Ok. Children are preferred to, say, famous oil paintings or dogs, for evolutionary reasons. There are human natural terminal values involved. But are you saying there are no terminal values detached from our evolutionary history - no reason beyond "that's the way we're put together" for us to eg: prefer mind to automaton?

Nature is full of recurring patterns. An alien mind might be very alien in its motivations, but there are likely to be consequences of fundamental principles that we should expect to find over and over. No two snowflakes are alike, but once you grasp the underlying principles that control their form, they're all awfully familiar.

To put it another way: we should always expect that bees will produce storage cells with a hexagonal shape. Not squares, not triangles, not nonagons: hexagons. And any alien species, if faced with the challenge of making accessible storage units with the least material possible, will come up with the same shape. It doesn't matter if they're methane-based or live in the plasma layers of stars.

It does matter if they're five-dimensional, though. Nevertheless, the point remains.