going to come out of a radically non-terran ecology.

One example: there are chess programs that play perfect endgames based on storing optimal-play trees built via exhaustive search. In endgames of the order of 50-100 moves, there's no theory underlying the program's play - it's just empirically optimal.

Playing such a program is profoundly unsettling. The program evades or subverts any attempt to assign it plans or subgoals as it has none (more accurately, the structure of said endgames does not lend itself to such a decomposition); the program moves perversely yet with ruthless efficiency. It is devoid of intentionality: truly alien.

Another route which we sometimes encounter here on Earth: our opponent has objectives we profoundly don't understand. We keep ascribing goals, beliefs, plans and intentions based on our hypothesising as to what it's after: we're always wrong, always wrong-footed, always mystified. But here the alienness is not in personality but in motivation. Not the same at all.

Read Part 2.
---
* OCEAN: Open, Conscientious, Extravert, Agreeable, Neurotic .. are the five dimensions.