It's also easier for human scriptwriters to imagine themselves repressing an emotion, pushing it back, crushing it down, then it is for them to imagine once deleting an emotion and it never coming back. The former is a mode that human minds can operate in; the latter would take neurosurgery.
Seems like this is a reasonable place to ask if people have recommendations for good scifi with truly alien-feeling aliens. I was trying to figure out if the cylons in season one of BSG counted, since I have trouble modelling their goals and acceptable means, but (a) part of this is that we just didn't see that much of them and (b) "I have trouble modelling them" would suggest that crazy people are the least human since their behavior is a lot more noisy. I don't think that's the metric I'm going for.
Interestingly enough nearly all attempts I've seen at "alien" aliens end up portraying them as virtue ethicists with weird virtues.
Heck most portrayals of consequentialists or deontologists (or most people attempting to live those philosophies) end up being virtue ethicists attempting to approximate consequentialism/deontology by suitable choice of virtues (and looking like straw consequentialists/deontologists to someone using a better approximation).
Today's post, Points of Departure was originally published on 09 September 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
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This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was The Truly Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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