Robert Freitas' Xenopsychology article has some interesting speculation around this theme. I recommend reading the whole thing, but here are some excerpts to get you interested:

Ganglionic intelligence:

On Earth, evolution favored voted the appearance of intelligence in two major classes of animal nervous systems, called ganglionic and chordate. It has its own peculiar psychology.

The invertebrates, representing perhaps 97% of all animal species alive today, took the ganglionic intelligence option. The earthworm is typical. Each of its many segments is almost an individual organism unto itself, having its own set of kidneys, muscles, sensors and so forth. Coordination is achieved by a thin latticework of nerve fibers crisscrossing from side to side and lengthwise. The ganglionic system resembles a ladder with bulbous neural tissues at the joints. Invertebrate organisms thus are comprised of a collection of sub-brains, each of which controls a separate part of the animal with fairly complete autonomy and no real centralized control. Sensors and their ganglia tend to cluster nearer the head, making not a true brain as we understand the term but rather a large bundle of distinct fibers. Such a nervous system is highly efficient for responding quickly to stimuli. Each clump of nerve cells becomes expert at some particular function–detecting and passing along sensory information, sweeping a leg or swing in wide uniform arc, opening and closing the jaws in slow munching motions during feeding, and so on.

Might extraterrestrials develop a high ganglionic intelligence that has, never developed on Earth despite hundreds of millions of years of opportunity? [...] It is hard for us to imagine the mentality of beings with advanced ganglionic intelligence. Dr. H. Chandler Elliot, a neurologist at the University of Nebraska College of Medicine, notes that humans normally disregard their internal organs. We respond to an empty stomach or a feeling of indigestion but normally we ignore its activities. Says Elliot: "The head of an insect apparently regards not only its viscera but also its legs, wings, and so on, with similar detachment. If one deftly clips off the abdomen of a feeding wasp, the head may go on sucking, obviously not distressed. The mind of such a creature, must be alien to us almost beyond comprehension." [...]

Yet another possibility is alien minds incorporating the advantages of both ganglionic and chordate architectures. For instance, each invertebrate sub-brain might evolve and enlarge to avoid multiplication of internal interconnections. This development is most likely in a radially symmetrical sea creature, wherein each brain has roughly equal access to sensory input and motor controls. Such creatures would have "collegial" mentalities, something akin to the many voting computers aboard the Space Shuttle, with multiple personalities within each organism and the ability to maintain consciousness under extreme physical trauma so long as any one brain remained functional.

Alien cultural universals:

To illustrate his point, he first refers to an inventory of the elements of human nature compiled by the American anthropologist George P. Murdock during a study of cultural universals:

Age-grading, athletic sports, bodily adornment, calendar, cleanliness training, community organizations, cooking, cooperative labor, cosmology, courtship, dancing, decorative art. divination, division of labor, dream interpretation, education, eschatology, ethics, ethnobotany, etiquette, faith healing. family feasting, firemaking, folklore, food taboos, funeral rites, games, gestures, gift giving, government, greetings, hairstyles, hospitality, housing, hygiene, incest taboos, inheritance rules, joking, kin groups, kinship nomenclature, language, law, luck superstitions, magic,. marriage, mealtimes, medicine, obstetrics, penal sanctions, personal names, population policy, postnatal care, pregnancy usages, property rights, propitiation of supernatural beings, puberty customs, religious rituals, residence rules, sexual restrictions, soul concepts, status differentiation, surgery, toolmaking, trade, visiting, weaving, and weather control.

Wilson insists that few if any of these elements are inevitable outcomes of either high intelligence or advanced social life; rather that "human nature is just one hodgepodge out of many conceivable." An entomologist by training, he has no trouble imagining an alien insectlike society whose members am even more intelligent and complexly organized than people, yet which lacks many of the qualities listed in Murdock's inventory. The alien inventory:

Age-grading, antennal rites, body licking, calendar, cannibalism, caste determinism, caste laws, colony-foundation rules, colony organization, cleanliness training, communal nurseries, cooperative labor, cosmology, courtship, division of labor, drone control, education, eschatology, ethics, etiquette, euthanasia, firemaking, food taboos, gift-giving, government, greetings, grooming rituals, hospitality, hosing, hygiene, incest taboos, language, larval care, law, medicine, metamorphosis rites, mutual regurgitation, nursing castes, nuptial flights, nutrient eggs, population policy, queen obeisance, residence rules, sex determination, solder castes, sisterhoods, status differentiation, sterile workers, surgery, symbiont care, toolmaking, trade, visiting, weather control . . . and still other activities so alien as to make mere description by our language difficult.

Alien emotions:

Of course, extraterrestrial sentients may possess physiological states corresponding to limbic-like emotions that have no direct analog in human experience. Alien species, having evolved under a different set of environmental constraints than we, also could have a different but equally adaptive emotional repertoire. For example, assume that human observers land on another and discover an intelligent animal with an acute sense of absolute humidity and absolute air pressure. For this creature, there may exist an emotional state responding to an unfavorable change in the weather. Physiologically, the emotion could be mediated by the ET equivalent of the human limbic system; it might arise following the secretion of certain strength-enhancing and libido-arousing hormones into the alien's bloodstream in response to the perceived change in weather. Immediately our creature begins to engage in a variety of learned and socially-approved behaviors, including furious burrowing and building, smearing tree sap over its pelt, several different territorial defense ceremonies, and vigorous polygamous copulations with nearby females, apparently (to humans) for no reason at all. Would our astronauts interpret this as madness? Or love? Lust? Fear? Anger? None of these is correct, of course the alien is feeling badweather.

... and more.

I'll give it a few shots...

Based off of something I once saw about octopuses, how about a creature with no sense continuity of self? Or no sense of self at all, even?

Or there's several ways to look at a creature that is largely immortal. I'm thinking of two specifically: One is so hearty that they can hardly suffer damage or death no matter what. The other is generally long-lived, but largely because they are careful (I think Eliezer talked about this somewhere, but I can't find it) that they would be terrified of crossing a street or driving a car because even a 1 in 100 million chance of death is too dangerous (but they would expect to get a royal flush several times over the course of their lives, they live that long).

I like the idea for wanting/liking being the same thing. You could play off of that theme with stuff like: - creatures who have conscious control over their reward circuitry - creatures whose neural reward pathways grow with age, so they experience rewards more deeply the older they get - creatures whose pathways for liking are transmitted to others, so the more creatures that like something, the deeper the pleasure - creatures whose desires can be traded

That's about all I could come up with in the past ~20 minutes. Hope they help.

There are the aliens in Blindsight. Rot13 Spoiler: Jub ner rkgerzryl vagryyvtrag ohg ynpx pbafpvbhfarff.

An interesting exercise would be to try to imagine a society of humans whose minds operated the way most intellectuals today imagine human minds operate.

For instance, see the recent post by LukeProg on values being relative. What would people be like if they really did have states as terminal values, the way folk psychology says they do?

Another exercise is: What would society be like if everyone knew how their minds operated? How would we act if people didn't believe in free will? (Asking that question gives me a headache... it seems to imply that we have free will.) How would we act if we were rational utility-maximizers?

Look into eusocial animals, e.g. ants, bees, wasps, termites, and naked mole rats. Intelligent minds of similar evolutionary origin would be very different from ours.

Relative rate of thinking. The universe may appear to be very different to very fast or slow thinkers relative to humans.

Tweak the bandwidth of information exchange and see what you get. With weaker communication powers, you get most nonhuman social animals on Earth, from ants to wolves to prairie dogs: able to exchange meaningful information ("food here"; "predator there") but not to express abstractions. How about with higher-bandwidth or more powerful information exchange? Suppose that I could, in the space of a few seconds of speech, convey not merely a fact, but the equivalent of paragraphs of information as to how I knew that fact?

(Or, of course, I could lie. Is increased bandwidth really all that useful? If so, why don't we have it?)

Alternately:

Some have suggested that a human mind is a sort of symbiote between genetic replicators (the human body including brain) and memetic replicators (culture, language, social behaviors, ideas). Certain aspects of human behavior are relatively constant across cultures, while others are highly variable. For instance, there are many different languages, but they all fit certain common patterns, because they have to be learned by a human brain.

Suppose that the relative strength of cultural-memetic replicators is increased: a species in which any given biological individual can be expected to participate not only in several different cultural milieux over the course of its life, but where a process somewhere between religious conversion and career-change takes the significance that reproduction has for humans. Converting other adults to follow your religion/worldview/profession/habits/hobbies/quirks strongly dominates reproduction and child-care as demands on organisms' energy. Rather than a reproductively successful individual being one who has several children, and a "loser" being someone who cannot find a mate, a successful person of this species is expected to have several followers or students in different aspects of life, and a "loser" is someone who is not imitated by anyone in any regard.

Ah, that's a very intruiging question - to which we probably won't get any better answer that what we can come up with through speculation...

It's really, really hard to extrapolate from n=1 intelligent species, but as you suggest, there may be some universals; some things I would consider in coming up with a credible alien intelligence:

• map intelligence vs mind properties for various earth species, and consider how the properties could change if you'd have a much more intelligent species (i.e., a more intelligent species may have more introspective control over things like boredom, akrasia and so on.)
• consider how the natural enviroment may influence the group size, amount of coordination needed and so on

Then there's the fact that certain traits may make it much more likely to encounter aliens that have them - if they don't have the need or curiosity to go beyond their home ground, it's much less likely you would encounter them.

I feel however that it is really hard to think about so very different minds. While I don't subscribe to his non-reductionist views of the mind, Thomas Nagel's What is it like to be a bat? is a classic in this area, as it's reprinted in The Mind's I.

Anyway, good luck writing your fiction!

Spread of your genes is what's optimized for by evolution - all of our values are conditional on the reality of how we live and spread our genes. Hive creature? Different values. Solitary creature? Different values. Underwater? Values. Cannibalistic? Eating babies is an important value, it's unwise to make the relativistic claim that it's just "social" - that's a slippery slope to societies with no babyeating at all.

In this post Robin Hanson presents a plausible vaguely anthropic argument that alien psychology (as well as physiology) may be more like human then you'd expect.

It's hard to imagine something stranger than things that already exist, like eusocial insects, slime molds, solitary mammals, total winner-take-all reproduction, parasites, or species that don't care for or recognize their young.

Ooh, I love this kind of thing! (i also consider myself very good at it) However, I can't really communicate somehting as complex as the kind of idea that makes a non gimmicky, truly alien mind through static text, mainly because I suck at explaining things that way. And I am confident the results will be much better if it us customized to the story anyway. So, I suggest we meet up over IM for a brainstorm session. As I said, I love this kind of stuff and will do it just for fun without you needing to mention me in the credits or anything like that if you don't want to.

A species that evolved intelligence but for which the social brain hypothesis is false might be very different-- but I don't know if it is plausible that such a species would develop a civilization.

My impression is that convergent evolution is commonplace. Boredom or equivalent algorithms are necessary for any complex learning. Emotions are molded by game theory. Once you have an intelligent social animal the selection pressures relentlessly shape the mind. If I met an alien I wouldn't be surprised if he or she was almost exactly like me in a lot of ways, to the extent that he or she would describe similar drug experiences and have similar archetypes in his or her fiction. In their vast diversity humans vary about as much as biological minds can vary. Think of it as a challenge: I'd be very interested in alien minds that clearly took these considerations into account but still ended up truly bizarre.

How about:

• Enhancing the brain with hardware for that memory/intelligence boost.
• Superior intuition for probability
• Different/worse optical illusions/blind spots from different optical nerve wiring
• Superior 3D spatial visualization for ocean dwellers
• Creatures that get stuck in a correlation/causation confusion and manage to continue along mostly successfully
• Types of synaesthesia far more elaborate than in Humans
• A conflict between intelligence and instinct where instinct is in total control but intelligence knows it's doing the wrong thing
• Minds partitioned more finely than the human left/right hemisphere split, with more independence between them
• Species that specialize their intelligence like insects becoming workers/warriors/queens/drones etc. but for intelligence

Lots of fun possibilities in this area.

Honestly, the odds of a planet that produces social talking thinkers not producing ones deeply similar to humans are pretty small.

You have read A Fire Upon The Deep, right?

Alternately, imagine being able to explicitly fork and merge streams of cognition as easily and explicitly as one can fork code in git. You could imagine each stream gets its own set of permissions, so the left hand might really not know what the right tentacle is doing.

Humans (roughly) desire to be happy. Imagine aliens who desire to be angry instead.

An alien species might be very adaptive, able to learn new things exclusively - and efficiently - by media such as audio, video, and text. Such a species might not have its culture organized around the seizing of others and agglomerating their brains and the defense from likewise. Prictualcre to determine who eats from whom, and how much brain to take, and how much work must be put into studying directly from books, and concomitant social enforcement mechanisms regulating such might be entirely absent. At first glance, that seems like a lot, though not everything that makes us who we are, but a bit of thought will reveal how deeply prictualcre is embedded in not just our culture but our biology, and in fact a species without it would be almost unimaginably strange. We simply don't notice it because of its universality on biological, cultural, and other levels.

I wonder what, if any, the relationship is between several things: predicting what humans will learn about the laws of nature, and predicting what alien life is likely to be like, for both an estimate and confidence in it.

It feels incongruous that I am relatively agnostic and uncertain about alien life's form (assuming it exists) but somewhat confident physics is close to hitting bedrock within the century.

I could just be ill-informed and reasoning poorly. Even so, I would expect patterns to those shortcomings.

They might lack our bizarre confusion between being able to act according to ones preferences and ones future actions being uncertain in some sense. I don't just mean the libertarian free will nonsense, even someone very intelligent and long past that particular idea like Vladimir Nesov still seems to think that being able to decide requires logical uncertainty about ones decision.