Omnihold does not bring anyone with actual responsibility to a summit, because negotiators should be optimized for communication and not decision-making. Their delegates are supermodels of various gendertropes in open ribbon ensembles. They have perfect smiles - with artificial teeth mounted over modular sockets, serving both as an input device and a bone-conduction replacement for earpieces. They have gorgeous hair - indistinguishable from the real thing, but with EEG monitoring grids tucked under the wigs.

Their proportions and facial symmetry are borderline infohazardous, the kind of look you only get by auctioning gametes with a top-1% population filter, and their pristine skin looks like it hasn't known a blemish since birth.

They stick close to each other with the friendly vibe, taking turns to speak and interrupting one another with a scripted organicity. Two-thirds of them are female, three-thirds are pumped full of empathogens, all are under twenty-five. A few wear suspiciously thin AR glasses with cameras, which, if anyone’s internal prediction markets are betting on it, are just thin clients with minimal onboard processing, relaying signals back to a much beefier router.

Omnihold gives their opening speech, noting that the portal seems narrow enough that any post-industrial civ could block or destroy it from their side, and that this is a good starting point to choose Something Which Is Not This. They commit to not using the portal for any scenario that the gatekeeper civilizations could have retrospectively stopped by denying them passage, even if gatekeeper's mutual enclaves in each other's territories become practically capable of undesirable behavior with impunity, and hope for the same in return. They believe that this contact can’t be worse than its absence and is likely much, much better!

Given the logistical constraints, scientific data, cultural assets, and biological samples seem like the obvious trade items. Consequently, they’re curious about how other worlds handle intellectual property and what exactly their enforcement looks like.

The delegation from Ailor consists of the Head of State, Head of Government, Representative of Representatives, and a small swarm of identically black clad attendants trying to disappear into the background. 

The Head of Government is an older man whose outfit looks like it was cobbled together from a half dozen types of regalia or more. His hat is a tiara wrapped around a headdress wrapped around a crown. A half cape crowns his kimono and is held in place by a large torc. His boots are heavily beaded moccasins that rattle when he walks. He leans often on a slim but ornate staff taller than he is.  

The Head of Government is wearing practical low profile power armor.

The Representative of Representatives is wearing an ornate toga made of some sheer material that continually threatens to be scandalous but never quite manages to achieve that, paired with dressy but practical sandals. 

All of the Ailori wear a deck on their non-dominant arm and their clothes are covered densely with the colored dots of their writing. Anyone could read it if they don't mind staring closer than might be polite on some worlds. 

Ailor does not have a concept of intellectual property and is not sure the concept is translating properly.

The Head of State finishes the opening formalities and sits down.

The Representative of Representatives engages the Omnihold delegation. Would they consider a blanket information and data sharing agreement for this intellectual property? A symmetrically stochastically unfair exchange has the most expected value and least overhead. If not, then is is acceptable to manage our trade-ledger with Omnihold as a unit and allow you to manage things internally from there? 

The delegate leaning forward, maintaining maximum eye contact with the Representative of Representatives, seems surprised, but in a good way - more like an itch to see Trade With Aliens finally manifest in reality. Information regulation is tricky, and societies without it are a common trope, but usually, they appear in "fragile mutual deterrence between uncoordinated warlords" settings. To not even have the concept of IP, however, carries a subverted tint of sanctity. If no one in their world has ever suffered a pathetic bout of paranoia about someone stealing and monetizing their super-valuable precious ideas, then she’s definitely sponsoring sperm and egg imports in hopes of replicating their population.

Her teeth vibrate imperceptibly, and the voice in her head, which she merely vocalizes, begins a brief recap of an ancient parable on the value of information, trying to shyly insert LLM-advised ailorianisms and overall be aesthetically pleasing to listener. She uses a metaphor where knowledge is a series of islands that no one created, but merely discovered while wandering the realm of ideas. Much like the bounties of nature, that which is not man-made belongs to no one - or belongs equally to all cooperative agents, justifying a UBI from geo-rent. But when you pluck a fruit from a wild tree, you must pay for depriving others of it. Information-fruits, however, are instantly copied, you deprive no one of them. It sounds compelling that all should be free to use them.

But if an island is uninhabited and far from civilization, it’s no comfort that you have the right to eat its fruit without limit, first, you have to get there. Therefore, the discoverer has every right to build a bridge and sell the fruit, to get paid for their logistical services - and to prevent the cultivation of those fruits by removing the seeds, for without them, those fruits wouldn't be on the market at all.

Yet, they don’t own the idea itself. Anyone else can build a similar bridge if they can prove they did it independently - that they found the island in their own travels without knowledge of the existing bridge. In modern terms: you can get a duplicate of any patent through "clean room design" in a causally isolated environment with a delayed news feed and so on, after which you may sell similar rights to view art, produce tech, or any other fruits of your island.

(the male delegate enters the dialogue, contrasting with the previous fairy-tale tone):

Except it’s just stupid to build two identical bridges to the same island. It’s not like they have bandwidth limits. So, the discoverer sets a price based on the expected time until the rediscovery of their island, extracting profit for accelerating progress relative to a counterfactual universe where someone else found it later. Prediction markets, given proper data for calibration, become uncannily accurate at this.

Some patents still cause disputes regarding the fair price and the probability function of rediscovery, but gremirians maintain a clean-room infrastructure and a legal consensus on proper causal isolation so that any unfair knowledge monopolies naturally inflate to zero. It’s a sad zero-sum game, but a necessary response to defection.

Furthermore, their current consensus holds that rights to creative works have an unlimited duration, as it is virtually impossible to create literally the same piece of art independently - every bridge leads to its own unique island. Inspiration from others' work, however, remains free. You don't pay royalties to the original author when writing fanfics.

All of this is relevant to how the Omnihold plans to evaluate Ailori data. They will trade the rights to use intellectual property as a special form of equity, identifying an ideal competitive price - indefinite for culture, and based on counterfactual discovery time for technology. However, they intend to isolate the profit accounts for each individual work until the author is identified.

They are glad the median Ailori are generous enough to share ideas freely. But if a small group of Ailori is dissatisfied with the status quo and wishes to be paid directly - and simply lacks the infrastructure for monetization - they may contact Omnihold to claim authorship and receive direct payouts after identity verification. In cases of refused profit, inability to determine preferences of the author (e.g., death), unidentifiable authorship, or excessive identification costs, they are prepared to route these accounts directly to the Ailor government.

In the other direction, regarding the sale of data from the Omnihold to Ailor, the proposed deal with the state as a single entity does indeed sound like the best option. Nonpublic prediction markets on both sides can bet on the expected value of the knowledge before its public release and the timelines for independent rediscovery to determine price, with standard probability-of-refusal functions proportional to the expected unfairness of the deal. Does this sound fair and implementable?

The Representative of Representatives makes eye contact and smiles back, her manner going slightly sultry. There's no super-stimulus about her, but just genuine and honest curiosity. She speaks little and listens much as the metaphor unfolds. And she actively listens, paying her full attention and seeming to follow along easily even as the Ailorianisms start to sound like Oma Desala speaking Tamarian. She's almost ready to reply when the second delegate enters the conversation. 

These prediction markets sound interesting! Ailor does ever reproduce the bridges to the islands of knowledge to better credit research, as a training tool, and as a competitive sport. The Representative isn't old enough to have any experience with actual currency, but it sounds like this prediction market ought to reproduce their experimental results in a new way. How long do you think it will take to teach someone how to prediction market, and what sort of isolation setup would you recommend for them? 

The Kastakian delegation is about as organised as ever, which means there appear to be three separate crews involved and none of them have successfully come to a consensus on their position before running out of time and just showing up anyway. Also they are humanoid sized feathered lizards along the lines of Archaeopteryx, and while they are thoroughly adorned in utility belts and backpacks they don't appear to have much use for clothing.

While the more Serious Business crew have been listening, making a lot of notes, and occasionally having confused whispered arguments over why their counterparts still seem to think they exist in conditions of scarcity even though that is clearly not the case, and the more Sensible crew has been setting up a refreshments station with long descriptions of the ingredients and processes in case any of the other delegates want some fish snacks or fruit water, the science oriented crew has most finished hooking up a rather bulky and complicated looking device that now displays a simple text menu in green on black, with a rather clunky large keyboard attached for inputs. It is attached to some large cables snaking back out through the portal, which appear to be necessary for the local Internet equivalent. 

"Connection to the Network is available!" crows Yompam triumphantly. "If you'd like to contribute or read our entire civilisational output, it's all here. As a reminder, we are philosophically opposed to anyone having to reinvent the wheel for any reason. If you have a connector from previous contacts, the splice point is here, for quicker retrieval. Obviously we also appreciate contributions, and give our thanks for previous knowledge transfer that has been very useful, although we are using tried and tested technology here rather than the output of relevant endeavour groups to avoid any safety issues."

Junilla takes a break from the snack area to contribute, "I don't think we're compatible for offspring, but if you have advances that could use our genetic material, I'm sure you'll recieve more volunteers than you can use."

"I would just like to clarify that because of the population disparity it is absolutely possible you could use all available samples, if you did find a route to doing so."

(As a reminder of information which would have been shared in previous summits: Kastakia struggles to stay at replacement rate with only around a million inhabitants; Kastakians lay single large eggs and generally devote a whole found-family group to raising one egg) 

Property is pretty simple in theory. If you made a thing or use a thing then it's yours. Combined with the fungibility of labor that allows you to generate a Blue Book value by collecting large amounts of data for a task and calculating the expectation value. Ideally we would have Blue Book values for everything, but as noted some things are difficult or time consuming to replicate. As-a-result there are portions of society that de facto run on vibes and polycule dynamics. We've only been in the Current Era for about 30 years, so information on Gremiria's mistakes would in expectation be quite useful.

That's a novel and interesting way to ask for sex. However, if you want sex you can just ask directly. Here is the indicator on her clothing that she's open to being approached for sex and here is her sexual preferences and limits.

It seems like there's a limited time opportunity to exploit inter-world ignorance for otherwise difficult repetition testing. Usually we just secure an appropriate venue and spin up a sub net. Unfortunately, this mostly means that we can only use students and only once. As long as most people aren't cheating the game then any leaks would show up as a radical outlier and naturally be trimmed. 

The Head of Government types something out on his deck, and a tech approaches Yompam to see about interfacing nets properly. Ailor has a curated sub net compressed for easy transfer that Kastakian can just have, and enough empty storage to handle multiple uncompressed Internets in expectation. 

The Head of State ceremoniously breaks a loaf of bread into pieces while chanting out an incantation in Latin. The Ailori contribution to the snack bar is laboratory grade potable water and a few forms of a very basic bread. Each is very clearly labeled with its component ingredients, going so far as to include molecular diagrams and pie charts. They don't want to accidentally poison someone with different biology. 

The delegation from the Second Republic consists mostly of translator-secretaries for Vuleftis, an Academy-educated member of parliament and on the committee vis-a-vis suzerainty. He was selected for this mission because his background gives him insight into what three of the largest factions on his world might find acceptable in any sort of negotiation. Up to this point, he and his translators have been quietly trying to follow several conversations in different languages none of them have previously heard spoken correctly, containing concepts they don't have full reference points for.

A foreign Head of State saying something almost intelligible was not in the briefing and is frankly more shocking than talking bird-people.

"Oh, uh, that was more along the lines of the delegate from Gremiria's remarks regarding the desire for children with a different motivational system - we do have currency, but ideas aren't something we would consider trading for it, it's really just to make sure we get enough medical and care staff and essential resource extraction, by offering them better resource access when they're incapacitated. Ideas are for being used.

As for property, some people do like to keep specific personal comfort objects, and sometimes essential equipment needs to not be open for anyone to wander off with?"

Vuleftis looks over the translation diagrams. The delegates from Ailor, Gremiria, and Kastakia all say they have money, but it isn't clear they're using the term the same way.

"Excuse me,"  Vuleftis says, pausing for the translators to repeat him. "Maybe I missed something in my notes, but as near as I can tell, these terms of 'money' and 'currency' translate to something like this." He holds up what looks like a tiny, flat, gold cylinder, and passes it to a secretary to pass around the table. "And it functions as a voucher for some allotment of economic output?"

One of the Serious faction finally speaks up. "Metals are one of the things that might be exchangeable for currency units if a hospital-ship is running out of them, or occasionally if an endeavour-group wants them that badly and can't demonstrate how useful they'll be to them any other way, but mostly the hospital-ships just keep records of accrued currency."

"And the hospital-ships will provide for anyone, but if you haven't accrued any currency you'll be in a shared ward and on cheap mass catering food, which many people are motivated to avoid."

Vuleftis nods slowly. He's guessing "currency units" are a more abstract form of what coins represent and that instances of that abstraction are not exactly lying around in the Republic's vault, ready to be traded. 

Vuleftis looks at another diagram. Then he pulls out a dictionary and flips through it. Then he looks at the diagram again. "Theocratic communism" sounds like what the High Council has been trying to engineer for over a hundred years. Sure, no Council member would claim they'd succeeded. And certain aspects of the cultural malaise seem attributable to the Council's plans. But only the most uncharitable cynic would say that it's "failed hideously."

Of course, everyone else here seems more technologically advanced. Maybe that's the problem? You don't expect civilization to make it through the decade if every individual builds their own death ray. Maybe communism creates the conditions to let people create the anti-communism... thing? In any case, the Council will surely want any data about communist failure modes that the Ailori get from the gremirians.

It was not an offer of sex! Our sexuality is decoupled from reproduction, though we will keep the suggestion in mind for the future. We intended to propose a trade in gametes, which seems a far more straightforward method of replicating a foreign population on one’s own planet.

Omnihold possesses a concept of "sharing food as a universal gesture of trust", but this was not a high priority in the delegate selection process, gremirians are quite picky eaters. But fine, after some consultation with the voices in their heads and processing preferences via teeth interfaces and EEG, they have identified a delegate who would be genuinely delighted to sample the alien fish snacks while chatting with the Kastakians.

...Kastakia, regardless of how much you insist on waiving gratitude at a collective level, we will still sell your knowledge at what we deem fair prices and register accounts to the authors until they are claimed under our system. At least for now. Millions of our people are already sorting through the downloaded data so that our "debt" for ideas authored by the deceased can be directed to you as a society - allowing for a symmetrical gratitude in the form of immediate publication of our own data for a roughly equivalent sum. However, we still fear offending individuals who might disagree with your system, those more egoistic who cannot receive direct compensation otherwise.

Money is a much broader term than a unit of exchange! Before radio, it might have been metals, sure, but people dreamed of a Total Market ETF as a currency long before the technical means existed. Under the Efficient Market Hypothesis, investing in every business on the planet equally is the investor's null hypothesis. There is an aesthetic beauty to it - every transaction becomes an addition to the supermind of humanity, signaling that someone believes they see a way to extract value above the market average through cooperation with others.

But that is not the most vital part. When you have a single fund owning ~one-third of every corporation, it becomes "egoistically altruistic" and internalizes externalities, because damage caused by one company hurts others within the same portfolio, as in universal ownership theory. It also votes for the adoption of universal industry standards via assurance contracts, aligning companies toward a common good - such as interlocking modular buildings - and can occasionally sponsor projects requiring global cooperation, like paying for universal language courses to transition to a conlang. This, by the way, is what Omnihold is.

The problem with attempting to build communism is that despite a majority recognizing that Open Individualism and the Veil of Ignorance under Eternalism make Total Hedonistic Utilitarianism the correct course of action, our nature is illusory. We are tethered to time and ego in an evolutionary cage. In practice, one cannot be an absolutely coherent Bodhisattva, loving others as oneself. They work on meditations, psychedelics, therapy and general education to increase coherence and the chances of interpersonal experiences, but usually, this is not required, as you can be useful to others simply by being egoistically efficient. This is to say nothing of the 3/20 who disagree with this metaphysics entirely.

Gremirians simply lack the internal motivation to help others. They may realize they are acting counterproductively to their own interests in a retrospective maximization of the chance of being a happy moment, but they feel no guilt or other form of negative feedback in connection with this. Their charity averages 1/15 of the GDP, but three-quarters of that comes from inheritances - and even inheritances are problematic, as most strive to exhaust their entire savings exactly before assisted suicide in old age.

The laws of physics make destruction easier than creation, so ancient attempts to coerce more coherent altruistic behavior led to corruption on a scale above a maximum of ~9*60^2, or guaranteed mutual destruction via cheap toxin production both within and between cities, or duty-evasion and parasitism by large swaths of the population, forcing the adoption of a framework of freedom as a point of compromise. Sure, here there are some detailed historical records.

"If you can prepare a document on how you intend to raise the children, and ideally a template of options for people to choose from, some Adventurers are very likely to make ready to donate eggs. If you'd like other gametes for study rather than direct use we're likely to get more sample than we can easily transfer through the world interface."

"Reciprocation is highly appreciated. I am not sure we can reasonably reciprocate the reception of your own gametes for replicating a foreign population locally - one of our concerns since this all started is being outcompeted for our own natural resources, as you might understand."

We do in fact have in vitro if you want gametes, although we don't expect that to be sufficient or necessary to reproduce the population whatever that means? Trading for diversity is likely a good idea.

Ailor is shocked by the idea that Gremirians can't achieve Universal Love! A typical Ailori can manage at least the very basics of Universal Love, Zen, and Enlightenment with minimal exposure to the concepts and a few months hermitage at the appropriate developmental stage, even in environments actively hostile to its development. If that doesn't work.... we don't actually know what to do to help. It's as bizarre to Ailor as if you had said you spend an hour a month breathing water. 

(This is Ailor's first summit, so they may be lacking context Kastakia provided with previous summits if it's not in the internet-sharing)

The Head of State is the only one to touch the coin even as it's held up for the Head of Government to examine. The Head of Government looks at it like it's mildly radioactive before schooling his demeanor and replying, "Yes, we had something like this in our past. We no longer use currency as a means of rationing. It's still used at times in board games and such, as a way of simulating scarcity."

"What, uh, do you have intrinsic motivation for if not helping others, then? Just the standard food, sex, comfort, or is there something else we might be missing here?" 

"I don't want to present us as flawless, we do have those who just opt out of society. You won't find their direct works in our Internet because they definitely opt out of that." 

The social sciences part of the science team is absolutely enthralled by the childraising schema. One of them is note taking as fast as possible on the Kastakian terminal while the others are engaged in enthusiastic wing waving debate complete with occasional mock charges, hissing and one brief full on tussle that is quickly broken up by the others as Ferek is glaring at them. The combatants are exiled swiftly back through the portal.

Vuleftis scans his teams transcripts and makes some notes

 - work out the details about access to natural philosophy on Kastakia
 - license our public domain to Gremiria and let them hold the proceeds in escrow

The problem with attempting to build communism is that despite a majority recognizing that Open Individualism and the Veil of Ignorance under Eternalism make Total Hedonistic Utilitarianism the correct course of action, our nature is illusory. We are tethered to time and ego in an evolutionary cage. In practice, one cannot be an absolutely coherent Bodhisattva, loving others as oneself. They work on meditations, psychedelics, therapy and general education to increase coherence and the chances of interpersonal experiences, but usually, this is not required, as you can be useful to others simply by being egoistically efficient. This is to say nothing of the 3/20 who disagree with this metaphysics entirely.

A few important somebodies will want to talk to these people. 

A typical Ailori can manage at least the very basics of Universal Love, Zen, and Enlightenment with minimal exposure to the concepts and a few months hermitage at the appropriate developmental stage, even in environments actively hostile to its development.

Some slightly less important somebodies will be interested in whether those techniques can be taught, or can only be learned. The ink drips from Vuleftis's pen. Then a more useful question comes to mind.

"If Ailor has eliminated scarcity, what is its policy regarding immigration?"

Vuleftis is a member of parliament, and with that comes a degree of responsibility in allocating resources.

There is a specific segment of the population he's thinking of that is an ongoing drain on those resources. They're not disabled or violent; they just don't contribute to society. Like, at all. There are times that the amount of work that needs to be done is insufficient to give everyone a share, and that's okay. Everybody gets a share of what the work produced if they're willing to work. A quadriplegic might be asked to be an extra set of eyes on a group of children and sound an alarm if there's a problem. In return, he is lauded as a contributing member of society and gets his rightful share of food and shelter. A repeat murderer can justifiably be barred from all cities, sentenced to forage in the woods, because the first responsibility of the state is to keep its citizens from being killed.

The Republic remains committed to ensuring all citizens' essential needs are met, but the budget shows they're feeling the pinch.

A trio of Ailor's aides react to the mock tussle, moving to intercept a moment before realizing it's not serious and shifting to merely stand nearby. 

Internally Ailor has freedom of movement, and being formally Asked To Leave somewhere isn't... well, it's probably the most common social conflict and legal matter, but legal matters are very rare.  Normally they wouldn't be worried about immigration at all, but the talk of gene-sharing and not being able to experience Universal Love and currency makes them a little nervous that they might not be screening for everything they ought to be. Plus the possibility they're about to experience an unmanageable volume of problems that are novel or normally quite rare. The Blue Book is self correcting enough that a population that's unwilling to contribute enough to sustain themselves won't eat for free forever, but it's not an ideal universe to eat up all our current Slack on the way there if that's how things go. 

If you're having problems with essential needs is that a physics problem or is it due to having currency? Or maybe political? Ailor might have ideas for the first two, but is reluctant to involve themselves in the third. 

That answers a few questions Vuleftis had about Ailor. He hadn't imagined anyone being formally Asked To Leave... more like being offered somewhere they might want to go. Actually, he privately imagined them being tossed onto the back of a cart like cordwood and anyone who didn't roll off in protest at this treatment was fine with being sent wherever. But that's more of a joke he'd tell privately to members of the budgeting committee.

Agriculture is a physics problem and significant headway has been made in that area. Improvements to crop yields continue to outpace the growth in bellies that need filling. If yields doubled, that would probably solve the budget problem, but there's still a second-order drag on the economy from people seeing them and wondering why they shouldn't also subsist by eating up the slack. 

It's unclear how currency or politics could be the root of the problem. The slack-eaters frequently don't have money, but it's neither hard to obtain money nor to live without it. The High Council has foresworn money and frequently uses the same public lodging and kitchens that the least welloff members of society use. The slack-eaters don't lack political representation in theory, but they also don't show up to vote.

Thessalia apologies to the Ailor observers - "We did leave everyone who'd get that way with someone who isn't a friend out, but researchers do get awfully excited about child raising arrangements."

Anyone doing their background reading will discover the big friendly bird people regularly get into minor physical altercations when sufficiently worked up about a topic - or just for fun - or more seriously when they feel physically trapped without trust this will resolve itself.

"In general terms, inadequate medical care - including very occasionally incurable conditions which couldn't reasonably have adequate care - is the main reason a Kastakian might regret their life, although mostly we haven't tested particularly bad material conditions! 

We do hear the call of the sea - being underground can be a suitable substitute for some but not all - a Kastakian trapped on land would suffer, primarily increasing anxiety, although probably still not so much they'd want to die about it.

I think repatriation would be the most appropriate remedy in most cases, with best efforts at medical care while waiting for that to be available.

We don't really consider that children have any debt to their parents? Society in general sometimes has historically compensated parents, although we've been doing better in recent decades and only those with very rare traits like high manual dexterity or stamina might be considered for direct compensation at the moment, childless friends still tend to give gifts but this isn't formalised.

There are a number of desired conditions we could tabulate, but generally more Kastakians is good even if they're not raised absolutely optimally - sufficient care and provision to avoid serious medical issues and sufficient freedom to leave bad situations voluntarily is essentially all that's required. 

From our reading we come out of the egg a little more developed than the average sentient, so there's a little less initial vulnerability - oh, I suppose we should give you temperature ranges, vibration and impact tolerances etcetera for the egg, but they're fairly forgiving. Ideally they should be around normal conversations to get language development started properly, but it can be fixed later."

Oh, being offered a stike on the head and then waking up in a crate headed to elsewhere is something that has ever happened to trouble makers. It gets rarer and rarer now that we've found most of the lead and pulled it out of the schoolhouses. These are known known issues, and those tend to be getting better even if painfully slowly.

Do you like fish? Here is a standard home aquaponics module with high yield companion planting. Here's the infrastructure to keep it at maximum yield, and here's what it looks like if you instead fuck it up and it tries to automatically rebalance the ecosystem. Unless the Slack-eaters are too lazy to pick food off the vine this should give them an easy way to feed themselves naturally coupled with skill-building incentives for ecological empathy. 

Kastakian has nothing to apologize for. Ailor understands how easy blood can run hot and feathers can get ruffled. One of the attendants has a preening kit if they would like help unruffling those feathers. 

It might be easier if they were troublemakers. Troublemakers can usually be redirected. Or flogged if they can't be. But it's legal to be annoying, live on the streets, and be a bad influence. There are positive laws protecting those actions. There's even a tiny minority that does those things on principle.

Hello! We are not giving them homes, but this aquaponics module should definitely be added to public kitchens if possible.

What do Kastakians who opt out of society... do? And how does the rest of Kastakia respond?

"Oh, lots of things. The most usual case is they just take their transciever offline and disappear into the, less traffic heavy parts of the ocean, or the really determined ones go deep inland, and we never hear from them again. 

We grow food forests on shorelines, and can subsist off fish and seaweed usually anyway, so it's not that difficult to be self sufficient until you need medical care.

Sometimes they make trouble, like there have been groups opposed to specific child raising experiments, or historically that have taken over small areas for 'rewilding'. If they're not directly harming anyone we leave them to it where possible, otherwise, well, fortunately we have folk like Fretek who think about the messy business of defence.

If they show back up at a hospital ship obviously they'll get treatment same as someone who has been off being an adventurer and not done any shifts. It's important they can opt back in when they like, someone might just get tired of people and want to be properly alone for a bit."

"It might be helpful to have a quick review of normal Kastakian child raising and some things we have tried? 

The traditional method is one egg, approximately four to eight adults, one small boat. The adults generally pursue light adventuring and correspondance work while raising the child by incorporating them into the party and letting them explore what they are interested in. 

Multiple children in this environment is not advised - it's good for the family boats to meet up but 'siblings' will inevitably fight, often quite seriously. 

We have experimented with a range of mass child rearing methods. None have produced better individuals than the single egg family approach, but it is possible to raise Kastakians in a regimented environment in close quarters as long as they have a minimal amount of private space with an appropriate sleeping surface and reading light, access to reading material and regular mealtimes and hygiene sessions and so on. 

The results generally are less independent and motivated than your standard Kastakian and are more prone to negative behavior patterns like doing nothing but sleeping and needing to be coaxed to eat, getting lost in reading rather than ever contributing, leaving society altogether, and random bouts of screaming and violence.

Every now and again someone has a bright idea for a new mass child raising regime, and this is generally permitted unless it appears to amount to serious torture that is likely to produce only damaged people - essentially this is just policed by how many people are motivated to stop them. Child raising without good intentions is vanishingly rare."

Fights almost never happen in gremiria. Our delegates possess the survival instincts of a lightbulb, no one has instructed them to react otherwise, so they simply watch with intrigued detachment.

​Gremiria doubts its current capacity to provide "adventures" and is still struggling to parse the concept in this context. Gremirians are not fond of nature, the newer generations simply would not survive it due to the genetic shutdown of pain. However, older outliers might still be found. To satisfy the nature-dependent circuits of the brain, we rely heavily on simulacra in our design. Would this suffice for your species? We can offer mirrors or video to extend perceived space, duplicated natural color palettes, artificial pitch and roll, swimming pools? Providing underground habitats or simulacra is far simpler than life on ships, we need to maintain integration with the ultra-dense logistics of the arcology. We can produce ships, but our decentralization technologies are weaker and we will probably have to import them.

​Socially, it seems your children are relatively... low-maintenance? We can provide large groups of adults for interaction and upbringing, provided the task is relatively unskilled and does not require coercion, discipline, or the projection of authority. Our education has focused heavily on universal mnemonics and mastery learning, and this point on the Pareto frontier seems distant from gamification or engagement. We don't yet know how your memory functions. Our approach worked on monkeys, but not on birds, our cognitive architectures are too different.

Huh, interesting. We're surprised that people live on the street for any period of time. Do they not build flavellas or shelters? What do they do when it rains? If they're merely trading comfort for less work then that's just a strange preference. If they're trading less work for more work then that suggests a more complicated motivation. We've had tribal people who have refused to learn the skills to work in order to protect themselves from being exploited for labor. This feels like it might pattern-match.

If we may ask, is four to eight the general ideal small group size for Kastakiani? We generally find good results in having slightly older children help teach younger children in small groups as long as there's enough adults on call to help them out if they get in trouble. Depending on the sorts of children's adventures you use this might increase at least Slack if not scalability? 

Gremiria seems very Zen about the scuffle, but then says confusing and worrying things about nature and pain. There's currently a debate on if this is a miscommunication or if Gremirians are a bizarre human-looking alien that somehow has different qualia and a lack of pain receptors. 

A single human-looking person walks in, unannounced and unexpected. They look androgynous, have very long, unkempt and dirty hair, and wearing loose orange clothes. Their expression is serene.

"Confuse not our street-dwellers and slack-eaters! The former are rare and do so on some principle that I personally don't quite understand. It's technically illegal to violate their rights and force them to come inside when the weather gets bad, but I don't think anyone has been prosecuted for doing that in my lifetime. The latter randomly nap outside when whether permits but when it doesn't, they come to the..."

Vuleftis paused. If no one thought to include this in a cultural packet, translating any colloquial term won't convey the meaning. 

"...the temple dormitories, like anyone else who finds oneself in need of shelter. Maybe ten to twenty percent of people live in one at any given time instead of in a clan house or detached room. The overwhelming majority of people are there temporarily and feel the obligation to contribute, either through volunteering labor or donating an extra few shillings per half-month. They know universal access to clothing, food, medicine, and shelter isn't somehow free, so they contribute to the commonweal under..."

He's blanking on terms again. One of the aides notices and writes down some possible translations of related concepts (godly-guest-friendship, categorical-imperative, enlightened-self-interest, veil-of-ignorance) to pass on down.

"If you provide some basic reading lessons - if they've been exposed to conversations in the shell they should come out with basic spoken language, although will need a while to attach context, and will pick up reading just by following along with someone reading aloud - and make sure they have good access to reading material, that will substitute for adventure somewhat, although if there is nothing useful for them to do they might find something to do anyway and you might get disciplinary issues there.

Also in that case you'll have to deliberately make sure they get exercise rather than it just happening naturally, and they'll quickly get bored of anything repetitive. 

Not sure on the simulcra, we don't have anything nearly that advanced - probably best to send material from mining endeavour groups who are more likely to adapt well to the underground.

Also, have your seas been depleted or polluted? If not you'll probably find adolescent Kastakians will happily build a boat or raft out of anything available and just set off to subsist on seaweed and fish for a month or two if everything in the arcology is too boring - especially if you can provide text net connectivity remotely. Most new Adventurers make it back to civilisation fine, and those we get back injured generally express it was entirely worth it."

"Discipline or authority problems - if there's nothing useful for a Kastakian kid to do they will find something to do and that may involve writing on the walls, disassembling things to find out how they work, and getting into places they shouldn't be in.

Also if there are multiple kids around they will absolutely fight each other unless it is extremely clear that is unacceptable behaviour and they're not left unsupervised too long. 

Usually how our memory functions is 'very well, thank you', works best with systems that make sense as a whole rather than disconnected facts. Also Kastakian children are more likely to misbehave if they are expected to do repetitive things, variety is key. 

Four to eight is generally a good team size for most endeavours - more and people start splitting into sub groups and not knowing everyone involved as well. Older Kastakian kids love teaching younger ones in short bursts, probably no more than a couple of hours at a time, but the involved adult supervision definitely needs to be able and willing to break up fights - the older ones will likely be fine but if the younger ones get bored they might fight with each other."

Kastakian children sound a little harder to raise than the average local child, but within the abilities of a couple of empty nesters.

(A translator pauses for a second upon realizing the idiom doesn't need to be adapted.)

Ailor greets the monk warmly, as if he's supposed to be here! 

Oh! You're supporting Hippies via Tithe instead of the Land Rent! This doesn't eat slack on Ailor because maintaining the Drum Circle and providing Free Love are counted for the public good, even though paying for Free Love is a logical contradiction. Your hippies seem rather anti-social and there's quite a lot of them, though. Do they not do Peyote? Or Cannabis, shrooms, and MDMA? Spiritual drug use sometimes leaves you hallucinating for the rest of your life but much more often promotes pro social behavior. If you have a small enough group for testing, perhaps we should send over some Hippies and the appropriate PSAs against spiritual drug use? Or if you prefer we can just provide you with our strains, database, and PSAs so you can test in more controlled ways yourself?

Ailor wonders if wall-writing, disassembling things, and accessing the secret spaces is a problem! They won't know for another seventy years for certain, but making all of that into age appropriate learning puzzles is the current theorized best practices. The fighting seems more of a problem.

"I am Lirakoz, from the Planet we call Ranalite. I am a Shaman, though the meaning of that role is probably not apparent." they speak very slowly, with a strong accent, trying to enunciate every sound as clearly as possible.

"The rest of my planet will not establish contact in the near future. They might later; it is not known to me. But in the meantime, I was guided here by intuition, to share the information that might be most critical for contact between civilizations. I hope it would not be, and do not expect to singlehandedly change the course of history with simple explanations of philosophy, especially as am I am not specialized in teaching anything to anyone." their specializations are intuition and Linguistics, that being the reason why they are here instead of someone else "But simple actions should be undertaken when their effect can be beneficial." (the original phrase was "a policy of takings low-cost actions of positive expected utility has higher expected rule-utility than a policy of high-cost actions of positive expected utility, even if the simple calculation is the same", but that is very hard to translate correctly without a firm grasp of the language).

The voice is not loud, and they don't actively try to attract attention from anyone. It doesn't matter, they have nowhere else important to be, and can just repeat themself again if needed, as often as needed. This is one of many ways in which Lirakoz is highly unusual among Ranalites.

Managing childhood chaos is surprisingly easy when cleaning is centralized, the real challenge is finding a compromise that satisfies the children's need for a sense of control through inflicting long-lasting damage while keeping the habitat habitable. Many gremirians are fairly tolerant of disorder. Our own children often fail to get along, but rarely to the point of justifying isolation from their peers.

​We have complex puzzles as a substitute for disassembling things, satellite connectivity, and competitive sports (mostly for older, pre-modification generations, as the younger ones’ lack of pain shifts training focus entirely toward technique and external monitoring). If reading serves as a surrogate for adventure, then we certainly have much to offer, along with other digital entertainment!

​Our animal suffering cessation projects have not yet reached the oceans. Migratory aquatic species, especially megafauna, cannot be easily kept in sanctuaries or raised from embryos outside of a host, we fear losing them permanently if we intervene, so our oceans remain wild, pristine, and unfortunately, likely to stay that way for a long time.

​This seems sufficient to begin experimentation. If you invite a group of Adventurers, we will try to replicate your lifestyle, and from that baseline, we can introduce variations, such as simulacra for urban adaptation or collaborative mixed species child-rearing trials.

​Greetings and welcome, Lirakoz! Is the lack of contact with your world due to technical constraints, or a deliberate philosophical stance of your people?

The interplay of Church and State can be tricky but here's the short version: the Church collects the tithe and the State collects the land rent and other taxes on negative externalities. The State handles things like police, the fire department, and making sure the population is fed. The Church handles things like education, medical care, and making sure the population is clothed. In theory, these funds are separate buckets. But sometimes if tithes drop, Parliament has to cut budgets elsewhere to make up the difference in funding the safety net. Conversely, Parliament can only request budgetary assistance if tithes go up and tax revenue goes down, which sometimes happens when anti-tax candidates win majorities increase the standard deduction or decrease the base rate per square meter. 

"Hippies." That is, wow, there's a lot of context there. Let's, uh, let's see is we can clear up some stuff. 

So there are people who perform work that markets don't adequately measure the social value of, like artists. There are professionals who don't want to spend three- or four-twelfths of their income of housing, food storage and prep, etc, and just need a place to sleep between supper and breakfast. There are people who sign up for seasonal work, like construction or being a farmhand, and move around a lot so they move around and consequently don't pay for fixed housing. There are teenagers who find their parents or clan intolerable and need to be somewhere else while they plan and execute the next phase of their lives. None of them are what we've here dubbed slack-eaters, who make up less than one-twelfth of the people sleeping at a temple. Are any of these people "Hippies"?

The previous ayatollah used cannabis. None of the other drugs sound familiar. "Free Love" seems to be a social movement in response to previously mandated sociosexual restrictions. Vuleftis has never heard of someone having sex professionally, but he knows some very competitive hobbyists.

"Greetings, Lirakoz! Ailor welcomes what you wish to share and asks for no more. Would it be useful to have a place to lecture?" The Head of State proclaims with as much gravitas as his old frame can carry. The aides are on standby with some folded blankets that can be improvised into cushion seating, incense, some polished rocks, a podium made by locking together a few collapsible stools, some candles, and a singing bowl if Lirakoz wants any of that stuff. He continues formally, "We welcome you further to spend as much time as you wish to spare, and leave with all the knowledge you might carry."

Ailor is still quite curious about Gremiria's pain thing, but politely not interrupting someone else's conversation. 

Ah, Ailor has a somewhat different political structure. It's useful to better understand the Second Republic's. 

We're in rapid-pattern-matching-to-converge-on-a-concept! Artists are likely Hippies. Professionals and seasonal workers are likely not, unless they only work when they want something. Young people could go any way. Tribespeople who avoid labor to protect themselves from exploitation are hippies, colloquially, although they don't usually identify as such. Hobbyists who contribute more via sex than other activities might be considered hippies. 

Free Love was in fact an important early part of the Reform era. Previously Ailor's religions used government to restrict sex to procreation only. Free Love allowed people to interact with and learn healthier forms of sexuality. That generation also experimented with... well, basically all the recreational drugs. 

"Both reasons, to my knowledge. Accessing the contact point and verifying it proved hard, but a different philosophical approach might have needed less evidence and dedicated more effort to the possibility". That is, really, why you need shamans. But this is too self-evident for Lirakoz to actively think.

"I do not known what would be useful. I am not a lecturer. And you are aliens. You would probably know better". That even shamans don't have knowledge privileged to expertise in most cases is something that should have obvious. But of course, those are aliens, even if some are human-looking, different cultural epistemologies are not surprising, even if the translation difficulties could be ignored (and they can't be).

"Start at the ideal and work backwards. Then we can see what missing pieces we can share." Working backwards from your goal-state isn't formally part of Ailori philosophy, because it's the default way of thinking. This advice is similar to reminding someone to breathe. 

"Ailor seeks to maximize the happiness and well being of sophonts. For us this looks like lifelong learning and skill building, densely weaving-together-many-reasons of work, and forging meaningful connections. Our known known problems are improving slowly. Any unknown knowns or unknown unknowns you notice would be useful and appreciated. Or, if you're in the Current Era or later then we would like to skip any skippable-intermediate-upgrades we can skip."

"What does the ideal world look like to you?"

Hm! Seems like our concepts of universal love differ significantly! To us, the ideal world looks just like a hedonium shockwave. We possess no control over whom we are born as, or whose perspective we will wake up in tomorrow. We do not experience the flow of time, it is easier to assume we are merely random, static snapshots of consciousness within a block universe. We cannot increase «our own» happiness, but we can act as agents who retrospectively maximize our chances of being a happy consciousness by increasing the total amount of it in the universe.

Gremiria cares about the happiness of consciousness-as-a-function-of-time instrumentally - because happy people are more efficient, or as part of trade deals with egoistic agents within our freedom framework. However, even egoists rarely terminally desire triggers of qualia, such as «meaningful connections» or «mastery», over the qualia themselves. If the median citizen wishes to increase the net happiness in the universe, those who reject this metaphysics want happiness to be inflicted upon them-as-a-function-of-time. Almost no one desires to exist as a complex personality and live in the volcano's lairs with catgirls or something, at least not for long.

This goal will be achieved after the singularity, but before then, we will minimize suffering by sterilizing animal life and simplifying ecosystems. Human happiness is negligible relative to less intelligent life, but it also increases over time.

The Kastakians have slightly weird body language but have apparently never heard of suppressing it and are clearlyincredibly disturbed by the idea of sterilising animal life and simplifying ecosystems, although none of them are sure they have standing to say anything about it for a moment.

"...sterilising animals and simplifying ecosystems would be seen as highly unacceptable behaviour in Kastakia," Ferek eventually manages.

"This is relevant to the thing I came to talk about.
There is a concept in Ranalite philosophy known as metamorality. It is not the only important concept, but this specific principle is believed to be universal. It seems obvious to many, but much harm in Ranalite history happened because Ranalites did not understand the concept, and it is theorized that a flawed of understanding of metamorality is the most probable cause of conflict between otherwise well-meaning alien civilizations.

Every thinking creature has goals it wants to achieve. Possibly non-thinking creatures, too. Different creatures have different goals. Those goals can be overlapping, or opposed, and so they might seem good or bad. Logic cannot prove a goal to be good or bad, preferable or dispreferable, without already believing something to be good or bad. It should be impossible, in theory, for a thinking creature to not value some things, and therefore to truly be able to look at things from a neutral perspective. But it is possible for creatures to understand this limitation, and look at other creatures who also cannot truly look at things from a neutral perspective, and try to understand your limitations as equal to the limitations of others.
Objectively, no goal can be truly good bad. But things are objectively good from the perspective of a specific value, for the purpose of achieving a certain subjective goal. 'What outcomes does this value/worldview finds good" is a question with a very simple, objective answer. 'Which actions are good from the perspective of this value/worldview' is a more complicated question, based on capabilities, resources and strategy, but it is not a moral question, the moral part has a very simple objective answer. The strategic part too has an objective answer, in theory, given enough information to find what outcomes a certain action will cause.
And so, if 'what things are good' cannot have an objective answer everyone can agree on (despite everyone feeling like there must be one), but 'what things are good from the perspective of a specific value' can have that answer, metamorality is the obvious solution. It is the value of fulfilling other values. Metamorality asks, 'if we assume that it is good for everyone who has values to fulfil their values, which actions would achieve that outcome?'.
This question has an objective answer. This objective answer does not prove that an action is good simply because it is meta-good from the perspective of metamorality. It is impossible to prove. A creature can know what action is meta-good and still choose a different action. And this might be a rational choice to fulfil their values. But often it would not be. Often the metamoral choice is better by any values. Because being part of a system that helps you fulfil your values is usually better than not being part of that system. Often this means that helping to maintain this system, and help others with things you yourself do not consider important, or avoid things that you do, might still be the better strategy overall. Partially because the alternative is not simply living in a world where you just do anything by yourself, but living in a world with other people whose goals oppose yours, who also choose to pursue only their goals, and not metamorally pursue all goals. In a sense, this is another example of a standard cooperation-defection dilemma, where it is possible in theory to achieve more by defection, but on practice cooperation is a much better strategy in most cases.
This is true for any sort of creature, whatever their values might be, as long as they are sapient, and hopefully capable of communication, otherwise coordinating on the specifics might be hard.
There are several important caveats.
Just like in the cooperation-defection dilemma, getting more of your value still does not mean getting maximal value. Getting maximal values for all incompatible values is, I am told by mathematicians, mathematically impossible. If the goals had so much overlap, the whole theory of metamorality would have not been needed in the first place. So a statement such as 'by pursuing metamorality you are guaranteed to get everything you want' would be false. The accurate version would be 'by pursuing metamorality, together with those of different values who also pursue metamorality, you are guaranteed to get more of what you value than in the alternative scenario where this lead to conflict with others'. This is not true for hypothetical creatures who inherently value the state where other creatures are denied fulfilment of their values. It is a logical paradox, to try to fulfil the value of a group, part of which can only be fulfilled by intentionally denying the values of others in the group, whoever those might be. So it is accepted that metamorality cannot fulfil the value of such creatures. But nothing can, other than a domination of reality by those hypothetical creatures, which no one else would want.

Metamorality is not itself an answer to specific questions. It is a basic framework that allows considering how can the goodness of an action be determined, and how to start evaluating which actions might fulfil it. It does not by itself answer which actions are good. That requires knowledge both of the specific values of all relevant sides, and of strategic circumstances that will predict which outcomes the actions will lead to. This is why I cannot, and should not, myself answer questions like 'what does the ideal world look like'.
There are many arguments in Ranalite, in different circumstances, about which specific action is or is not metamoral. That is impossible to avoid. It is better than the previous state. It was, according to known history, a state of constant confusion and war. Which is even more probable between creatures more different from each other than Ranalites are from each other.
An axiom of Ranalite metamorality, which is assumed on practice but is not objective, is that the only way to achieve anything approaching metamorality, is to only evaluate a person's desire about their own life as relevant. If someone else wants me to live differently, even if it does not affect them in any way, this is objectively a value they have, and it is objectively meta-bad for that value to go unfulfilled, but it is impossible to try and fulfilling it in ways that would not be even more meta-bad. So part of the compromise, that achieves the optimal amount of value fulfilment, is that they cannot decide my life, their opinion of me does not count as part of the calculation society makes to determine whether my actions are metamoral, unless I make the choice of caring about their opinion, or unless my actions do affect them directly.
What exactly counts as 'affecting directly' is the main disputed question in any circumstances. For example, most Ranalite states consider loud noises to be an action that directly impacts a person's life, but only a small fraction of states consider appearance to, and have laws that forbid looking specific unwanted ways in public. It is theorized that optimal metamorality from that perspective could only be achieved if we lived in a state where everyone freely chooses which parts of reality to interact with, and which other people. It is not yet possible, but maybe will be, once. We all hope.
Maybe for different creatures, who have very different psychology and society, different trade-offs and different compromises will be necessary, even if the basic principles of metamorality and apply to everyone.

What other caveats have I forgot...simple altruism is not metamorality. It is not enough to want good outcomes for another person, metamorality means trying to help others to live the kind of life they want (or at least not hinder them), not just the kind of life you think will be good for them. That is part of the logic behind my desire about others not being accounted for evaluating the lives of others.
In the basic stages of evaluating what it means for a creature to have values or goals, and why we assume that it is meta-good for those values to be fulfilled and meta-bad not to, there is a claim that the thing that makes the goals important is the subjective perception of the creature, and so things outside that perception are not relevant. So it is good, for example, to lie to a person and make them believe they did something important that fulfilled their goals, to make them happy, as long as they never learn the truth. Or that it is not bad to kill a person who desires to keep living, as long as they die instantly and do not have time to notice they are going to die. This is a thing philosophers think about, but it is not accepted as morality, for simple reasons. Some people value only their internal state, and so for those people it is good for only the internal state to change. Some people value their impact upon the universe, and as long as that impact does not conflict with the lives of others, that is the thing they value, the thing that matters to metamorality and should be fulfilled. Not some secret other thing. That you want to not be tricked is reason enough to not trick you, that you want not to die is reason enough to not kill you, regardless of the way the moment of death is perceived. This principle is why I avoid directly translating the terms for fulfillment or negation of value, that exist in most Ranalite languages, because the closest translations, 'happiness' and 'suffering', have a connotation of internal state, and so it would be wrong to say that a person suffers from their values being negated in a way they never know about. But some people value not experiencing suffering, and some are willing to suffer as long as their goal is fulfilled, and only a failure of that goal would really be...[[suffering]]."

Pause. (Lirakoz is speaking slowly, and so doesn't need to actively stop and regain breath. As many Ranalites would).

"I am not a lecturer, and never had to explain metamorality, or any other important concepts, to those who never heard of it. I am sure I explained some things suboptimally, and will answer further questions in attempt to clarify the meaning".

"Sounds about right. The only thing you'd find some Kastakians disputing is how much you should intervene when someone is going to, in your opinion, harm some other people, but the only way to stop them is to harm them in turn, if only because you'd stop them achieving their values. 

And I guess about who is a moral patient in the first place, some people won't even eat fish because fish pretty clearly don't want to be eaten."

If you find this unacceptable, then we will not proceed with it in Kastakia without your explicit permission! This grants you significant bargaining power, as we are prepared to pay for the right to sterilize your biomes. Is there a price at which you would agree to this?

​(The delegate says this with the problem-solving enthusiasm, embodying the spirit that "contact cannot be worse than its absence". But on the backend of Omnihold, rare paranoid opinions appear. We would understand if you were morally indifferent to nature and sought compensation for its use, but if you inflate the price because you terminally value the preservation of a factory of existential horror based on what appears to be mere aesthetics - that is suspicious and is reminiscent of hostage taking)

​This offer is open to other civilizations as well! However, if your networks are unified and any data we provide reaches everyone simultaneously, we must calculate the value of published data for all parties at once. (...And the slowest-evaluating civilization will bottleneck the publication process for the rest. Well, it sounds like more work, but not enough for us to give up and half-ass it)

​Lirakoz, what you describe is essentially our freedom framework. Our primary objection is that agents are often incoherent and shift their values unpredictably. Our best attempts at talk-control show a higher conversion rate into religion than out of it, suggesting an asymmetry in the tools of truth. We believe the absolute majority of living beings act against their own best interests, yet we are forced to encourage their self-harming behaviors in our deals.

​The freedom framework does not prioritize coherence of will. If you trade with an AI for "catgirls", "meaningful connections" or "wireheading", but expect the AI to instead direct your provided negentropy toward some "objectively true moral cause" (because that is what you would obviously want if you were coherent), you simply will not trade with that AI. Therefore, the AI will not do it, it will choose the incoherent, first-order interpretation of your values to close the deal.

The Head of state sits respectfully, actively listens to Lirakoz, and takes constant notes on his deck. Then he sets a timer for five minutes before he responds. 

"This sounds like a very different framework for much of our own philosophy. We assume that [qualia] is the basis of moral worth, and that sophonts all posses [qualia] in equal measure. Animals are thought to have less [qualia] and thus less weight for decisions. This allows us to treat morality as a state of the universe, albeit one we cannot measure directly yet. From there we seek to find the rules that maximize the [Utility]- the happiness and well being- for things of moral worth."

Meanwhile, the Representative of Representatives it trying her very best not to show her growing horror at the Omnihold delegation. "This hedonium shockwave pattern-matches to "wireheading" to us, which is a classic example of a Bad End. One that maximises happiness at the expense of well being."

“Well-being” didn’t translate? Wireheads are being well. Sure, you don't want wireheading if it harms reason as the primary instrumental value, but it's an acceptable choice at the end of life. And if you have a machine that takes care of your instrumental values ​​for you, then of course you want to be a wirehead. You seem... more attached to your tools?

We also consider qualia to be the basis of moral value in the utilitarian framework, although we do not believe there is a strong correlation between qualia and intelligence. Intelligence is essential for the status of a "cooperative agent" in the freedom framework, but qualia are not necessary for it. We believe that many animals have qualia as intense as humans, and even those with weak qualia simply outnumber us. We haven't solved the theory of consciousness and don't have cheap enough experiments to test it, but that's our bet.

"Qualia is kind of the issue with keeping intact biomes - although only one of them!

We probably need to send you some people to experience your simulations - we don't have anything that advanced and so complete biomes are still necessary for experiencing important ancestral environment qualia like catching fish and exploring shorelines.

But the other two problems are - resilience, and the right to opt out. If we didn't have complete biomes, we might lose something we turn out to need later, and it'd be impossible for someone to just strike out on their own if they really can't abide society.

We do cultivate some of our land biomes, but we take care not to entirely replace anything original because of resilience. And, well, the fish farmers lost the war."

Vuleftis looks at his notes and frowns. It sounds like the Ranalite is describing politics in very many words. More specifically, politics as practiced during the First Republic.

"Lirakoz, this sounds the attitude my people had long ago toward different tribes trying to co-exist. Each tribe had its own ideas of right and wrong, good and evil. The Republic didn't enforce one code of morality over another. Instead it created a forum where representatives could determine the minimum set of laws needed for tribes to co-exist and pursue what they deemed good and oppose what they deemed evil."

It doesn't quite work that way anymore. The assorted moralities were homogenized over the centuries, through a mix of cultural exchange and violence. But that's still the core principle that MPs operate under when drafting legislation. Only afterward do they run their proposed solutions through any moral test cases at the end to see what needs to be tweaked.

"Well being doesn't just mean continuity-of-existance, but also more abstract things like growth-of-self. Normally we would think of wireheading as preserving just the first at the expense of the second, but this sounds like it doesn't even care about the first part!" The Representative's deck buzzes on her arm, and she takes a moment to modulate herself. "Apologies. I can get quite passionate." Deep breath. "Since neither of us have a complete theory of mind yet, we should table this for now."

The Head of Government is quietly agreeing with the Kastakian delegation on the subject of biomes. Ailor has as well seen unexpected outcomes from removing or adding species to a biome in the past. As a rule, diversity lends to resilience. 

An aide gives Vuleftis a stack of translation diagrams relating to the main(?) branch of the conversation. He must have gotten distracted trying to follow the Ranalite monk's meaning. The gremirians remain the higher priority because they're both the most alien culturally and the most advanced by a metric Vuleftis can observe but not name at the moment.

flip, flip, flip

Oh. This is not good. 

"If I understand the size that 'biome' denotes, no one on my world is authorized to give permission to sterilizing one. Also... how would you even do that?"

"Of course, coherence of values is not maximal, and sometimes changes, or is unknown. But it is possible to help people better understand what they truly value, or could value, and how to achieve that. Introspection and insight into your own mind is one of the most useful skills in a metamoral sociality. And people should be free to change their goals if they want. This is something most decision algorithms should account for. Predictions of your own chance to chance your mind is the future should be trained and evaluated, and options that can be taken back are preferred.
There are cases that present hardship. Children, for example, consistently lack introspection, or general cognitive abilities to determine what things are possible, what outcomes result from their actions, and what outcomes they want. Nonetheless, there are ways to raise children with minimal negation of their values, and maximal opportunities for them to get what they desire, learn what they desire, how often they are wrong about what they desire, and what actions should be avoided by their own values. Even if they are not ideal, and don't include zero of those negations. But physical existence makes that inevitable.
There are cases of people with mental illness, that cause them to predictably act in ways they do not endorse before, later, or even during the action. Those are of course tragic, and in a sense the worst thing that can happen to a sapient creature. Sometimes they can be solved with medication, but even if not, there are almost always ways to mitigate this, for a person to figure out what they want, and then be guided in that direction by others, in ways they find helpful and safe, even if not ideal, and still posing some opposition to your current experience of value" (Ranalite considers things like "someone waking you up on time because you have work" to be an example on par with various forms of psychosis. Which Lirakoz doesn't see the need to specify, not expecting anyone to be confused by those being the same basic categories of situation). "In that sense, metamorality is not just freedom, even when not counting limitation from harming others. A metamoral society would restrict your actions, if it is done in ways you openly endorse. It is absurd to live in a universe where people can openly endorse restriction of their action, instead of just always acting in ways they endorse. Maybe other sapient creatures are better at it than us Ranalites.
But other than dementia caused by old age, which to my knowledge there is no way to treat, a society can succeed at being metamoral despite the existence of mental illness.
There are cases where avoiding drastic actions is impossible. Suicide is the biggest one. Even if you have good reason to think suicide serves your values, and no new information can change that, and your counterfactual self would not regret the choice in two years, it is irrecoverable, and therefore an option that should be dispreferred. But a moral framework that completely forbids suicide cannot be said to universally support any kind of person to affect their life in any way they want. Some consider the current freedom of suicide too high, and some too limited. I think the compromises seem reasonable enough. Though different states have differences in rules about Given.
Theoretically, there are cases where someone has opposition of introspection as an inherent value, and so it would harm them to try figuring out what (other) values they have that can be fulfilled or negated. If such a person also wanted to die, and quickly, i think that would truly be a moral philosopher's nightmare. Or exciting work day, i suppose.
Those are enough to mean that doing the right thing, and guarantying everyone a perfect life, or even a Truly Good life, is impossible, or nearly impossible. But that is not the same thing as everyone acting against their best interests. Rather, everyone is acting towards an expected cloud encompassing the not-exact variations of their best interests (the most negative possible description of the situation), and succeeds at matching them more than half the time, in expectation. It is rare for someone to act in a way that is the exact opposite of their interests, instead of just bot exactly matching them. It is more common for people to act in ways close to maximally opposing the interests of others, but that is a tendency that can be compensated, and is why I am here, hopefully.

The ability to convince people of different values is...not something I heard about as a problem. Other than general problem of epistemology and communication. Believing in true facts instead of random misunderstandings or rumors or guesses is hard. Following valid logical processes when thinking about true information, instead of distorting it without noticing, is even harder. That is an asymmetry of the tools of truth, compared to the truth of anything else. But if you have true information, and analyse it with a valid process, which as many things is impossible to do perfectly, but possible to strive for optimality and expect success...conclusions about morality and goals could not be right or wrong. If people come to some conclusions more often than others, that is expected. Many more prefer to not experience hunger than to experience hunger, for example.
Religion is not popular in Ranalite, if I correctly understood what it means, and it is harder to convince a Ranalite of religious concepts than non-religious ones. Maybe that is a difference between species.

And yes," much shorter reply adressed to Vuleftis "metamorality can apply to several distinct groups each with their culture and differing goals, to live the way they want. But it also applies to individuals within a group, who can have different values. A known counterexample to early naive culture-based formulations of metamorality was that scarring someone who does not want to be scarred is bad even if the larger culture things it is bad, and even if the person expects it to happen (and so wouldn't decide to resist, even if they prefer it not happen)."

"We haven't really bothered talking about religion because, uh, it's not totally certain to us that you even have souls? Possibly you do but there's no particular reason to expect they work anything like ours do, not that we have any scientific proof of that anyway."

If no single representative is authorized to permit biome sterilization, does this fall under direct democracy? You mentioned a land rent tax - does it not extrapolate to a fee for environmental impact? This is how the issue was authorized in our world, the Church paid the State for the right to alter nature.

On land, the bulk of the work was done via gene drives, passing recessive sterility genes to 100% of offspring, and toxins dispersed from airships, although many areas and species required unique solutions. We replaced sterilized ecosystems with human-useful crops that thrive in semi-wild conditions.

Plants struggle without animals at all, so we permitted certain species of worms to multiply unchecked as a compromise. Worms possess a unique combination of high body mass per individual and a very low neuromass-to-biomass ratio (relative to insects). Most of our models of animal suffering, which establish linear and non-linear dependencies of qualia on neural complexity, agree that despite the stress of overpopulation, this is a significantly superior scenario. Bees, as pollinators, were made dependent on human-provided hives, they do not overpopulate and live relatively well. Livestock is monitored, though they still graze over vast territories.

Yes, our ecosystem is less stable, floods and fires occur, and we have high average CO2​. But for the right to opt-out, our world is arguably better than the old one! Our bees are stingless, there are no natural toxins, no parasites, and no predators. Almost all plants are edible for either livestock or humans. Without forests and meaningless competition for sunlight, the navigability of shrubs and grasses is improved. We continue to experiment with zoning and the selection of new symbiotic species to refine these conditions further, and mineral binding of carbon dioxide, even through naive thermonuclear blasting of rocks, seems to work and is quite cheap.

And we can always reverse it! We preserve DNA, and insects or birds are easily hatched in incubators. For larger species, we maintain compressed sanctuaries, where we only keep key species capable of gestating others, because artificial wombs are too complicated. Through IVF with immunosuppression and hormonal regulation and some genetic modification of the surrogate mother, we can induce one species to give birth to many others. This is harmful to the health of both the child and the surrogate, and failure rates are high, but we can attempt it multiple times and the second generation is born healthy and can restore the population without such problems.

The term "gene drives" doesn't seem to have a translation, so it's probably a piece of science or technology they haven't discovered. But that's not important right now.

"I think most biomes have more than one government claiming exclusive rights to various parcels, which is one reason there's no one party that could authorize that. The exception to the rule is that I represent a legislative body that actually does have jurisdiction over an entire biome in its central provinces. I haven't stopped to imagine what the other MPs might think about your proposal, but it sounds like the sort of thing the High Council would threaten to veto. They might even try to stop you from making such deals with other governments."

Sterilizing a biome is simple, just apply fire to scale. More likely you mean sterilizing a species in a biome. That's trickier, but you can do it by breeding a maladaptive line and introducing it to the population. 

The Head of State is still listening to Lirakoz and broadly agreeing. He'll add that values being incoherent or circular may be an unfortunate universe, but it isn't inherently insurmountable as long as some states can be said to be preferable to others.

The subject of "souls" is one with some ambiguity. Ailor is fairly certain that the entirety of a person exists in physics. In fact, if you want to look at their database there's a very simple organism- a worm- in there you can run. 

The Representative of Representatives at least seems mollified that DNA backups are being kept. 

"I think we could get the sterilization of mosquitoes past the Council, to demonstrate our commitment to cultural exchange."

"Yes, bodies exist in physics and animals exist in physics, that is an immensely cool worm simulation and I think I've lost three of my junior researchers to just staring at it, but until we made contact there was no other creature with the same suite of prospective and retrospective consciousness - like, the animal does not want to die, but you're the same person who went to sleep?

The only reason wireheading is unappealing is that personhood that looks for purpose, right? Animals are generally very happy with happiness although you can screw this up if you selectively breed then enough. It turns out small cetaceans are an alarmingly good model for people and we mostly stamped out those programs in civilised areas, I believe from the data banks some of you had similar findings with various land mammals.

Turns out you can't do it with birds because if you keep them in remotely humane conditions they fly away when they've had enough."

Diseases and parasites in people are probably worth removing from the ecosystem. That might be common ground for everyone. 

Hm? To be clear, that's not a simulation. We can put 'em in a body and let 'em run around in meatspace if you like. Only having one sophont on your homeworld is limiting in exploring the theory of mind. Animals seem to have a subset of qualia, but they seem to be the same person before and after sleep? When an animal learns a puzzle they often remember it after they wake up the next day.

Bees will play with balls, and dogs will herd sheep. We pattern-match at least some animals to experiencing growth-of-self. 

Yeah, fuck mosquitoes

(not a literal translation, but a close cultural adaptation)

Sexually reproducing parasites can be eradicated by the gene drive, we have no special measures against microbial diseases. Unless we're talking about influencing zoonotic diseases.

Our model is that many animals possess intelligence but lack the ability or desire to develop it. Currently, uplift is strictly regulated and doesn't offer much economic benefit to try, but if we were to do so, we'd focus not on selection and g-factor modification, but on zoogogy, emotional regulation, and the engineering of specialized manipulators.

Historically, we had 3600s of capuchins capable of following complex instructions and using sign language. Although their intelligence exceeds that of a natural baseline, without monastic training and cultural support, they degraded to the level of “just weird monkeys”. This isn’t unsurprising, since without culture and training, humans also become close to apes and their intelligence becomes difficult to restore in adulthood. We do not keep those semi-uplifted capuchins alive because they are not ideal for reproduction of other species.

Wow, we don't have digital worm brains that advanced! That’s cool.

"Uh, I think it might be relevant that we didn't really consider animal qualia at all before contact, and don't have any major domestication - we have small felines that live on our ships that invited themselves and were historically useful for pest control and some people find them generally aesthetically pleasing, and some animal models have been used for research, but other cultures seem to have much more extensive animal companionship, which I guess would make it easier to spot similarities?"

Glad you like the worm!

It does make sense that co-evolving into sapience with canines would give very different experiences and intuitions about the moral worth of other species. Even then, people on Ailor have erred in terrible ways in the past. Not everyone has moved past that yet.